Steve Palmer here again. Time for another lawyer talk.

Q And A.

I have had a lot going on upstairs in the

law practice, so been a little bit behind, but catching up now.

So without further Ado, we're going to jump right on.

And I got a question here from Jack.

This is about sovereign citizenship.

This is an interesting topic.

And the question is basically from Jack,

who likes to watch people, apparently, and he's fascinated with various groups.

He watches the Flat Earth Society, and

he's asking some questions about sovereign citizen society.

And here's his question.

In the United States, there are some laws that, even though they are long

established, can sometimes be found unconstitutional.

Do sovereign citizens have a validity to their argument of not having to get a

driver's license to drive a car, car insurance and plates on their vehicle,

making their own custom plates or not paying their taxes?

Part two, have you ever defended a sovereign citizen before?

And part three, if you have a client who

is a sovereign citizen who got charged with crimes for not having a driver's

license, car insurance, legal plates on their vehicle, but your client demands

that you defend him as innocent because he genuinely believes that he is operating

under separate laws, how would you handle his case?

Well, I have, in fact, represented some

sovereignty, and I'm going to try to tackle this.

And let me just premise this.

I am no expert on sovereign citizenship or the sovereign citizen movement.

I've done some reading and research in preparation for this.

So I'm not going to hide that I didn't just know this, but generally

speaking, sovereign citizens claim that their citizenship stems from their natural

birth and they are not subjugated to the federal government.

They claim, I think, generally speaking,

that those of us who answer to the federal government have

given up freedoms in exchange for a bargain of their protection or benefit,

and they have chosen not to engage in that bargain.

Therefore, they are sovereign on their own.

They are citizens of their own, and they don't have to answer to the federal laws.

I think that leads a lot of them not to

pay taxes, not to participate in government action.

I think what they do is they try to a lot of them, when forced to write their name

down for some government purpose, we'll write it in all caps and say and sign it

on behalf of this person, as if all caps is a straw man, sort of like a

Corporation, and that is what represents them to the government.

But they are truly sovereign behind that,

sort of like a power of attorney type thing.

This gets them in lots of trouble because they don't think that they need to have

driver's licenses or registrations or pay taxes, like I said or other things.

Now I'm not going to take a position on this one way or another.

I don't think our government will ever

honor the claim that there are, in fact, sovereign citizens out there.

I think the federal government, the state

governments, and local governments will all insist that they are the government,

and everybody here has to answer to the laws.

But jumping on these questions,

do I find any constitutional validity to their claims?

I don't. I really don't.

I don't see as I read the text of the Constitution, as I studied the history of

our country and how it all developed, I don't see it.

But like I said, I'm no expert and I

certainly don't judge anybody for what they believe.

I do, however, represent people who get in trouble, and I have represented people who

have got in trouble because of this ideology.

And I've been at court with folks, and this is going to part two.

Have I ever defended sovereign citizens before?

Yes, I have.

And I've been to court with sovereign citizens.

And before I get into that, let me just say this.

The interaction I've had, though limited

with sovereign citizens has, generally speaking, been sort of harmless.

I've never felt threatened by somebody who claims they're sovereign.

I've never really had any real big problems.

That said, I've not represented lots of them.

As I researched this online, either in Google DuckDuckGo and other research

engines or other search engines, I found there's a lot of negativity out there.

The FBI has them on a domestic terrorist list.

Most of the articles call them extremists, radicals, far right, etc.

For. And I think it's probably true that some

sovereign citizens are extremists and are radical and are far right.

But I think it's also true that most are probably they would never bother you.

They're harmless.

They're not going to do anything.

Now, here's where you get into issues when people draw generalizations.

There's going to be a picture of Venn

diagram, two circles you can have where two circles cross.

You might have some sovereign citizens

with some far extreme groups and their circles cross.

And so some will be sovereign and radical and want to overthrow the government.

Others are just sovereign and they're just

going to live their lives and they just want to be left alone.

So I think it's dangerous as it is with race, as it is with gender, as it is with

all these types of things to group people in as stereotypes.

But that said, have I represented sovereign citizens?

Yes, I have.

I've been to court where folks claim that they don't have to answer to this from a

jurisdictional standpoint or from any other standpoint.

