Flesh and blood defense falls into the wrong hands

Tax protestors and other anti-government, black-helicopter, global conspiracy theorists have argued for years that the federal government doesn't apply to them. The seeds of their theory were planted during Reconstruction as a backlash against the Fourteenth Amendment. Fast forward to the U.S. going off the gold standard in 1933, federal marshals going to Little Rock in 1957, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After inflation and the oil crisis in the 1970s resulted in family farm foreclosures in the 1980s, the movement grew in numbers and influence. Their ultimate "victory," answering Waco and Ruby Ridge, was their terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

The contours of the philosophy have changed somewhat in the past 120 years, but its underlying theory was and still is a fundamental belief of biblically based white supremacy. The least unclear version of the story goes as follows: The serpent seduced Eve after feeding her the apple. Then she seduced Adam. The result was Cain and Abel, who were actually twins. One type of people descends from Abel (the northern European type), and the other from Cain (the soulless beast of the field type). How this retelling squares with a literal interpretation of the KJV is not clear to me, but then, I'm not a Christian, and even when I was, I was a papist.

But in any event, like the NRA, the origins of the flesh and blood defense were in the Ku Klux Klan, and there it remains. Most famously, the defense depends on a claim that the Fourteenth Amendment was never actually added to the Constitution correctly because of procedural deficiencies. What the deficiencies are varies from theory to theory; the one I hear the most is that Congress did not properly adjourn in the session immediately preceding the final vote on the Amendment. There's also a circular argument that it is unconstitutional because it violates the Tenth Amendment.

Here's one particularly interesting vision of the coming secular end times:

[ . . . ] Posse members would explain the need for local militias to stockpile weapons in order to defend white Christians from blacks in the coming race war sparked by the inevitable economic collapse caused by the income tax and a cabal of international Jewish bankers bent on global dominance through one world government, for Satan.

It's just about all there, I think. It leaves out Barack Obama only because the Washington Monthly article it's from discusses a court hearing from January, when Clinton was still a viable candidate.

Tax protestors and other conspiracy theorists end up in federal court pretty often because they do a lot of illegal things, like not paying their taxes, buying real estate with fictitious checks, and blowing up day care centers. So they've developed a theory for their defense, largely based on the bizarre claim that there is a difference between you, the living person, and the fictitious entity that the government has created for you in a mysterious database of taxpayers and citizens, which will be turned over to the U.N. as soon as Barack Obama is elected, or the race war starts, whichever comes first. It's the "flesh and blood" defense: you are a sovereign person. Therefore, court documents that refer to you as "defendant" or that print your name in capital letters do not give the court jurisdiction over you. Rather, the documents give the court jurisdiction only over the fictitious entity that the government created in its database. Which may be in New York City or Washington D.C. or Yucca Mountain, depending on who you ask.

There are supplemental theories that include nonsense about the gold fringe on the flag behind the judge, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

So about that court hearing in the Washington Monthly article. It's a consolidated federal case against some African-American gang members and drug dealers in Baltimore. They're being prosecuted for various RICO offenses, drug offenses, and murder. The defendants were cooperating with their court-appointed counsel, all very competent attorneys (including one law professor), until recently. But out of the blue, or possibly from listening to tax protestors in prison, they've adopted the "flesh and blood" defense as their legal strategy.

The defendants filed a motion to dismiss their case based on lack of jurisdiction over their sovereign person. They cited to the Uniform Commercial Code, too, to further support their case. When Federal District Court trial judge Andre M. Davis denied the motion, he tried to explain that their arguments necessarily rest on "an ideology derived from a famously discredited notion: the illegitimacy of the Fourteenth Amendment." United States v. Mitchell, 405 F.Supp.2d 602, 606 (D. Md., Dec. 19, 2005).

In other words, they're arguing that the Amendment that granted them citizenship as African-Americans is no good. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Is it a case of the chickens coming home to roost -- black people using a white supremacist theory to escape the death penalty, presumably to the white supremacists' chagrin? Or is it just incredibly sad that these guys lack the education and the critical thinking skills to know what they're doing?

As the defendants were being removed from the courtroom after the January hearing, the judge heard one of them laughing and told the court reporter to put the laugh on the record. Their flesh and blood defense strategy wore down the prosecution enough that the government is no longer pursuing the death penalty, anyway.