Posted on 08/13/2015 5:23:45 AM PDT by Javeth
Freedom to travel is a fundamental and internationally recognized human right. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Congress ratified the UDHR on April 2, 1992. But it’s now having second thoughts.
The “right to travel” makes some politicians very nervous. Consider the issue from their viewpoint. Leaving the country makes it more difficult to detain you if the Feds suspect you of a crime, such as withdrawing lawfully earned cash from your bank account. It’s also less convenient to surveil you if your political opinions don’t toe the party line. And above all, it’s harder for Big Brother to grab your assets.
So, it’s hardly surprising that in May, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced legislation that would seize the passport of any US citizen with “seriously delinquent tax debts.” The proposal, part of an omnibus trade bill, isn’t new. Indeed, this is the fourth year in a row that Hatch, or other Big Government apologists, have introduced this measure.
The proposal requires no hearing or any other due process to grab your passport. All that’s needed is for the IRS to issue a “Notice of Levy” for any amount greater than $50,000.This is a letter informing you that the IRS thinks you owe it money.
Sure, $50,000 sounds like a lot of dough. But when it comes to tax liabilities, it’s practically chump change.
In June, the House of Representatives removed the passport revocation provision from the trade bill. But the measure isn’t dead. The Senate version of the bill still contains this measure.
The bill is now in conference, where Senator Hatch and his cronies must convince their colleagues that revoking the passports of US citizens who might owe money to the IRS is just, equitable, and compatible with the US Constitution (not to mention the UDHR).
In case you wondered, it’s not just Big Government “conservatives” like Orrin Hatch who support this measure. There’s bipartisan support for the concept. Indeed, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced the first proposal of this type in 2012, following a 2011 General Accountability Office recommendation. Obviously, politicians from both the “left” and “right” want to restrict travel options for US citizens. That means that even if passport revocation for back taxes doesn’t pass this year, the proposal will resurface.
You might wonder what the need is for this measure, since the IRS can already apply to a federal court for a legal writ called Ne Exeat Republica. In the context of unpaid tax, this writ forbids you from leaving the US until you pay up. But to invoke this measure, the IRS must first obtain a court order to “ground” you. That’s inconvenient, since it involves that pesky concept of “due process” the Feds want to avoid at all costs. Senator Hatch and his colleagues want to remove that obstacle as soon as possible.
First off, CALL AND WRITE TO your Senators and Congressmen and make absolutely sure that this "American Berlin Wall" bill is categorically rejected, and make it clear that if they fail, there will be hell to pay, and not only in the primaries. As the article makes clear, this bill poses a great danger against the basic right of freedom of travel and due process as enshrined in the US Constitution. Since the law already allows restrictions but only in the case of a court hearing and warrant (i.e. due process), the only purpose of this bill is to provide the statists and big government stooges in the US with yet another tool to arbitrarily attack political enemies and seize property and assets from US citizens, in effect making us slaves to the whims of whoever's in power. This is exactly what happened with the Obama IRS's corrupt attacks on the conservative movement and its convenient "loss" of incriminating e-mails, but Orrin Hatch's bill would be disastrously worse and deadly to our cause. It would allow the statists among both the Democrats and fellow RINO's like McCain, Rubio, Graham and Ayotte to use the IRS as their personal vendetta machine, allowing them to arbitrarily impose tax arrear "notices" against anyone they don't like, and since no court hearing or due process would be needed to establish guilt, the federal government would have full power to seize your assets and detain you indefinitely. It's Big Brother on American shores.
And as I've kept emphasizing over and over before, we have to organize NOW to wrest the Senate out of the hands of these corrupt RINO traitors. It's worth noting that as crooked and slimy as Boehner and Ryan have become, the House Republicans overall have come through on many critical votes to block some terrible Dem and GOPe monstrosities-- previous versions of this Big Brother tax bill (it passed the Senate in May but the House blocked it before), the 2013 immigration bill, the attempt to raise the H1b visa cap, plus the cronyist Export-Import Bank and gun-grabber legislation.
Whereas, the GOPe-controlled Senate is truly beyond hope, and the GOP establishment there must be utterly destroyed. The RINOs in the Senate have walked arm in arm with their butt buddies among the statist Democrats to push for mass surveillance, mass immigration and amnesty, gun seizures and now atrocities like the Hatch bill.
Even the most corrupt Senators are hard to bring down due to all the money from the oligarchs, the nature of statewide races and the various ways the GOPe has tried to rig the primaries, so we need to be organizing now to coalesce support around a single conservative champion in each of the relevant states to take out the RINOs-- a Constitutional conservative as Mark Levin and Rush have aptly described such a candidate. While Hatch has expressed an intention to retire after the current term, there are plenty of other RINOs trying for a longer career who need to be forced out of office in humiliating fashion. Here are the states in which the worst of the RINOs are running (easy to identify based on their support of that absolutely monstrous pro-amnesty H1b immigration bill in 2013-- especially the Gang of 8 members like Lindsey Graham who joined with the Democrats in drafting it):
2016 (this election cycle): Marco Rubio from Florida (Gang of 8 member for the 2013 immigration bill), John McCain of Arizona (Gang of 8), Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Mark Kirk of Illinois, John Hoeven of North Dakota 2018: Jeff Flake from Arizona (Gang of 8), Orrin Hatch from Utah, Bob Corker from Tennessee, Roger Wicker of Mississippi 2020: Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, Susan Collins from Maine, Lamar Alexander from Tennessee
We cannot afford any more RINOs in the Senate, we don't have the luxury of waiting out another set of election cycles, they have to be pushed out now. That means targeting them ruthlessly for defeat int he primaries and failure in all their initiatives, humiliating them and their staff, attacking them in newspaper letters to the editor and billboards, flooding their phones and letters with angry denunciations for their RINO betrayals, in general making their lives miserable and pushing them to resign. No mercy, our country and our Constitution depend on it!
