I realize it might be perilous to take seriously the extreme constitutional vision put forward on Glenn Beck’s program, but I’m watching his special on the Constitution, and one little thing jumped out me.
Beck wanted to know, from his guest Andrew Napolitano, what we could do to reverse Barack Obama’s incursions on the true Constitution. How can we return to the limited federal government that the Constitution enshrines?
Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court Judge, responded that we could begin by abolishing the federal income tax—because the federal government needs “cash” in order to tell people and states what to do.
Whoops. It seems the Judge momentarily forgot the Sixteenth Amendment. It goes like this:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Of course, the Sixteenth Amendment just says Congress may impose an income tax. It doesn’t say Congress must do so. So perhaps Napolitano just meant that Congress should agree not to use its power under the Sixteenth Amendment, and abolish the income tax.
Nevertheless, the Sixteenth Amendment is a pretty severe rebuke to the extreme-libertarian view of the Constitution promulgated with regularity on Beck’s program, where the Constitution always stands in opposition to federal power. The amendment presents a serious challenge to the idea that the Constitution is a “libertarian document,” a statement for which Christopher Beam has gotten in a lot of trouble.
I wonder what’s going to happen when the Republicans who are so eager to read the Constitution aloud in Congress encounter constitutional provisions that don’t comport with their ideology.