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BAD TAX IDEA IN CRAWFORD

August 16, 2005

Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war protester who lost a son in Iraq, has a very bad tax idea (Via The Drudge Report):

Sheehan, who is asking for a second meeting with President Bush, says defiantly: "My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don't owe you a penny...you give my son back and I'll pay my taxes. Come after me (for back taxes) and we'll put this war on trial."

In the normal process of such cases, the Tax Court would be unlikely to hear her case before 2007. By then, her campout near the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas will be yesterday's news. The Tax Court procedures aren't likely to morph into some sort of Nuremberg Trial; the judges there tend to focus on tax liability, rather than allegations of war crimes. As the tax law has no gold-star mother exception, Ms. Sheehan can expect to hear that she does, in fact, owe some pennies.

(Via Megan McCardle, as substitute for Instapundit).

UPDATE: Reader Dave Gross writes:

I think you dismiss Cindy Sheehan's tax refusal too quickly. She isn't like the various "constitutionalist" tax protesters who don't pay their taxes because of a deluded legal theory they're trying to convince other people is true. She knows that it is against the law for her to stop paying taxes but intends to do it anyway as a form of civil disobedience.

Her view of the war in Iraq may not be yours, and her choice of tactics may not be as you would recommend, but as a technique it has good credentials.

America's original civil disobedient, Henry David Thoreau, was jailed for tax resistance. And none other than Gandhi endorsed tax resistance ("Withholding payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government"):

"He or she who supports a State organized in the military way whether directly or indirectly participates in the sin. Each man old or young takes part in the sin by contributing to the maintenance of the State by paying taxes."

I suspect that you're right that Sheehan will not have the opportunity to raise Nuremberg-style defenses in tax court, but that may not be what she means when she says she'll put the war on trial. She seems to have a knack for getting the press and the people to talk about the war and its human costs by means of some well-placed performance art. Being pursued by the IRS might be another good opportunity ("I gave them my son, haven't I given them enough?").

Mr. Gross has a site devoted to pacifist tax resistance, http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/.

He is certainly right about the distinguished pedigree of civil disobedience, but I don't see it working here. The administration has some P.R. savvy of it's own, and I would be surprised to see any aggressive IRS action before December 2008, by which time other events will have taken center stage. But Ms. Sheehan will still have a tax mess to clean up, and whatever you think of her politics, she really doesn't need any more problems.

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