The Law That Never Was by Bill Benson (Volumes 1 & 2) HQ Scans [PDF]

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Professional High Quality (600ppi) Scans (cleaned & straightened) with OCR and high-res color covers:

The Law That Never Was - Volume I (1985) by Bill Benson.pdf (389 pages)
The Law That Never Was - Volume II (1986) by Bill Benson.pdf (403 pages)

PDF files have newly re-designed color covers (similar to actual book hardcopy covers, but enhanced with color seal).
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The Law That Never Was: The Fraud of the 16th Amendment and Personal Income Tax is a 1985 book by William J. Benson and Martin J. "Red" Beckman which claims that the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the income tax amendment, was never properly ratified. In 2007, and again in 2009, Benson's contentions were ruled to be fraudulent – the court refused to even review the documents.

BACKGROUND

Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, an amendment proposed by Congress must be ratified by three-fourths of the states to become part of the Constitution. The Article permits Congress to specify, for each amendment, whether the ratification must be by each state's legislature or by a constitutional convention in each state; for the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress specified ratification by the legislatures. There were 48 states in the Union in 1913 — the year when the Sixteenth Amendment was finally ratified — which meant that the Amendment required ratification by the legislatures of 36 states to become effective. In February 1913, Secretary of State Philander C. Knox issued a proclamation that 38 states had ratified the amendment. (According to Congressional analysis, a total of 42 states had ratified the amendment as of 1992.)

CONTENTIONS

Prior to Benson, the "non-ratification" argument was presented in a court of law by James Walter Scott in the 1975 case of United States v. Scott, some sixty-two years after the ratification. Scott's argument was to no avail; he was convicted of willful failure to file federal income tax returns for the years 1969 through 1972, and the conviction was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In a 1977 case involving a tax protester named Bob Tammen, a U.S. District Court noted that Tammen was involved with a group called "United Tax Action Patriots," which took the position "that the Sixteenth Amendment was improperly passed and therefore invalid...." However, the specific issue of the validity of the ratification was neither presented to nor decided by the court.

William Benson's book relates how, in 1984, nine years after the Scott case and seventy-one years after the ratification was proclaimed, Benson began a research project to investigate the ratification process by traveling to the National Archives and the capitols of various New England states to review documents relating to the ratification of the Amendment.

Benson found variations in wording, punctuation, capitalization, and pluralization in the language of the Amendment as ratified by many states. He used the changes as part of the basis for his contention that those states had not properly ratified the Amendment. Benson further claimed to have found documents suggesting that some states that had been certified as having ratified the Amendment never voted to ratify it, or voted against ratification. Benson claimed that no states, or only a few states (variously reported as two states or four states), had properly ratified the Amendment.

In his book, Benson made the following claims:

– Seven states (Connecticut, Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia) did not ratify the amendment, and it was reported as such.

– Two states (Kentucky and Tennessee) did not ratify the amendment, but Secretary Knox reported that they did.

– Eight states (Delaware, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont and Wyoming) were reported by Secretary Knox as having ratified the amendment, but the States actually have missing or incomplete records of the ratification procedures or votes, and there is no conclusive record that they ratified the amendment or reported any ratification to the Secretary of State.

– Six states (Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Washington) did approve the amendment, but the Governor or another official who was required by their respective state constitutions to sign the legislation into law did not sign the legislation.

– In twenty-five states (Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming), the legislature violated a provision of its state constitution during the ratification process.

– Twenty-nine states (Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming) violated "state law" or procedural rules during the ratification process.

Additionally, Benson asserted that:

– Twenty-two states approved the amendment, but with changes in wording, and the inexact version was accepted as a ratification of the original version.

– One state approved the amendment, but with variations in spelling, and the inexact version was accepted as a ratification of the original version.

– At least twenty-six states approved the amendment, but with changes in punctuation, and the inexact version was accepted as a ratification of the original version.

Benson asserted that the Oklahoma State Legislature changed the wording of the amendment they approved so that it meant the opposite of the original amendment as it was submitted to the States by Congress, but that Secretary Knox counted Oklahoma as having approved the amendment.

Benson also asserted, as an example of a state’s violation of its own Constitution, laws, or procedural rules, the claim that the Tennessee State Constitution prohibited the legislature from acting on any proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution submitted by Congress until after the next state legislative elections. According to Benson, the Tennessee legislature acted on the proposed 16th amendment the same month it was received (prior to any new state legislative elections).