Posted on 02/08/2014 9:25:20 AM PST by Servant of the Cross
‘The House should sharply reduce IRS funding until the agency is more responsive.” Well, I’d have omitted everything after “funding” but this was still an astute observation, offered at the conclusion of Thursday’s excellent Wall Street Journal editorial. I’m grateful to have smart guys on the team, even if slumming with us power-of-the-purse radicals may get them booted from the GOP’s “We’re only one-half of one-third” circle of submission.
The editors were exercised over the revenue agency’s latest shenanigans, which include covering up its past shenanigans — the willful targeting of conservative groups in order to frustrate their opposition to Obama-administration policies. And now, in the ultimate act of chutzpah, the IRS is attempting to codify the abuse as standard operating procedure.
While the country partied pre–Super Bowl, President Obama got in the spirit by hilariously claiming that there was really “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS’s politicized harassment of his political adversaries. Now it’s true that, five years in, the president’s Most Memorable Mendacity Cup runneth over. Yet the “smidgen” may take its place alongside such faves as “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan”; “We’ll lower premiums by $2,500”; “Al-Qaeda has been decimated”; “the most transparent administration ever”; “shovel-ready jobs”; “You didn’t build that”; and the claim that the Benghazi massacre was triggered by “the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video.”
In truth, there appears to be no smidgen of the IRS case that is not tainted by corruption: from the years-long conspiracy to undermine the free-speech rights of Obama opponents, through the Justice Department’s strategic selection of a heavy Obama-campaign donor to conduct an “investigation” in which there was little apparent interest in questioning witnesses, on up to the current effort to institutionalize the very misconduct that the president and his redoubtable attorney general once told us was “intolerable,” “inexcusable,” “outrageous,” and “unacceptable.”
As the Journal’s editors point out, the existing rules governing non-profit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code have been in effect unchanged since 1959. But after President Obama took office in 2009, tea-party groups, many of which organize themselves under 501(c)(4) for fundraising purposes (just as left-leaning groups do), rose up in protest against his governance. The Tea Party led a rout of congressional Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. With Obama’s own reelection bid on the horizon, suddenly the purportedly non-partisan IRS began fretting over its 501(c)(4) guidelines.
To read them, NR’s Eliana Johnson observes, is to find “guidance that is more subjective than objective.” But that is why the guidance is not read in a vacuum. What a “social welfare organization” is, and the degree to which it may engage in “political activities” so long as doing so does not constitute the organization’s “primary activity,” are matters determined by the application of a half-century’s experience and practice.
Under that extensive precedent, no one at IRS seemed to have any problem with tax-exempt status for, to take just one example, MoveOn.org — an organization the IRS decided was not overly “political” notwithstanding its history of in-your-face political activism and its website’s proclamation of a mission “to lead, participate in, and win campaigns for progressive change.” No, it was only when conservatives became a threat to a second term of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” that the IRS decided its guidance needed clarification.
The IRS scandal, though egregious, is only one in a series of gross Obama-administration abuses of power — and if you expected the Obama Justice Department, at the urging of the Obama White House, to get to the bottom of what the Obama IRS was doing to Obama’s political opposition, then you probably also expected you’d be able to keep a smidgen of your health insurance. So the question on every conservative’s tongue has become, “How can we stop this?”
Simple: We stop paying for it.
The Journal’s editors are exactly right: The House should sharply reduce IRS funding. But not just “until it becomes more responsive” to congressional investigators. The budget should be slashed until the IRS has no resources to do anything other than what the House thinks it ought to be doing — which, at least until Obama’s term is done, ought to be nothing other than processing tax returns.
The reductions should not stop with the IRS, either. Why is the House funding the Justice Department to the tune of over $27 billion? Many of its proper prosecutorial functions can be more than adequately handled by state law enforcement. Meanwhile, today’s DOJ practices racially discriminatory law enforcement, sues states that exercise their lawful sovereign powers, conducts reckless gun investigations that massively arm violent crime groups, selectively prosecutes Obama critics, stonewalls Congress to the point of unprecedented contempt, and whitewashes administration scandals. Why does the House think it needs to pay for all of that?
Why does the House continue to provide lavish funding to the Department of Health and Human Services, also known as Obamacare headquarters? Why pay for the Environmental Protection Agency to implement by regulation ruinous policies Congress has declined to enact by statute? Why is the House underwriting all this suffocating government about which members of the House incessantly complain?
When Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee backed House conservatives in trying to defund Obamacare, the Republican establishment, echoed by the Journal’s editors (as well as the editors of National Review), complained that the strategy could not succeed. While I disagreed, the naysayers certainly had a point when they argued that, legally, much of Obamacare spending was “mandatory.” That is, it was already written into law, so it was not just a matter of the House choosing to decline funding in the exercise of its constitutional power of the purse. Instead, defunding mandatory spending would require the writing of a new law that could not only pass the Senate but be signed by President Obama — something critics said could never happen.
