“All right. Go ahead. Ask anything you please if it isn’t a conundrum.”
“Well, it isn’t a conundrum. It is only that I wonder how you know there isn’t some law authorizing the revenue officers to make arrests without warrants?”
“I know it simply because such a law is impossible.”
“How so?”
“Because there is no power on earth that can make such a law for this country.”
“Couldn’t Congress make it?”
“No. Congress has no more power to make it than a flock of crows has.”
“I don’t understand. If Congress should pass an act to that effect and the President should sign it, what then?”
“What then? Why just nothing at all. It wouldn’t be a law. It would have no more force or effect than the decree of a company of lunatics that the sun shall hereafter rise in the west and set in the east.”