Water Resources Development Act of 2013 - Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, we realized over the last 72 hours that we were all scandalized when we learned that the Internal Revenue Service of the United States and employees within the Internal Revenue Service were targeting fellow Americans and political organizations because of their political views. The feelings we have are bipartisan--I hope they are. I don't think any of us want to see an agency of government being used to target our fellow Americans because of their points of view on a political issue. This is a very serious issue.
Yesterday I called for the President to ask for the resignation of the acting chief of the IRS. I asked that there be a criminal investigation launched in this matter, which Attorney General Holder has announced today.
I have prepared an amendment that I think is timely and that I hope we will consider in this body that makes it a crime for an employee of the IRS to target individual taxpayers or organizations because of their political views. I stand today to ask if the chairwoman would consider consenting to allow my Rubio amendment No. 892 to be included in the unanimous consent agreement.
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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, and I will not object to the unanimous consent request because of the importance of this issue to many States in the country, let me close by saying that we need to understand what happened here over the last 72 hours and what we found out. Employees of the Internal Revenue Service made a decision that they were going to specifically target groups who had things like ``tea party'' and the word ``patriot'' in their organization, groups who looked to do things like protect the Constitution of the United States. This is outrageous.
There is growing evidence that higher-ups--significant people in the IRS--knew about this and were not disclosing that to Members of Congress. Members of this body were asking the IRS directly: Are you involved in this? Is this happening? They were not giving us information we now know they had.
I will not object to the unanimous consent request because of the importance of this issue, but this issue will not and cannot go away because of the importance of it.
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