No reason provided
A guy goes and argues that, per the tax code, he shouldn’t have to pay taxes. The court rejected his motion without any opposing argument from the government and the judge provided no reason as to why the motion should be denied.
Sure, the guy may be wrong but the courts at least need to hear his case. That’s why we have courts, in case you were wondering.
Update: Tom’s smarminess in comments got me to looking for the case at the Court’s site and I noticed the PDF was blank. So, I googled up this Evans person and he has a website. On his website, he has the court’s opinion from October 2, 2003. It seems (and I am happy to say) the court did not dismiss his case without a reason. I guess the guy tried to do it again in December and was dismissed outright for trying that before.
December 29th, 2003 at 12:09 pm
Nah. You’re thinking that the people have a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I believe five members of the Supreme Court has decided that the First Amendment doesn’t mean what it says.
Where’ve you been?
December 29th, 2003 at 12:31 pm
Kevin,
Those were my thoughts exactly. Where is the outrage?
Buck
December 29th, 2003 at 6:16 pm
Sigh
The problem with the “wheres the outrage” argument is that the Courts have heard cases like this before. Without seeing the argument, I would bet almost anything that this person has trotted out one of the dozen or so crackpot theories about the “real” meaning of this or that law or section of the Constitution that have been throughly and resoundingly rejected by every level of the American Court System. Therefor, there is black and white precedent for rejecting the suit – and a lower court SHOULD reject suits like this. Our system works on precedence – if the Appeals courts have already said, on more than one occasion, that this particulalr argument is invalid, then it is not the job of a district or trial court to decide otherwise. The judge probabay gave a verbal reason at the hearing, and even if he did not, its not unusual for judges to not write opinions that say, in effect, “look you bloody stupid idiot: this argument has been ruled crap about a billion times, and you should know better than to bring it before me, becasue it has no basis in our law.”
This is not an abridgement of someone’s rights- its is how a court system is supposed to operate. A murderer cannot bring a motion arguing that murder is not in fact illegal an expect it to be taken seriously at the trial level. The guy got his chance to petition the government: unfortunately for him, he used a bloody stupid argument. And he can still appeal his bloody stupid argument to the next level of the Court System. Ohh, the oppresion!
December 29th, 2003 at 9:10 pm
Funny how today’s liberals sound like yesterday’s conservatives 🙂
Seriously, then the judge should have cited those prior cases where this issue was addressed but if i know the government and the courts, they haven’t. They’ve just neglected to cover some loophole.
December 30th, 2003 at 10:49 am
Uncle:
I didn’t realize you had the court transcripts available to you. Please, link them!
December 30th, 2003 at 11:13 am
It’s spelled out in the article. In the future, would you like for me to begin every post in which I link to another source with the phrase if this is true?
That would up the word count on most blogs significantly.
December 30th, 2003 at 11:15 am
On a slightly humrous note, I went to the court’s page and the PDF for the case is blank. Heh.
http://www.paed.uscourts.gov
December 30th, 2003 at 11:45 am
Well, you have your answer now: There’s no outrage because no outrage was warranted. And that was my point. When you see stories like this on a highly partisan site (left or right, I don’t care), and they aren’t picked up by larger news sources, there’s usually a reason. And that reason is almost never the media bias that you attempt to allege, but rather because there’s no “there” there.
December 30th, 2003 at 11:50 am
they aren’t picked up by larger news sources
Actually, i find that larger news sources often ignore many rights stories. For example, you’ll rarely find an article on eminent domain in a major news source.
December 30th, 2003 at 11:52 am
Kudos on the homework, by the way. 🙂
December 30th, 2003 at 11:53 am
Agreed on eminent domain. Although those stories generally are picked up by the local media, just not the national media.
December 30th, 2003 at 12:04 pm
Particularly when the national media gets a building because of it 🙂