[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 10139-10140]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                THE IRS

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, when the IRS targeting of conservative 
groups came to light after the last Presidential election, just about 
everyone denounced the agency's Nixonian tactics. Members of both 
parties--from the President on down--called it outrageous and 
inexcusable and just about everyone agreed no stone should be left 
unturned in figuring out how it happened in the first place.

[[Page 10140]]

  Well, that was more than a year ago, and despite the President's 
assurances that he was as mad as everybody else, his administration has 
been anything but cooperative in the time that has elapsed since then. 
Instead of working with Congress to get to the bottom of what happened, 
the President's allies actually went in the opposite direction. They 
tried to slip a regulation by the American people that would have 
effectively enshrined the IRS's speech suppression tactics--the kind of 
tactics at the center of the IRS scandal--as permanent agency practice. 
It was a brazen move on the administration's part, and administration 
officials only backed down after Americans rose up and demanded that 
the IRS get out of the speech suppression business for good. Even some 
of our friends on the pro-First Amendment left--a dwindling 
constituency in recent years--joined us in condemning it. But I doubt 
we have seen the last of the administration's antifree speech efforts.
  We have seen a revival in recent weeks of a truly radical proposal to 
change the First Amendment. When it comes to the IRS scandal, it is now 
quite obvious we have not seen the last of the administration's 
stalling either. The latest claim by the IRS is that it somehow lost a 
full 2 years' worth of emails from the woman in charge of the IRS 
department at the center of the scandal. They lost 2 years' worth of 
emails. But Congress submitted a request for these emails over a year 
ago, and they are suddenly telling us now? The committees investigating 
the scandal need those emails in order to figure out who knew what and 
when and to determine whether any coordination was going on between the 
IRS and anyone outside the agency.
  I will be interested to see what the IRS Commissioner has to say 
about all of this when he testifies next week. But please, let's get 
past the ``dog ate my homework'' excuses buried in a late Friday news 
dump. The President promised to work ``hand in hand'' with Congress on 
this matter so his administration needs to live up to that promise 
immediately.

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