An author and columnist for Time magazine is now urging millions Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton to refuse paying their federal taxes as a way to abolish the Electoral College and have presidential elections determined by popular vote.
Mark Weston, author of “The Runner-Up Presidency,” published his idea in Time, stating, “The approximately 65 million Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton should pledge that in the future if a Republican wins the presidency with fewer votes than a Democrat for the third time in our era, we won’t pay taxes to the federal government. No taxation without representation!”
He points out that Republican Donald Trump won this year’s electoral vote with about 46 percent of the popular vote, while Democrat Hillary Clinton received about 48 percent, and that Democrat Al Gore also lost the presidency to Republican George W. Bush in 2000, despite Gore having won the popular vote.
“Democrats must, therefore, pester Republicans where it hurts: the pocketbook,” says Weston. “Is signing a pledge to not pay taxes legal? Yes, if no overt act of conspiracy is involved, and the pledge itself is hypothetical. No one knows when or if it would be carried out.”
He continues: “If the Republicans won’t help amend the Constitution so that America can resume being a democracy, then Democrats, lacking the representation that supporters of a future popular vote-winner ought to have in the executive branch, should not submit to paying taxes to the federal government.”
Regarding how the pledge would work, Weston writes:
First, an online group such as MoveOn.org, Change.org or both, should circulate a petition. The pledge is not just a powerful protest; it is also effortless, requiring no legal or financial sacrifice at all for years, possibly decades.
Second, the pledge should only apply to federal taxes. We would still pay state, local, sales and property taxes. This is a protest against our 229-year-old system of electoral votes, not against taxation in general.
Third, if a Republican wins the election without winning the popular vote again, we should still pay what we owe in federal taxes—just not to the IRS. Instead, people would compute their federal taxes, file a Form 1040 and write a check to a national escrow account, preferably in a well-established Canadian or British bank that is beyond the reach of the U.S. Justice Department, because whoever opens this account probably will be in violation of U.S. law. In the check’s memo line, people should write, “Funds to be transferred to the IRS as soon as America resumes being a democracy.”
If the U.S. government wanted control over the trillions of dollars in this escrow account, it would have to replace our antiquated electoral system with a fairer way of electing presidents. Then, when 38 state legislatures have ratified an acceptable Constitutional amendment, the escrow officer could cheerfully transfer the account’s trillions of dollars to the IRS.
What do YOU think? Sound off on calls for Democrats to stop paying taxes
Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars reacted to Weston’s idea by tweeting, “Encouraging people to commit criminal acts = solicitation in many states and is illegal.”
Encouraging people to commit criminal acts = solicitation in many states and is illegal. https://t.co/OEFlEMbXLx pic.twitter.com/ioXmyjD2dj
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) December 6, 2016
Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge wrote: “Sadly, it appears, Mr. Weston missed out on what America’s constitutional democracy means. As we noted previously, despite what the disaffected left now says about the ‘outdated’ electoral college system, there was and still is solid reasoning behind it’s existence. The power of the individual states weighed very heavily on the founding fathers who created the electoral college system specifically to avoid the mass centralization of power in high population density areas. And, while we certainly understand why the left would look to now discredit such a system, the fact is that there would be no United States of America without it as smaller states simply never would have opted in to the union.”
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Durden added, “Finally, we look forward to President-Elect Trump’s tweet response to this seemingly treasonous sore-losership.”
Follow Joe Kovacs on Twitter @JoeKovacsNews
