Opinion ID: 186432
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Dismissal of Frivolous Claims

Text: 15 Appellants finally contend that the District Court erred in dismissing Appellants' requests for injunctive and declaratory relief as frivolous. They maintain that theirs were not simply tax protest claims to be dismissed out of hand, and that eighty issues of material fact existed at the time of the motion to dismiss that should have been resolved before dismissal. They give examples of these alleged issues of fact in their brief, including Whether the federal United States government is a `corporation', and, Whether a corporation is a republican form of government (emphasis in original). These arguments are without merit. 16 First, the examples of material facts in dispute put forth by the Appellants are not issues of fact at all, but issues of law, and do not appear in the amended complaint in this case or elsewhere in the record before this Court. Similarly, the requests for relief denied by the District Court are all patently frivolous, including requests for declarations that laws passed by Congress do not apply to Maxwell as a sovereign citizen of the Union State of Texas, that the United States is not a republican form of government and therefore must be abolished as unconstitutional, that the Secretary of the Treasury's jurisdiction is limited to the District of Columbia, that Maxwell is not a citizen of the United States, and so on, 17 Most of these claims are only relevant to this case based on Appellants' legal theory that the federal government's jurisdiction is limited to the District of Columbia and other federally owned lands by art. I, § 8, cl. 17 of the Constitution. This is a blatant misreading of this clause which does not limit the other constitutional grants of authority to the federal legislature but only limits the places where the federal government has exclusive legislative power. The other grants of authority in Article I still hold, including the power to lay and collect Taxes ... throughout the United States. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 8, cl. 1. The Sixteenth Amendment further authorizes a direct nonapportioned income tax upon United States citizens throughout the country. Brushaber v. Union P.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1, 12-19, 36 S.Ct. 236, 60 L.Ed. 493 (1916). Both of these powers to tax have long been upheld by the Supreme Court; arguments resting on the assumption that the federal government has no such power are frivolous. Appellants' few remaining claims are based on similar outright misreadings of various federal statutes and constitutional provisions and are likewise frivolous. We thus do not address these and other issues not material to the outcome of this case.