Mitchell
Brushaber held the income tax constitutional under the Sixteenth Amendment — not that Frank Brushaber was a nonresident alien
*The Federal Zone* claims that the Supreme Court in Brushaber treated Frank Brushaber as a nonresident alien and limited the income tax to a 'federal zone.' The Court's actual opinion contains neither holding. The case upheld the income tax as constitutional under the Sixteenth Amendment, addressed three constitutional challenges (apportionment, due process, geographical uniformity), and did not specify Brushaber's citizenship beyond a single procedural acknowledgment that 'averments as to citizenship and residence' had been made. The reinterpretation fails at primary source.
Brushaber: What the Case Actually Says
*Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co.*, 240 U.S. 1 (1916), is the most-cited and most-misread case in the alternate-tax movement. *The Federal Zone* and its derivatives read Brushaber as treating Frank Brushaber as a 'nonresident alien' and limiting the income tax to a 'federal zone.' The Court's actual opinion contains neither of those holdings. What it contains is a careful resolution of the *Pollock* / Sixteenth Amendment tension that produces the opposite conclusion: the Sixteenth Amendment removed the source-of-income consideration from the apportionment analysis, leaving the income tax operative as a constitutional indirect tax. Layered onto that, the IRC's own definition of 'nonresident alien' at 26 U.S.C. § 7701(b)(1)(B) — 'an individual who is neither a citizen of the United States nor a resident of the United States' — forecloses the territorial-volunteer reading at the statutory level. The Brushaber reinterpretation fails at primary source.
The Federal Zone Thesis at Its Foundation
Paul Andrew Mitchell's *The Federal Zone* (1992; 11th ed. 2001) builds an elaborate territorial-limits argument on three foundational moves: a re-reading of the Supreme Court's 'three meanings' of 'United States' from Hooven & Allison, a restrictive reading of the IRC's definition of 'State,' and a restrictive reading of the IRC's use of 'includes.' The structural argument depends on each foundation holding. None of the three holds against primary sources. § 7701(c) — the IRC's own construction rule — directly forecloses the central move.