United States v. George S. Sitka

MESKILL, Circuit Judge:

In this appeal, we are asked to address a question that we had thought was long settled. We are asked to rale that the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives Congress the “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes,” was never properly ratified in accordance with Article Y of the Constitution, and that federal courts therefore lack jurisdiction to entertain tax evasion prosecutions under the criminal penalty provisions of Title 26 of the United States Code. The United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, Blumenfeld, J., held…