The Lawfulness of the Reconstruction Amendments

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Before we get started on the reconstruction amendments 13-15 I will look at the 16th amendment, the Income Tax amendment, because there was real litigation on many of the points raised by modern skeptics about the Reconstruction Amendments. The purpose of this is to show that the nit pickers about amendments, the ones that raise technical and obscure issues with the Constitutionality of amendments never prosper.

Benson contentions[edit]
The William J. Benson contention is essentially that the legislatures of various states passed ratifying resolutions in which the quoted text of the Amendment differed from the text proposed by Congress in terms of capitalization, spelling of words, or punctuation marks (e.g. semi-colons instead of commas), and that these differences made the ratification invalid. Benson makes other assertions including claims that one or more states rejected the Amendment and that the state or states were falsely reported as having ratified the Amendment. As explained below, the Benson arguments have been rejected in every court case where they have been raised, and were explicitly ruled to be fraudulent in 2007.

Benson and Beckman did not discover anything; they rediscovered something that Secretary Knox considered in 1913. Thirty-eight states ratified the sixteenth amendment, and thirty-seven sent formal instruments of ratification to the Secretary of State. (Minnesota notified the Secretary orally, and additional states ratified later; we consider only those Secretary Knox considered.) Only four instruments repeat the language of the sixteenth amendment exactly as Congress approved it. The others contain errors of diction, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. The text Congress transmitted to the states was: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." Many of the instruments neglected to capitalize "States", and some capitalized other words instead. The instrument from Illinois had "remuneration" in place of "enumeration"; the instrument from Missouri substituted "levy" for "lay"; the instrument from Washington had "income" not "incomes"; others made similar blunders.
Thomas insists that because the states did not approve exactly the same text, the amendment did not go into effect. Secretary Knox considered this argument. The Solicitor of the Department of State drew up a list of the errors in the instruments and – taking into account both the triviality of the deviations and the treatment of earlier amendments that had experienced more substantial problems – advised the Secretary that he was authorized to declare the amendment adopted. The Secretary did so.
Although Thomas urges us to take the view of several state courts that only agreement on the literal text may make a legal document effective, the Supreme Court follows the "enrolled bill rule". If a legislative document is authenticated in regular form by the appropriate officials, the court treats that document as properly adopted. Field v. Clark, 143 U.S. 649, 36 L.Ed. 294, 12 S.Ct. 495 (1892). The principle is equally applicable to constitutional amendments. See Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, 66 L.Ed. 505, 42 S.Ct. 217 (1922), which treats as conclusive the declaration of the Secretary of State that the nineteenth amendment had been adopted. In United States v. Foster, 789 F.2d. 457, 462-463, n.6 (7th Cir. 1986), we relied on Leser, as well as the inconsequential nature of the objections in the face of the 73-year acceptance of the effectiveness of the sixteenth amendment, to reject a claim similar to Thomas's. See also Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433, 83 L. Ed. 1385, 59 S. Ct. 972 (1939) (questions about ratification of amendments may be nonjusticiable). Secretary Knox declared that enough states had ratified the sixteenth amendment. The Secretary's decision is not transparently defective. We need not decide when, if ever, such a decision may be reviewed in order to know that Secretary Knox's decision is now beyond review.
— United States v. Thomas
The bottom line is that trivial objections to amendments are not going to go very far.

Another argument made by some tax protesters is that because the United States Congress did not pass an official proclamation (Pub. L. 204) recognizing the date of Ohio's 1803 admission to statehood until 1953 (see Ohio and the Constitution), Ohio was not a state until 1953 and therefore the Sixteenth Amendment was not properly ratified.[7] The earliest reported court case where this argument was raised appears to be Ivey v. United States,[30] some sixty-three years after the ratification and 173 years after Ohio's admission as a state. This argument was rejected in the Ivey case, and has been uniformly rejected by the courts. See also McMullen v. United States,[31] McCoy v. Alexander,[32] Lorre v. Alexander,[33] McKenney v. Blumenthal[34] and Knoblauch v. Commissioner.[35] Further, even if Ohio's ratification was not valid, the Amendment was ratified by 41 other states, well in excess of the 36 needed for it to be properly ratified.​

In Baker v. Commissioner, the court stated:

Petitioner's theory [that Ohio was not a state until 1953 and that the Sixteenth Amendment was not properly ratified] is based on the enactment of Pub. L. 204, ch. 337, 67 Stat. 407 (1953) relating to Ohio's Admission into the Union. As the legislative history of this Act makes clear, its purpose was to settle a burning debate as to the precise date upon which Ohio became one of the United States. S. Rept. No. 720 to accompany H.J. Res. 121 (Pub. L. 204), 82d Cong. 2d Sess. (1953). We have been cited to no authorities which indicate that Ohio became a state later than March 1, 1803, irrespective of Pub. L. 204.[36]
 
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