Yesterday and today, the late Representative John Lewis is lying in state at the Capitol. Thousands of people lined up to pay respects to the Congressman yesterday and I’d be surprised if thousands more don’t today.
They may know Rep. Lewis from his days as a Freedom Rider, fighting for racial justice. They may know him from the graphic novels about his civil rights career. They may know him from his 40-ish years representing constituents as an elected official.
I was reminded that Rep. Lewis was a deeply religious man and advocate of religious freedom last week when I got a call from Amy Lee Rosen, a reporter for Law360. She was doing a story about tax bills sponsored by Rep. Lewis.
One of the bills Rep. Lewis sponsored? H.R. 4169: the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.
I was familiar with the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act; I wrote about it in chapter 4 of my book.
What is the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act? Some context first: Quakers (and some others, including some Mennonites, but I know the Quaker story best) have religious objections to violence. Their Peace Testimony means, among other things, that they are conscientious objectors to war. They have a long history of not participating in war.
For many, however, it isn’t enough for them to avoid fighting; they don’t want to support war in any way. That includes funding the military through their taxes.
Quaker tax resistance has taken a number of forms. Most Quaker tax resistors figure out what portion of the federal budget funds the military and other war-related expenditures and they reduce their tax payments by that amount. Some have claimed what they call a “conscience deduction,” reducing their tax liability by 56%, the proportion of the federal budget that went to the military. Others take the portion of their taxes that would fund the military and escrow those funds, writing on their tax returns that they would turn the escrowed amount over to the government as soon as the government guaranteed that it wouldn’t use the money to fund the military.
Both strategies were spectacular failures. While courts recognize the importance of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, they have consistently held that the federal income tax does not violate taxpayers’ free exercise rights, even where taxpayers have a religiously-based objection to government spending.
While there’s no judicial remedy for the Quakers’ plight, there is a potential legislative remedy. In 1972, the Religious Liberty Trust Fund Act was introduced for the first time, and it has been introduced (with some minor variations) in virtually every Congress since. The current Act essentially requires the Treasury Department to develop an account into which the taxes of designated conscientious objectors would be deposited. Funds in this account could not be used for military purposes but could be allocated to any nonmilitary purpose.
Rep. Lewis has sponsored this bill during the last four Congresses (that is, since 2013). The current iteration of the bill has a single cosponsor in addition to Rep. Lewis.
A couple of thoughts about the bill: first, it would remedy a true infringement on religious liberty. It’s not an area that impinges on our religious liberty as Mormons (our religious objection to war is at very best tenuous[fn1]). And it’s not one that affects a significant portion of the population—as best I can tell, Quakers make up about 0.02% of the U.S. population.[fn2] That means that they almost certainly lack the voting power, on their own, to make legislative change. Since the courts are closed to their arguments, they need allies interested in their religious liberty.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that this bill would be virtually costless for the U.S. There’s some administrative cost in setting up a separate fund, but the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund wouldn’t take a single dollar away from the military.
Why is that? Well, in 2019, the federal government brought in $3.5 trillion in revenue. The Pentagon requested an allocation of $686 billion. Let’s imagine Rep. Lewis’s bill passed and 80,000 Quakers became designated conscientious objectors. Imagine that each paid $11,000 in federal income taxes.[fn3]
That means $880 million in tax revenue can’t be used to fund the military.
0.1% of the military’s requested budget.
But remember, the military’s budget is only about 20% of federal revenue. So somewhere around 80% of that amount wouldn’t have gone to the military anyway.
But wait, there’s more: money is fungible. So we have a fund of $880 million that can’t be used for the military. So the government takes $880 million of taxes that would have gone to fund, say, food and agriculture (total budget in 2015: around $13 billion) and gives it to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, it allocates the $880 million in the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund to food and agriculture. Both are fully funded.
But the religious conscientious objectors haven’t been forced to violate their religious consciences.
This bill has failed to pass for the last 48 years, including 7 years that it has been sponsored by the late Rep. Lewis. And yet it is one of the easiest, least expensive ways to defend a group of believers’ free exercise. A bill that Congressman John Lewis, a fierce advocate for equal rights, championed. And, while perhaps it’s not the most pressing testament to his memory that Congress could pass (that would probably be the Voting Rights Act), it would be at least a footnote in his long and distinguished life of service.
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[fn1] My freshman year at BYU, I found basically a self-published book from the Vietnam era by somebody arguing that Mormons did (or, at least, could) be conscientious objectors. That was definitely a minority opinion in the church, though.
[fn2] That is, this census puts the number of Quakers in the U.S. at just over 80,000. Meanwhile, the U.S. has a population of about 328 million. If Google did the division right, that’s a miniscule portion of the population.
[fn3] In 2017, 143 million taxpayers paid about $1.6 trillion in income taxes. If you divide that, the average taxpayer paid just over $11,000. Of course, that average is basically a meaningless number, but it works for illustrative purposes and it’s a lot easier to find online than the median tax payment.