Category: Civics Education

Civics Education February 5, 2020February 5, 2020

How to Write a Letter to Congressional Representatives and the President

@2019 by Randall E. White, author of American Popular Sovereignty

The Twelve Questions Letter

This blog provides an example of effective administrative letter-writing as a vehicle to achieving political remedy. When raising an issue on the national level of government, the essential elements of effective letter-writing include:

Writing to the five essential representative offices that are usually involved in making or enforcing public policy and laws, which are: (a) our President; (b) the chief executive officer in charge of the executive agency overseeing our issue; (c) our Representative in Congress; and (d) our two State Senators
Explaining why the issue is of great national importance
Citing the public authority under which We the People have a right to request representative action in the matter, together with our representatives’ duty to comply with our request
Telling our representatives exactly what we want them to do: e.g., for the President to issue an Executive Order creating a certain public policy for the relevant executive agency to follow; and for our Representatives and Senators in Congress to support the public policy set forth in the Executive Order, together with creating or amending legislation which will solve the underlying problem that the Executive Order is temporarily fixing.
Sending the letter to our public representatives in the hundreds of thousands or millions to provide them with evidence of our public will in the matter, which they can use to leverage or defend political action on our behalf

The following is an example of an administrative letter which is asking some objectively reasonable questions about federal taxation, which is actually a “hot potato” issue involving public corruption, wherein the intended remedy is ultimately our being granted access to a Grand Jury, which has the inherent legal authority and public powers necessary to investigate and prosecute the matter on our behalf. In the event that our public representatives do not comply with our administrative request, then our alternative remedy is to directly establish public policy or law through the ballot initiative process. The letter template is in standard business letter format, as follows:

Your name

Address

City, state, postal code

Date

President Donald J. Trump; The White House; 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW; Washington, DC 20500

Commissioner Charles P. Rettig; Internal Revenue Service; 1111 Constitution Avenue, NW; Washington, D.C. 20224

Representative [name]; address; Washington, DC, postal code

Senator [name]; address; Washington, DC, postal code

Re: Questions concerning federal tax liability

Dear Public Representatives,

I am writing to you in my capacity as one of We the People, who are the creators of our government and having the authority to protect our Constitution. This letter presents questions of great national importance affecting the rights and duties of millions of private sector working-class Americans in relation to our Internal Revenue laws. We require straightforward answers which will assist us in properly determining the legal status of our pay when preparing federal tax returns.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) asserts in its official publications, forms, liens and levy actions, that all Americans are liable for a federal income tax on our wages of labor and earnings from self-employment. The IRS sanctions third-party reporting about our pay on the IRS forms W-2 and 1099, which the IRS routinely uses to assert that we have a federal income tax liability.

Whereas Article I of our Constitution prohibits direct federal taxation without apportionment and the last time Congress levied a direct tax was in 1861, which expired in 1872, taken together with the fact that the Sixteenth Amendment did not repeal or modify Article I, it is not clear how the IRS federal taxation, lien and levy policies and practices involving the forms W-2, 1099, and 1040 conform to the basic elements of direct and indirect federal taxation under our Constitution, or to our Internal Revenue laws.

Therefore, pursuant to your oath of office to uphold and defend our Constitution, and your duties thereunder, please assist us in understanding our rights and duties in this matter by answering the following straightforward questions:

Concerning the IRS Form W-2, identify any sections of the Internal Revenue Code that levy a tax with respect to the wages of labor.
What is the subject of the tax?
What is the measure of the tax?
In accordance with the basic elements of direct and indirect federal taxation under the Constitution, how is the tax a circuitous mode of reaching the revenue of the individual? [1]
Concerning the IRS Form 1099-MISC, identify any sections of the Internal Revenue Code that levy a tax with respect to non-employee compensation.
What is the subject of the tax?
What is the measure of the tax?
How is the tax a circuitous mode of reaching the revenue of the individual?
Concerning the IRS Form 1099-K, identify any sections of the Internal Revenue Code that levy a tax with respect to an individual utilizing a merchant processing service for conducting retail sales over the Internet.
What is the subject of the tax?
What is the measure of the tax?
How is the tax a circuitous mode of reaching the revenue of the individual?

