Ensuring Integrity in the Irs Workforce Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. KELLY of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3724.

I would think as we look around the country right now, the integrity of what our government is and how our voters are represented and our citizens are represented, is really the case here.

I thank the gentlewoman for bringing such a commonsense piece of legislation forward because we know in this town there is nothing less common than common sense.

The faith and trust of the American people is based on their belief that the people who work for them are acting in their best interest, always acting in their best interest--the interest of the American people. Not in their personal interest, but in the interest of the American people. We find out that there are folks who are working on behalf of the American people, but they have somehow betrayed that faith and that trust. And folks have lost confidence in their government. They have lost confidence because of things that happened, not things that were imagined, not some whimsical idea that somehow we can get at somebody for doing this.

There is no agency that is feared more in this country than the IRS. The question is: Why would they be so feared? Because they can completely shut you down, they can freeze your bank account, they can make you stay up late at night worrying about what is going to happen.

When you get that letter from the IRS, the next thing you do is contact an attorney to represent you because you don't want to make a mistake, you just don't want to do it. But then you find out that within the IRS, people working for that agency, but, more importantly, working for the people of the United States, have violated that trust.

These are substantiated results. This is not somebody's idea or way of getting back at somebody. This is removing bad apples and saying: you have violated, you have betrayed the trust of the American people, you are going to leave the agency, but, more importantly, you are never coming back in.

This isn't any way to somehow get back at a political party or get back at anybody. This is a fact that if we cannot restore the confidence the American people have in us--their faith and their trust--why are we here? Why do we go through elections?

I don't come here to represent my ideas and my beliefs. I come here to represent the values and beliefs of Pennsylvania's Third Congressional District. That is 705,687 Americans, not Republicans, not Democrats, not Libertarians, not Independents, but Americans.

This piece of legislation takes into account that these are wrongdoers. These are not people who we want to associate ourselves with. These are people who have used the power of their office or of their position to somehow work against the very people who employ them.

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Mr. KELLY of Pennsylvania. I would just say, at this moment in our history, I thank the gentlewoman for standing up for every hardworking American taxpayer and doing the best we can to restore the faith and confidence of the American people that they can trust who it is that they elect to represent them and they can trust us to make sure that wrongdoers are punished and, once are asked to leave, are not allowed to come back in.

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