[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 42 (Thursday, March 13, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1598-S1599]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            ANTI-FREE SPEECH

  Mr. McCONNELL. I wish to take a moment to address anti-free speech 
legislation the Obama administration has made a priority for this term. 
It is a regulation that comes in the wake of an unprecedented IRS 
attack on Americans' civil liberties and it represents a direct assault 
on the First Amendment.
  First, let's be clear. This is not some partisan issue. Right across 
the political spectrum the American people agree this is a terrible 
idea. That is probably why it has generated more public backlash than 
any similar regulation in our entire lifetime.
  Americans on the left hate it. Americans on the right hate it. 
Unions, business groups, environmentalists, conservatives, the ACLU, 
all of them have expressed concern. It is very rare to see a coalition 
that broad agree on anything in this town. Yet it is easy to see why 
Americans would be so united in opposition to this regulation.
  The First Amendment exists to protect political speech. That was what 
the Founders had in mind when they wrote First Amendment political 
speech. The government should be doing everything it can to protect 
that right, not hurt it.
  That is why we saw a record number of Americans register their 
complaints with the IRS. In fact, there were more than 140,000, 
comments--140,000 comments--on this regulation, which I hear is the 
highest number ever received in the agency's entire history. And let's 
not forget the IRS has a long way to go to regain public trust these 
days. Too many Americans look at the agency and see an instrument of 
political harassment rather than a bureau of tax processors. So if the 
agency wants to regain trust and return to its true mission, then it 
simply has to get out of the speech regulation business altogether. The 
IRS needs to get out of the speech regulation business altogether, and 
the Obama administration can do that.

  Look. The administration ran this idea up the flagpole. In the midst 
of a historic crisis of public confidence at the IRS, it decided to 
upend more than half a century of practice and rewrite the rules on how 
Americans could express themselves, how they could be heard. They asked 
for comments, and the American people let them know what they thought 
in over 140,000 comments, almost all of them in opposition.
  This regulation needs to go. This regulation needs to go, and it 
needs to go now. It is in the administration's power to make that 
happen. All it has to do is to listen to the American people who are 
speaking out in record

[[Page S1599]]

numbers--record numbers--and put an end for good to the idea that the 
law should be used to harm political enemies.
  Let's protect the First Amendment and restore integrity to the IRS at 
the same time by withdrawing this awful regulation.

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