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California Bureaucrats Proceed with Fee, Despite Its Illegality
CALIFORNIA-The year was 1990. State expenditures had doubled
during the roaring 1980s, and now the recession had arrived and
the cupboard was bare. Instead of reducing expenditures, the
state responded with new taxes. Among them was a smog impact
fee, a $300 tax slapped on every motorist who moved to California
with the family car. It was one of those midnight bills - actually
46 minutes past midnight, in this case - that pass at the end
of a legislative session with no public scrutiny.
There was one big problem with this tax: It was illegal, and the
state knew it. The Legislature's own legal counsel had warned
legislators before they voted on it that it was unconstitutional
on both state and federal grounds. Yet they adopted it anyway.
The law was a collection of lies. To evade the U.S. Constitution's
interstate commerce clause, it was called a smog impact fee, but
it had nothing to do with smog; revenues were deposited into the
state's general fund. To subvert the state Constitution's prohibition
against such a tax, the Legislature declared that it was a "sales
tax," although it had nothing to do with sales.
Since 1990, families who have moved to California have been forced
to pay $455 million in illegal taxes that the state was never
entitled to collect in the first place. In May 1998, a Superior
Court told the state what the Legislature's own legal counsel
had already told it in 1990: The tax is illegal.
On 1 October, the 3rd District Court of Appeal agreed.
It was an illegal tax then; it is an illegal tax now, and it
has always been illegal.
And yet, the Department of Motor Vehicles has announced that it
will continue to collect the tax, while the state attorney general
drags the case, year by year, all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court. Even then, the DMV vows it will only give refunds for
the last three years the tax was collected. And it will only
refund money to those who jump through the bureaucratic hoops
that the DMV will administer. This is an outrage. It is an outrage that the state would drag this case out for years, when from the beginning its own lawyers told it the tax was illegal. It is an outrage that the state would hide behind a three-year legal statute of limitations for a tax that it knew it was never entitled to collect. It is an outrage that the DMV would require taxpayers to obtain and file bureaucratic paperwork to apply for a refund when the DMV has the records of every person who has paid the tax and could mail them their refunds immediately. Finally, it is an outrage that the state would not pay the same interest that it charges taxpayers if the shoe were on the other foot. If the same taxpayer owed the state $300 in 1992, the state would charge him $557 with interest today. SOURCE: Excerpted from the 11 October, 1999, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, from an article entitled, "A Lesson for California From King George III." Author Tom McClintock is a state Assemblyman (R-Northridge), who is vice chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.(WFI EDITOR: Illegal taxes are now a routine part of life under the republic in the United States. In comparison, the taxes we are now expected to pay dwarf the taxes that were imposed by the parliament of King George III, to partially compensate for the war Britain had recently concluded for the purpose of the security of the Americans. The announced purpose for the Revolution, "No taxation without representation," to a knowledgeable person, is the equivalent of fighting a revolution for the right to have an attorney; it lacks the real passion a person would require to give up everything he knows and is familiar with, for an uncertain future under the control of a class of slavemasters, who did not hesitate to seize power when the crown was finally overthrown.
The question modern Americans have to ask themselves is,
if the government itself operates illegally, what is there to
provide law and justice for the American people? The proven fact
that the bureaucrats violate the law every day is simply sound
evidence that passing new laws will not stop the bureaucracy of
the republic, which appears to have its own agenda which breaking
the law is no impediment to. Although the suggestion that restoration
of a constitutional monarchy is anathema to the majority of college-educated
professionals, who have been conditioned by their educations to
have a knee-jerk reaction against a restoration, the truth is
that until genuine legal authority is brought back into the American
legal and political system, corruption shall continue to be the
biggest problem facing the American people.) |
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