I am not trying to reopen that debate. The point is that there is nothing mandatory about funding the federal agencies. The House does not need to reverse existing law; it just needs to start slashing — just as the Journal is urging it to do to the IRS.
Republican leadership, which is paralyzed at the thought of any high-stakes confrontation with Obama and thus acts as if it is an impotent bystander, actually has a trump card to play. Yes, the GOP — all together now — controls only one-half of one-third of the government. It so happens, though, that the “one-half of one-third” in question, the House of Representatives, has a veto over spending — not a half of a third of a veto; a full veto.
Under the Constitution, the House must initiate any spending the government does. All of the agencies on which President Obama must depend to push through his agenda depend on the House to underwrite their operations. If the House dramatically reduces their budgets, they lose much of their capacity not only to harass Obama’s critics but to facilitate his imperial presidency.
In explaining that “the power of the purse is the heart of legislative authority and thus an essential check on the executive branch,” the late political scientist Aaron B. Wildavsky elaborated:
An executive establishment freed from dependence for funds upon the legislature (and hence the public) would be a law unto itself and ultimately a despotism.
We are there . . . unless Republicans are willing to use the power that they have. Could Obama and the Democrats shut down the government over a House refusal to fund Leviathan at its current astronomical levels? Of course they could. If there is no bicameral agreement on the budget, or if Obama refuses to sign what he is given, the government would shut down. Republicans would have to be prepared to communicate, compellingly, that they are paring back increasingly unpopular agencies like the IRS, the HHS Department, the EPA, and the Justice Department — not zeroing them out but degrading their capacity for abuse. Republicans would have to be able to explain that, where these excessive agencies are concerned, Republicans have decided that all Americans should get the kind of “waivers” that President Obama reserves for his cronies.
Unless Congress is prepared to impeach a lawless president, its only other constitutional clout is control over the public’s money. That is the way to cure rogue agency behavior that Congress is paying for. And in this instance, if Republicans cannot be the solution, then they are a big part of the problem.
The Obama Media has them cowering in the corner.
They do use the power of the purse to assist and advance the government agenda.
They have no stones to effect any substantial change on the current lawless regime. The Dems and Obama are going full-steam ahead with their agenda by simply refusing to use monies allocated for something and redirecting them elsewhere.
America has turned into a dictatorship with a fuzzy representative republic outer shell.
To ask the GOP to use the power of the purse on any issue is akin to asking us to take a plane trip to Fantasy Island. It appears neither one is going to happen.
Since then, Republicans won't even mention the idea. Whoever is giving the GOP leadership their marching orders REALLY doesn't want this concept gaining any traction.
We’ve already seen how this will go.
Obastard will slap away a half loaf if he doesn’t get the full loaf, he’ll shut strategic government operations down, throw barrycades in front of open-air monuments, the press and over half the population at large will heap all the blame on the GOP, and Bonehead and Chinless will beg Obastard to take the full loaf he asked for in the first place, while calling the ones who tried to stop it a bunch of filthy, know-nothing idiots for trying.
When the dust is settled from the lost battle, the biggest bastard in the Senate will still be hurling epithets at good conservatives, calling them stupid and “Wacko-Birds.” Someone unexpected will come to provide him aid and comfort when his own state party finally gets fed up with him, thus kicking them all in the teeth for having the gall to criticize him.
This is the state of the Republican Party in February, 2014. Good luck in November, and in 2016 for that matter.
Judging by the large number of ‘moderate republicans’ who echo the lie that Sen. Cruz and the House tea party republicans wanted to shut down the government, I can’t disagree with you.
This what I cannot understand - Why the House doesn’t simply refuse to fund all this government crap. Let the chips fall where they may. The problem must be that many just want to be re-elected rather than do what is right for the country.
stones? GOP?
Uhhh, Hello....
I’m all for Boehner hitting Obama with his purse.
YOU DA MAN!! I have had same idea, called my congressman, Kenny Marchant, on Ways and Means, left message - cut off the funds until there is some action. Congress has the power of purse - or at least it should.
There is not a smidgen of truth in Obama. His most precious activity is lying.
1. Any group that wants to be exempted files a request for exemption and states that they have a public purpose.they automatically become exempt. Something like they have a political, religious or public purpose, and are not seeking profit.
B. If the IRS disputes the public nature of the interest group, it must fund the defense of those claims, and pay for the legal expenses of the public interest group if it is wrong. There will be an office like the public defenders office that criminals get, only this one for patriots. IRS agents must file an affidavit stating the basis for their claims under oath, with criminal penalties to any agents who make false statements or file without probable cause.
Do that if you are serious about protecting freedom.
Fixed it.
Take a little trip back through the DeFund ObamaCare threads and you will find more than a few Freepers that were against the DeFund effort.
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