Sounds a lot like the Berlin Wall to me.
Someone explain to me how we aren’t pre-Soviet Russia? They want to ban travel for “tax-accused” Americans? GTFO! What are we, east Germany pre-1989? JHC!
What will Geithner do? or the other workers at the IRS?
I’ll be damned! I always thought it was one’s patriotic duty to try to evade taxes. Wasn’t that the case in 1775?
Well, at least, this will not apply to the EXEMPT
and the their EXEMPT staff, so they can continue
their TYRANNY.
Sweden has laws like this. They are a clear sign that You have a country with a completely screwed up, unfair tax system. Rather than fix it, the government forces people to stay and pay taxes. How is this not involuntary servitude?
8. (4) A great debt will require great taxes; great taxes, many taxgatherers and other officers; and all officers are auxiliaries of power.
6. But the grand nostrum will be a public debt.
7. It must not be forgotten that the members of the legislative body are to have a deep stake in the game.
11. As soon as sufficient progress in the intended change shall have been made, and the public mind duly prepared according to the rules already laid down, it will be proper to venture on another and a bolder step toward a removal of the constitutional landmarks.
http://www.constitution.org/cmt/freneau/republic2monarchy.htm
First, external passport restrictions. Then, internal passports for all.
This is so incredibly un-American, in the way I was brought up to understand “American.” It was pointed out to us many times as incredible that the Nazis and the Soviets would confiscate your wealth on exit, if they allowed you to exit at all.
Here... it’s back taxes. And you almost can’t get fully legal money out of the country—nobody wants the hassle of handling an American citizen’s account. Plus, the IRS has such onerous and confiscatory regulations on reporting that it is easy to slip up—and get a good chunk of your wealth confiscated. And then... you can’t travel?
Land of the free, indeed.
Easy mobìlity- any mobility that does not depend on official permission always makes leftist bureaucrats and officials all varieties nervous. It makes it more difficult to keep the strings and chains on the citizens if they can just up and go somewhere else. That is why Hillarycare included travel restrictions.Those travel restrictions did not figure in the bill’s failure in Congress.
“.......legislation that would seize the passport of any US citizen with “seriously delinquent tax debts.”...........
Maybe not so bad, think about it, many of our “elected representatives fit squarely in this category. Might keep them from wasting our money on their “fact finding missions”, which we all know are nothing more than sight seeing vacations.
In Soviet Russia upon learning that you were requesting permission to depart the workers paradise, your assets were forfeit as well as your job. Bam... wait forever for that exit permission.
My thoughts exactly, a kind of administrative Berlin Wall much like the corrupt Fatca tax legislation. An irony that on the one hand Hatch, Rubio, Graham, McCain and the rest try to flood us with cheap labor (with even Ted Cruz joining in on the foolish attempts to raise the H1b though at least he’s stood firm against amnesty). Yet on the other hand they also want to make it harder for US citizens to leave if the government goes after us and our assets. Truly a totalitarian dictatorship in the making, this restriction on even basic freedoms like travel is precisely what they do. The Senate GOPe is truly dangerous to the most basic pillars of American liberty, and Mark Levin is right to go for the jugular in attacking McConnell and his minions like Hatch, Kirk, McCain, Ayotte and Flake (not to mention turncoat RINO governors like Nikki Haley in SC). The Senate RINOs are not utterly spineless, they’re active backers of Big Government statism and opponents of the conservative movement. This is what corrupt Big Money from treasonous oligarchs like the Chamber of Commerce and Sheldon Adelson does.
Certainly looking that way! AS my neighbor pointed out, the government already makes attempts to pull the passport and restrict other basic freedoms for Americans hit with child support or alimony (which given the outrageous excesses of these court-ordered, slave-like appropriations of assets, hit millions of people in the country). So we’re already well on the way, Hatch’s latest betrayal would just be icing on the cake.
Yep, Timothy Geithner, Al Sharpton and other “special Americans” would be fully exempt from such restrictions, not to mention the bribing oligarchs like Sheldon Adelson, Mark Zuckerberg and the Chamber of Commerce lapdogs, no doubt about it. And unsurprisingly Hatch, McConnell, Graham and the other Senate GOPe RINO statists are fully in favor of it, after all they know whose boots they’re licking for their serial acts of treason.
With Trump’s success thus far being attributed to the base being PO’d at the GOPe and their tactics, you’d think they would lay off of stuff like this. In view of this, trying to impose travel restrictions like this takes balls, big ones. It’s another show of defiance the GOPe has for the general citizenry. It’s one huge showing of power and one huge middle finger at the populace.
What is so contrasting, is they want tax payers penned up under travel restrictions, but illegals who do not pay taxes can come and go as they wish, to include committing whatever crimes they want.
PURE TYRANNY!!!
I’d like to hear Trump’s stance on this.
Avoid, not evade. Avoidance is legal.
Yeah the Fatca and child support/alimony restrictions are already a step in the same direction as Soviet Russia, looks like we now finally know the “model of government” the Dems and RINOs are most keen on emulating!
A subtle but important difference.
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