Thank you for in advance for your cooperation by providing truthful, complete, and timely answers to our questions.

Best regards,

Your name

[1] White, R. (2019). Direct and Indirect Taxation Under the Constitution. American Popular Sovereignty; A guide to restoring participatory government and achieving remedy. (pp. 280-294). Fort Worth, TX: APS Education.

Citizen Homework:

Take the letter above and complete with your name, address and mail or email to your Congressional representatives. Or write a letter of your own about a topic that you feel is important for the President, your Senators, or Congressional representatives.

Then mail or press the send tab. Our government works when we get involved.

Contact Congress

Contact the White House

The American Intelligence Media and American Popular Sovereignty invite you to join patriots everywhere in learning American history and civics – the real stuff, not the propaganda found in public school textbooks from publishers with Pilgrims Society affiliations.

To get started, we recommend that you subscribe to this blog where you will receive regular updates, including video presentations, recommended articles, and conversations between authors Randall E. White and Douglas Gabriel. For students that can’t wait to dig in, go ahead and purchase the print textbook which ships anywhere in the world:

American Popular Sovereignty

See the previous lesson:

The Basic Elements of American Government

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The Organizing Principal of Government

Start at the beginning of the series:

The Basic Elements of American Government

Civics Education February 1, 2020February 5, 2020

The Basic Elements of American Government

Excerpt* from American Popular Sovereignty @2019 by Randall E. White.

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“In America, the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign. I was elected not to take power, but to give power to the American people, where it belongs.” —President Donald J. Trump [1]

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The essential elements of American law and government that are never taught in conventional civics courses, include:

The traditional motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum, a Latin phrase meaning “out of many, one”. We are more than just a nation of many individual people. Together, we form one united entity, which our government was formed to serve: the People.
The core of American government is popular sovereignty, which means that all political powers exercised by the state through publicly elected and appointed representatives originate from the citizens, who are the sovereign or supreme power and authority.
We the People, meaning the citizens collectively, as a sovereign body politic, possess absolute sovereignty. Our governmental institutions, entities and public representatives, possess limited sovereignty conditioned upon official conduct conforming to publicly delegated authority, defined purpose, and mandated standards for official conduct.
American citizens, in our capacity as a sovereign body politic, possess plenary public powers, which we have historically exercised through our participatory and representative governmental institutions, together with their parallel governmental processes and procedures. Plenary means full and complete.
During the 1600s through the 1800s, America’s traditional participatory governmental institutions in the form of public militias, grand and petit juries, protected our civil rights and the integrity of our representative governmental institutions (the legislative, executive and judicial branches of representative government) by holding public representatives accountable to their oath of office and to the citizens’ public will, as depicted in Diagram A — American Government in 1791.

The concepts and political traditions which comprise American popular sovereignty evolved out of the desires and aspirations of ordinary working-class people from Europe and other places around the world to be free from oppression and to be self-governing. Most of our ancestors who immigrated to America originally came here because they were fleeing religious persecution, economic oppression or slavery in its various forms, while at the same time seeking freedom and a genuine opportunity to create new and better way of life for themselves and their families, for generations to come. This pursuit has become widely known and commonly referred to as “the American Dream.”

America is a “melting pot” of peoples from around the world, made up of all races and ethnic backgrounds. Americans characteristically tend not to judge or look down upon oppressed peoples in other parts of the world because many of our own ancestors were either destitute or taken as prisoners or slaves at an earlier time in history.

Americans as a whole are a generous people who sincerely desire to share their good will and cultural traditions supporting freedom and opportunity with people in other countries, through economic trade and cultural exchanges conducted in a manner which benefits everyone involved, without causing any harm.

[1] President Donald Trump’s statement to the United Nations General Assembly on September 19, 2017.