Dr. Robert W. Malone, widely known for his work on mRNA technology and subsequent vaccine skepticism, published an essay on July 3, 2026, on his Substack *Malone News* titled *"The Amendment That Changed America: How the Sixteenth Amendment Broke the Constitution."* Presented as a companion piece to his earlier essay *"The Quiet Death of American Federalism,"* the article advances a libertarian constitutionalist argument that the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 fundamentally destroyed the structural balance of the U.S. Constitution.
The Core Argument
Malone contends that the federal government was deliberately constrained in its taxing power until 1913. Before the Sixteenth Amendment authorized a federal income tax, Washington's revenue was limited to tariffs, excise taxes, and other indirect sources. This fiscal constraint was, in Malone's view, a critical design feature—not a bug—of the Founders' system. With the income tax, the federal government gained access to virtually unlimited revenue, which it used to expand its power, fund vast bureaucracies, and effectively reduce state governments to "procurement officers" dependent on federal largesse.
The essay draws heavily from Frank Chodorov's 1954 work *"The Income Tax: Root of All Evil,"* published by the Mises Institute. Chodorov argued that income taxation liquidated the spirit of the Union and created the exact kind of centralized national establishment that the Founding Fathers had sought to prevent. Malone updates and extends this thesis, arguing that the federal government has used its tax revenue to "bribe" states and citizens into submission, thereby gutting the checks and balances the Founders built.
Constitutional and Educational Dimensions
Malone emphasizes that the Federalist Papers should be required reading for every student, suggesting that the erosion of federalism is partly an educational failure. His essay traces what he sees as the watershed legal and constitutional moments that transformed America from a limited republic into a centralized administrative state. Reader comments on the piece praised it for carefully mapping the amendments and case law that, in their view, dismantled the original constitutional framework.
Critical Assessment
Malone's argument is historically grounded in anti-centralist tradition, echoing long-standing conservative and libertarian critiques of the modern administrative state. However, it presumes a static interpretation of the Founders' intent and largely dismisses the fact that the Sixteenth Amendment was itself ratified through the proper constitutional process established by Article V. Progressive historians and legal scholars typically argue that the income tax was necessary to address the economic inequities of the Gilded Age and to fund the infrastructure of modern governance. The characterization of federal grants to states as "bribery" is also contested; many scholars view this relationship as cooperative federalism, however imperfect.
Nonetheless, the essay contributes to an important and enduring debate about the proper scope of federal power, the relationship between taxation and liberty, and whether certain constitutional amendments have so fundamentally altered the character of American governance that they effectively created a new system. Whether one agrees with Malone's conclusion that the Sixteenth Amendment "broke" the Constitution, his essay serves as a provocative reminder of how fiscal power shapes political structure.
