Trying To Connect Dots Regarding Michele Bachmann And The Untax Movement

Reading Rising Hegemon, I decided to listen to this Michele Bachmann Congressional debate video, and thought I heard unmistakable echoes of the Untax Movement (particularly from about 37:00 to about 40:30):



Then, I read that Michele Bachmann was an IRS tax attorney from 1988 to 1993, just when the various Patriot and Militia groups were becoming active. Was there a chance Michele Bachmann had ever been associated with a group like The Pilot Connection?

I had a brush with The Pilot Connection in the early 90's, when girlfriend (and about-to-pass-the-bar Lincoln Law graduate) JKA started working on their behalf:

"Patriots for profit" have been around as long as the "patriot" movement itself has, but the 1990s have produced a number of very prominent schemes. Many "patriot for profit" schemes center around income tax evasion. Because the "patriot" community is so united against the income tax and tax protesters make up a prominent portion of the community, a number of would-be swindlers offer various tax avoidance schemes for sale at exorbitant prices, none of which, not surprisingly, actually work. One of the most prominent such schemes was that promoted by the Pilot Connection Society. Based in Stockton, California and headed by Phillip Marsh, the Pilot Connection Society held seminars and even barbecues designed to get people interested in their "untax" kits in the early 1990s. One IRS spokesman called it "one of the biggest, if not the biggest, illegal tax protest group in the country."

At the time, The Pilot Connection needed as much legal expertise as they could get, and I worried that JKA was becoming too closely intertwined with their quasi-extralegal efforts. I was close enough to the action that I remember spending Christmas Eve 1992 at the Marsh's Stockton home.

Nevertheless, by 1994, JKA had her own practice that concentrated on family rather than tax issues, and she left that particular fold (and the subsequent downward trajectory - the move to Utah, the arrests, federal trial, and imprisonment).

Nevertheless, was Michele Bachmann an Untax sympathizer, despite working for the IRS?

Well, not according to this Native American:

Manypenny worked at the Youth Project, described in court records as "a public foundation with a 17-year history of building citizen participation organizations around the country committed to social justice and peace.'' The resident of the White Earth Indian Reservation contended he was exempt from income taxes because of the April 8, 1867 land treaty between his Chippewa Indian ancestors and the U.S. government. He met Bachmann briefly in the federal court building in St. Paul.

"She was very -- how do I put this? -- haughty and curt,'' the 64-year-old Manypenny told National Journal in a telephone interview. "I tried to state my contentions to her and it was like talking to a brick wall.''

It's hard to connect to dots with conservative political organizations, since there are so many of them and since they are so diverse. But, I tried....

The Liberty Foundation has been described as a successor to the Pilot Connection, but they seem to be Libertarian Paulites that are highly-skeptical of Michele Bachmann.

The U.S. Attorney who prosecuted a prominent Untax case in Minnesota (the Karl Foster case) was William B. Michael, Jr., a former Green Beret who is now apparently with Chicago law firm Mayer Brown, at least one of whose attorneys has donated to the Bachmann campaign. None of this is surprising by itself, though. It just shows it's a chummy world at the higher echelons of law and politics, and the Untaxers haven't quite penetrated that rarefied space (unless you include high-flying corporate Untaxers like Mitt Romney, who has access to the posh world of the Cayman Islands, and doesn't need Untax kits).

The more I read about Michele Bachmann the more I'm coming to understand that, even though she once was an IRS tax attorney, she seems to be less animated by Libertarian and Untaxing thought than she is by Social Conservatism, American Exceptionalism, and Military Triumphalism. You can't have all that oom-pah-pah Triumphalism without high taxes, though, and she knows that.

So, why is Michele Bachmann making Libertarian like noises in the political campaign? Well, that's politics! In an election, you have to assemble the broadest possible coalition of interests, and that includes the outcast, despised Paulites too.

So, if you are a white, suburban, mega-churchgoing Untaxer, the 2012 Michele Bachmann, like her 1988 self once did, would surely hate it, but she would bite her lip and do her duty, and throw your Untaxable white ass into prison for a spell.