|
Redcloud is right. This "awesome letter" is fanciful but useless.
The author of the letter appears to have picked up the legal rule that the U.S. Code titles, if not enacted into positive law, are mere prima facie evidence of the law. But he clearly doesn't know what tht rule means.
The US Code is an effort to present the law as it exists now, with any amendments, and in logical arrangement. To do that, editors had to do some revision and rearrangement of sections of the original Acts of Congress. It may be that an editor erred in revising a section (e.g., he might have overlooked an amendment or reworded it in some significant way), in which case the text from the original Act of Congress, as amended by any others Acts of Congress, is the positive evidence of the text of the law. The Acts of Congress are published in the Statutes at Large.
The burden of proof is on the party challenging the accuracy of the U.S. Code text; he has to present the evidence, from the Statutes at Large, to show that the US Code text is in error. Otherwise the US Code text is accepted as authoritative.
Enacting a US Code title into positive law means that Congress enacts, as a huge Act of Congress, a bill which sets out the text of all the sections of the Code title. Then the text of the Code title is known to be positively the wording approved by Congress. After that, amendments in subsequent Acts are made directly to the text of the Code rather than to a specific previous Act.
Title 26 of the US Code, which is also known as the Internal Revenue Code, apparently has not been enacted as positive law. I say "apparently" because Title 26 is not explicitly listed in the official notes of the US Code as having been enacted as positive law but, on the other hand, recent amendment to the tax laws have referenced Title 26 sections rather than distinct Acts of Congress. The presumption that the Title 26 sections accurately reflect the applicable Acts of Congress is not negated by the mere chanting that "Legal presumption of lawful authority of sec. 6201 ... is hereby refuted and rebutted"; evidence from Statutes at Large is required to undermine the presumption.
And the author of this letter has no such evidence. He said that "Section 6201 ... is derived from sec. 3182 of [the] Revised Statutes of 1874 ..... The intent of Congress has not changed as there has been no amendment to the Statute[s] at Large to date." Apparently the letter-writer thinks that the a volume of Statutes at Large, issued for the Acts of a particular year, will be recalled and replaced with a newer volume that shows subsequent amendments. He is wrong. The official notes {worked up by the House of Representative Law Revision Counsel) to 26 USC 6201 give the earliest source for this section, the adoption of the Tax Code of 1954 (which completely replaced the Tax Code of 1939, which, in turn, had completely replaced earlier tax codes), amended since 1954 by more than a dozen Acts. No mention of the Revised Statutes of 1874. The Revised Statutes sec. 3182 is a shorter provision which may have been the precursor of the current section 6201 but it is clear from the citations of all the Public Laws in the official note that there have been plenty of amendments.
The same defect is found in the letter-writer's discussion of sec. 6331.
His next big error is when he tries to relate (or, more to the point, disconnect) the corresponding Internal Revenue regulations which are title 26 of the Code of Federal Regulations. He uses the tables of statutes set out in the index volume of the CFR. It's an understandable mistake.
Every regulation in the CFR - not just title 26 - must comply with federal law (the Acts of Congress). The CFR provides a little note of the underlying statute (or US Code section) for almost every regulation section -- but that note is a convenience by the CFR editors and not dispositive of the legal situation of the regulation. In the case of the Internal Revenue regulations, until about 1964 the CFR's Title 26 volume (unlike the other titles) contained the whole of the Internal Revenue Code (tite 26 of the US Code), each US Code section followed by its corresponding regulation, so the regulations had numbers that pretty clearly connected them to the underlying 26 US Code section -- and the CFR editors saw no need to provide a referential note. But, around 1964, the CFR dropped reprinting the text of 36 US Code and simply kept the regulations, with their accustomed section numbers but without the statutory sections. That being the situation, the CFR editors didn't bother working up referential notes for the Internal Revenue regulations because their section numbers so clearly indicated the appropriate sections of 26 U.S. Code.
The letter-writer erroneously assumes that this decision by the CFR editors works to invalidate the legality of the regulations in 26 CFR. He is wrong.
In short, the letter-writer reveals the shallowness of his understanding of the bibliographic technicalities of the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations. I would say this serves as evidence that he is an amateur without legal training, but unfortunately I frequently see evidence that law schools around the country have changed their legal research courses from required to elective.
|