[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 99 (Wednesday, June 7, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H2767-H2768]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IRS SUCCESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Pennsylvania (Ms. Dean) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. DEAN of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, in the past year, you might 
have noticed a difference while doing your taxes.
  If you called IRS with a question, you waited on the phone for maybe 
5 minutes instead of 30 or more from years past.
  If you got your tax refund in a reasonable amount of time, there is a 
difference. If you are one of the Americans who attempted to evade 
taxes and ended up paying your fair share, you can thank the Inflation 
Reduction Act for that.
  This historic legislation has enabled the IRS to be better funded, 
better staffed, and better at getting hard-earned money back to the 
people.
  My constituents have noticed. When we legislated $80 billion over the 
next decade to modernize IRS, Republicans

[[Page H2768]]

set out spreading disinformation and fear: agents coming out to get 
you.
  They were wrong. They knew that was not the case, but they wanted to 
demonize IRS anyway. Instead, what happened? We saw improvements.
  In one of the most immediate results from a bill I have ever seen, 
wait times are down to 4 minutes across the country. Tax returns are 
arriving without months-long delays.
  In my own office, we had more than 250 cases open at any one time, 
trying to help constituents. Now that number is below 60.
  Again, Republicans launched an attack on IRS funding during their 
manufactured debt ceiling crisis of the last few weeks.
  Thankfully, their success against IRS was limited. They were able to 
claw back only a small portion of that funding that we set forward.
  Still, their opposition is incomprehensible. Republicans say they 
don't like government, that government doesn't work. President Biden 
and congressional Democrats reveal that when we fund government 
properly, it does work.
  I thank the IRS team for their hard work on behalf of my constituents 
and Americans all across this country.


                          A Scourge in America

  Ms. DEAN of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, every year in this country, 
43,000 people, 44,000 people--in one year, as high as 49,000 people--
die of gun violence.
  Every single day, we lose people in this country to gun violence. Mr. 
Speaker, 54 percent of that horrific number is gun violence suicide.
  This week the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force held a hearing, and 
we had six, eight, nine folks testifying before us: folks who had 
survived mass shootings; folks whose family members lost their lives 
due to gun violence and suicide; and folks who had accidental shootings 
take place in their communities that harmed and took the lives of 
others.
  When we asked for a committee room in this Capitol in order to host 
that testimony and to learn something more about it, guess what 
happened?
  It was Monday, a fly-in day, when these committee rooms are not busy. 
There was no room in the House for that committee to be hosted, so we 
had to go to the Senate.
  Committee chair after committee chair of the Republican Party, the 
majority party, denied us access to a committee room to simply hear the 
testimony of those who know something sad and tragic all too well about 
gun violence.
  We had the benefit of the Senate giving us a small committee room 
where we were stuffed in: advocates, victims, researchers, professors, 
and others.
  That should tell you all you need to know, America, about the shame 
of gun violence in our country and why we are so hampered in dealing 
with it.
  Gun violence death is preventable. It is an extraordinary scourge 
here in America. Yet, we are blocked by Republican majority leadership 
who won't even give us a room to be heard.

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