The Supreme Court is bound by the Constitution. In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution grants jurisdiction to the federal government to regulate three areas of commerce: “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes” – in other words, foreign commerce, interstate commerce, and Indian commerce.

The 16th Amendment, the income tax, has been the subject of many Supreme Court decisions. The IRS always cites to the Brushaber v. Union Pacific R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916), to inform the public that the 16th Amendment was held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court. What the IRS doesn’t inform the public about Mr. Frank Brushaber, the central character in the Supreme Court case, is that he was a withholding agent for several foreign investors in the Union Pacific Railroad, acting as their fiduciary.

The Supreme Court, obviously being aware of all of the pertinent details, ruled in the Brushaber case that the federal government always had the power to tax income as an excise tax and, therefore, the 16th Amendment is constitutional. The Supreme Court then ruled in the very next case it decided, Stanton v. Baltic Mining, 240 US 103 (1916), the following: “… that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation, but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged and being placed in the category of direct taxation subject to apportionment by a consideration of the sources from which the income was derived…”. The ”previous ruling” cited in the Stanton decision was referring to the Brushaber decision.

A few years later the Supreme Court again ruled upon the 16th Amendment’s effect on the federal government’s power of taxation. In Peck & Co. v. Lowe, 247 US 165 (1918), the Supreme Court stated, in part: “The Sixteenth Amendment … does not extend the taxing power to new or excepted subjects …”.

The Supreme Court decisions above all inform everyone that no new power of taxation was granted to the federal government by the 16th Amendment. These decisions all inform everyone that the federal government always had the power to tax income from the beginning. Since no new power of taxation was granted to the federal government by the 16th Amendment and the federal government was held to always have had the power to tax income, then the revenue that’s being derived by the federal government from an income tax must come from one of the regulated commerce jurisdictions granted to the federal government by the Constitution – therefore, this revenue must come from foreign commerce, interstate commerce, commerce. After all, generating income is a commercial activity.

The Supreme Court ruled exactly that in Eisner v. Macomber, 252 U.S. 189 (1920), where the Court stated the following: “The 16th Amendment must be construed in connection with the taxing clauses of the original Constitution and the effect attributed to them before the Amendment was adopted.”.