Twisting the Truth
State Attorney General Paul Summers, who believes a state income tax is constitutional despite three unanimous state Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, is now espousing a novel theory that past legislatures have already, in essence, enacted an income tax. Summers, working ever harder to twist the law hard enough to make the income tax fit, told House members last week, according to this Nashville City Paper article that the Supreme Court wrongly held the income tax to be unconstitutional because of flawed research, and that the legislature has already passing de facto income taxes. Accordnig to Summers, the state's 6 percent business excise tax is really an income tax on the corporate “person.”

While Summers is cooking up bizarre semantics to try to fool legislators into believing the income tax is constitutional, he has ducked the issue of Article 11, Section 9.

Now, Sections 28 or 29 of Article 2 of the state constitution are the sections that list the taxes the legislature is permitted to levy. But, as explained more fully in a post below, Article 11, Section 9 explicitly says the General Assembly is "not authorized" to allow empower municipalities to levy certain kinds of taxes that the General Assembly itself is not authorized to levy under Artcle 2, Sections 28-29. The legislature may not grant any munipality the power to tax "incomes, estates, or inheritances, or to impose any other tax not authorized."

A few months ago, I was a guest on Teddy Bart's Roundtable radio show with AG Summers. After the show ended, I asked him about Article 11, Section 9. His first reaction was a pause - he seemed unaware that such specific and declaratory language was in the constitution. I asked him to research it and send me an email explaining how, in light of Article 11, Section 9, the income tax could be considered constitutional. He said he would, and wrote my email address on his legal pad. I never heard from him. Too busy cooking up bizarre legal notions about corporate "persons," I guess.