A “dog and pony show” is a staged performance that appears lawful to regular people who cannot see what is missing. The judge’s actions happened in open court. Federal judges have been doing what they want for so long that there was no attempt to conceal it. 

What people could not see was how Judge Sparks changed the law in front of them. Subchapter N contains the cross-border rules that determine when income is taxable. Instead of letting the jury apply those rules, he kept them from the jury and substituted the domestic-income-tax belief.

That violated the constitutional separation of powers and the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) because a federal judge has no authority to replace statutory rules with his own conclusion.

Enforcement power exists only because statutes and required procedures create it. Those same rules also limit it. Power does not come from titles, offices, or assumptions. It comes from the words in the statutes, applied through the procedures those statutes require.

When the rules for search warrants, indictments, trials, jury instructions, or convictions are violated, the action loses legal force. The violation itself defeats the action, because authority exists only when the required rules are followed.

Since 1862, the income tax has used the same cross-border structure. Since 1916, citizens or residents inside the United States with only domestic income have been charged, convicted, and relieved of money under the same domestic-income-tax belief. But the IRC does not apply to them.

In this case, the search warrant, indictment, trial, jury instructions, and conviction appeared to be lawful, but only because the federal judge enforced a domestic tax that does not exist in the Internal Revenue Code.

Section 7203, “Willful failure to file return, supply information, or pay tax,” uses only the word “person.” Section 7701(a) defines “person” and “United States person” separately. Citizens or residents with only domestic income are not “persons.” Section 861(a), read with Section 7701, limits taxable income to income that crosses national borders.

The whole prosecution was a travesty of the law. The warrant did not obey the statutory rules. There was no legal duty for Clayton in the indictment. At trial, Judge Sam Sparks kept the jury from seeing the cross-border rules in Subchapter N. Because the legal profession is self-regulated, there were no adverse consequences for these constitutional and statutory violations.