And I've sat in the courthouse halls and

I've talked to folks about this and I've said, look, I appreciate that

I'm not going to debate you on this, but the courts here aren't going to agree.

They're not going to say that.

Oh, guess what?

You're correct that we don't have

jurisdiction over here, over you and let you go.

It's not going to happen.

And like I said, I've never had anybody have a violent or angry outburst at that.

I've had frustration and I've had to have

long conversations, but I've never had anything that really bothered me.

Now, I know that some of these cases have gone far.

If I had a client, this is part three, and

I'm going to sort of tackle both at the same time.

If I had a client who claimed he was a

sovereign citizen, would I defend him based on that claim?

And the answer is probably not, because

I'm not allowed as a lawyer to assert legal arguments and claims that

I know to be false or I know that aren't supported by law.

So I don't want to say false necessarily,

because I don't mean it as an insult, but I do mean it this way is that in our legal

system, there is no valid argument that the courts will recognize.

So I am like it or not, I am stuck with what the law is.

And I run into this in all sorts of ways.

There's lots of Supreme Court decisions I don't agree with, but

my professional obligation is to recognize that they exist.

If I get a chance to argue against them in

a court where it's actually an issue, then I'll do it.

But here I don't see a valid argument based on the law that I know and based on

the governmental structure that I participate in.

So a lot of sovereigns, I think, end up representing themselves for that reason.

I read a case out of North Carolina where

a court basically addressed a lot of these jurisdictional issues.

I'm not going to go into the weeds on it, but they shot down every one of them.

The case went up and down the appellate

letter twice, and then it actually ended up in federal court.

And it's all the same outcome.

The court is going to say, no,

we have jurisdiction over here, over you, no matter what you say.

Now, as far as producing driver's licenses, et cetera, I understand that

sovereign citizens a lot of times will create their own driver's licenses.

They will have odd license plates.

The case in North Carolina, the individual

was pulled over and cracked his window just barely, and handed a card that said,

I'm exercising my right under the Fifth Amendment.

Unless you're going to arrest me, then you leave me alone and let me go.

Well, they did arrest him, and he ended up in court and he was convicted of not

having a driver's license and not having insurance, et cetera.

Now, I think looking at this from a big

picture, you can sense the frustration with the growing government bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy, and maybe that's what is fueling this a

little bit now more than ever, perhaps, where it just feels like the government's

tentacles are in every part of our lives and people just want to be left alone.

But that doesn't mean you don't have to follow it.

There are legal basis to challenge a lot of this stuff.

It's happening at the highest levels of

the United States Supreme Court, and I think particularly covet a lot of the

emergency orders that came from that and a lot of the executive

orders that are coming out of the White House, really in the last three or four

presidential regimes are starting to raise eyebrows, and people are questioning

whether the executive branch has that much authority.

We don't have a King. We have a President.

We should have three individual branches of government.

And they're starting to get blurred.

And the executive branch is getting so

much power that it's almost become a monarchy.

And I think that will only fuel these I'll just say these minority groups more

because the more it happens, the more people say this is crazy.

It's not supposed to be this way.

But there is a difference because you've

heard me on this microphone and Lawyer talk actually say this is that I think we

need to the administrative state of government has grown way too powerful.

There's way too many tentacles out there in our individual lives.

But that doesn't mean I just ignore it and don't follow the law of our society.

I do participate and I am involved in I

look at ways to challenge governmental action and governmental power.

And I guess I'm fortunate for having a

career in a profession that enables me to do that in a way that I can still be a

citizen and I can still challenge governmental action.

And I get to do it in the proper battlefield in the court system.

We recently did a podcast with Rob Muse, and I urge everybody to go check it out.

He's an attorney. He's working hard to really

check the authority of government when it comes to our individual freedoms that are

so precious to us in those first ten amendments of the Constitution.

So seeing The Battle Hymn of the Republic

as you listen to this in your head anyway, I'll wrap it up with that.

Steve Palmer here Lawyer Talk Q A and A, where we are taking questions.

We are answering them in bite sized chunks.

That doesn't mean we still don't have the

roundtable discussions with Norm Jared back at the microphone last week anyway.

And Bread at Circle 270 Media.

If you've got a question, if you've got a topic, if there's something you want me to

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