The sovcit I'm dealing with actually thinks that we should pay him the money he owes us. The thinking process with these clowns is something I will never understand.
They aren't the smartest people to begin with, add in the sovereign nonsense, they're suddenly dumber and dumber!
Sovereign citizen claims seem like a wild tangle of complex legal theories, but they all boil down to a simple concept: Sovereign citizens believe they are not subject to the laws or authority of the federal government, but only to "
common law" or "
constitutional law," the law of the original and "rightful" U.S. republic before the
14th Amendment — which addresses U.S. citizenship rights and the validity of the U.S. government's "public debt" — was ratified [source: Berger]. This means they believe they don't have to pay taxes and aren't subject to court rulings,
arrest, fines or any other duty or penalty imposed by the government.
Sovereign citizens claim there is a difference between a human being and the separate legal entity represented by that person's birth certificate or legal name. To them, all government statutes are contracts between the government and this legal entity, which sovereign citizens refer to as a "
straw man." Therefore, the human —
not the straw man — is not subject to those statutes. Sovereign citizens are cautious of "creating joinder" between their human self and their straw man, which might happen because they register for a government service, accept a bill from the government or accidentally sign their name the way it appears in legal documents and tax paperwork. A sovereign citizen named Debbie Smith, for instance, might only refer to herself as "Debbie of the family Smith" or sign her name in an unusual way, like }}Debbie,,,Smith{{.
Many sovereign citizens believe that county sheriffs are the highest legal authority allowed in the U.S., and that state and federal police are illegitimate [source:
Goetz]. They deny the authority of the U.S. federal government, or even the lawfulness of its existence. Another common claim of sovereign citizens is that they are not citizens of the U.S. (or whatever nation they reside in), but rather are separate, independent sovereign nations; citizens of such a nation; or citizens of a state or province. Some sovereign citizens claim to be citizens of a religious "nation" subject only to the authority of God.
The redemption movement is an offshoot of sovereign citizenry. According to adherents of this movement, the U.S. government issues everyone a birth certificate when they're born, creating the "straw man" legal entity that represents them. But furthermore, the movement claims, the government creates a bank account for each straw man and stocks it with $630,000. It's possible, sovereign citizens say, to use these funds to pay debts (especially tax debts) by filing a bunch of documents and sight drafts, which basically means writing checks drawing on this mysterious, unproven $630,000 account [source:
Tremblay].
Even though sovereign citizens' beliefs may seem dubious at best, the movement is rooted in a history of groups with anti-government and anti-tax ideologies.
From claims of secret bank accounts created by the government to exemptions from federal law, sovereign citizen beliefs seem outlandish. But is there any truth to them?
people.howstuffworks.com
The sovereign citizen movement began in the 1970s and grew from an extremist group called
Posse Comitatus (a common-law legal term meaning "the force of the county"), which coalesced around right-wing, anti-government ideas in Oregon, although it had a presence in California and Wisconsin as well. The group's members maintained that the
county level of government is the highest authority, that people can declare themselves sovereign and free of federal government control, and that income taxes are illegitimate. They also espoused anti-tax, racist and anti-Semitic ideas. The Posse's anti-government tactics spread and were adopted by different groups, like adherents of the racist, anti-Semitic hate group
Christian Identity and sovereign citizens, as the movement's popularity rose and fell. Some form of sovereign ideology exists in most English-speaking countries — outside the U.S. it is more commonly known as a "freemen on the land" ideology, but the core beliefs and tactics are essentially the same.
In many cases, sovereign citizens employ violence to demonstrate their beliefs. Perhaps the most infamous violent incident involving sovereign citizens is the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Terry Nichols, one of the perpetrators of the bombing, had used sovereign citizen tactics in court cases and attempted to renounce his citizenship in the years prior to the bombing. In a separate incident, Gordon Kahl, a member of Posse Comitatus, killed three federal officers and was killed in a subsequent shootout in 1983. In fact, there have been numerous accounts of sovereign citizens murdering law enforcement officials or plotting to murder police officers and judges. The FBI's counterterrorism unit even declared sovereign citizens "a growing domestic threat to law enforcement" [source:
FBI].
In the United States, several incidents of government agents engaging in armed conflicts with right-wing groups or families have even strengthened the popularity of the sovereign citizen movement in recent years. The Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco, Texas (1993) standoffs are the most notorious, but the anti-government Montana Freemen had a
months-long standoff with FBI agents in 1996, and militants conducted an
armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Although not all of these events were directly tied to the sovereign citizen movement, they incited an increase of anti-government sentiment.
Sovereign citizen beliefs have experienced a resurgence since the early 2000s largely because the ideology has been marketed to and adopted by groups other than right-wing extremists. Sovereign citizen tactics, stripped of white supremacy, Christian and anti-Semitic sentiments, can appeal to anyone of any race or religion [source:
Goetz].
But how do sovereign citizens reach the point where they think writing in a certain color of ink or insisting to a judge that they are "not a person" are sound legal tactics? The justifications for their unusual claims follow a chain of faulty logic that we'll break down in the next section.
