Republican Congress Prepares to Challenge IRS

Since Republicans took control of the House and the Senate in November’s election, one of their priorities has been getting to the bottom of the IRS targeting scandal. Investigations have stalled after numerous delays from the IRS, and it’s time to get moving.

First they cut the IRS’ budget. Now multiple bills are in the making that will hopefully restrain the IRS from targeting other groups in the future.

Representatives Paul Ryan and Peter Roskam are introducing a bill in the House that will prevent the IRS from changing its rules for 501(c)(4) organizations until current investigations have concluded. The IRS first proposed changing those rules in 2013, but backed down after receiving a lot of negative feedback. Commissioner John Koskinen is still committed to getting them passed, but it’s clearly a better idea to wait until the scandal has been put to rest before making any changes.

Ryan and Roskam are each involved in oversight committees currently investigating the IRS for targeting conservative groups. In a press release, they said waiting to change the rules for at least two years “would allow the agency to integrate recommendations from congressional investigators.”

A similar bill will be presented in the Senate. Both “will send a clear message,” Ryan said. “Everyone deserves a fair standard fairly applied, and for too long, the IRS has targeted people because of their political beliefs. … We won’t tolerate the agency’s shenanigans.”

Sen. Ted Cruz is preparing two more bills aimed at the IRS. He presented both last year but hopes they’ll get more traction now. The first would prohibit the IRS from discriminating based on political beliefs and delineates the punishment for doing so.

The second would allow the Federal Election Commission to “determine whether an organization is engaging in political activity” instead of the IRS. “The IRS should focus on taxation, not on determining what constitutes political activity,” Cruz said.

He called for a resolution to the drawn-out investigations:

In May, 2013, President Obama declared the IRS’s illegal targeting of conservative groups ‘intolerable and inexcusable,’ yet to this date no one has been held accountable for it.

The IRS has no business meddling with the First Amendment rights of Americans. Rather than further stifling free speech, the IRS and the Department of Justice should provide the American people with all the facts surrounding the IRS’s targeting of certain organizations based on their political activity.

The wheels are rolling… hopefully the American people will get to hear those facts sooner rather than later!