It is as fundamental as the Right to Marriage well established by the Supreme Court. Revoking passports for tax debts is deeply wrong and a very bad idea.
Any attempt to restrict that Constitutional Right would be likely unconstitutional if based on someone's tax debt.
There is a a bill to revoke passports or not issue US passports if people owe taxes.
This should not pass- and would likely be viewed as Unconstitutional if it passed.
The IRS is a body functioning under the Executive Branch that acts outside Congressional oversight for the most part. It has a political agenda often and we recently have seen political enemies targeted by the IRS. People and organizations that have been hostile to the Democratic Agenda have been targeted by the IRS. See, Louis Lerner
The amount of IRS error is reflected in litigation against the IRS. They make mistakes. They can double or triple a tax debt with penalties, interest and fees.
We live in a Global Economy where it is just as likely that people's business enterprises require they go overseas as much as they go across State lines (or more depending on their business).
People need passports to travel to meet family, or conduct business as well as more frivolous holidays. This penalizes people who have family out of the country potentially. It potentially also impacts the poorest of the citizenry- who might be disputing tax debts or interest and penalties that double or triple the actual debt.
We do not in this country deny rights of citizenship in this country because people are poor or have a hard time paying their taxes.
There is already an enforcement mechanism in place to prosecute tax avoidance and evasion. Denying a fundamental right to Travel (which people need to make money to pay their debts in some cases) is not only Unconstitutional, its counterproductive.
That is UnAmerican.
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Without doing any legal research I quickly found this on Wikipedia which you can follow up on-
The U.S. Supreme Court in Crandall v. Nevada, 73 U.S. 35 (1868) declared that freedom of movement is a fundamental right and therefore a state cannot inhibit people from leaving the state by taxing them. In United States v. Wheeler, 254 U.S. 281 (1920), the Supreme Court reiterated its position that the Constitution did not grant the federal government the power to protect freedom of movement. However, Wheeler had a significant impact in other ways. For many years, the roots of the Constitution's "privileges and immunities" clause had only vaguely been determined.[5] In 1823, the circuit court in Corfield had provided a list of the rights (some fundamental, some not) which the clause could cover.[6][7] The Wheeler court dramatically changed this. It was the first to locate the right to travel in the privileges and immunities clause, providing the right with a specific guarantee of constitutional protection.[8] By reasoning that the clause derived from Article IV of the Articles of Confederation, the decision suggested a narrower set of rights than those enumerated in Corfield, but also more clearly defined those rights as absolutely fundamental.[9]
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