Holding the IRS Accountable

Floor Speech

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Mr. DeSANTIS. Mr. Speaker, tax day is fast approaching. If you, as a taxpayer, get audited and the IRS subpoenas documents from you, do you think you could destroy them and say: The heck with it? Could you lie to the IRS when they are asking you about your taxes and investigating you?

If somehow you unintentionally provided false information to the IRS, could you decline to correct the record once you found out that what you told them was not true? If you had a duty to comply with a lawfully issued subpoena, could you just fail to take basic efforts to comply?

I think every taxpayer in America instinctively knows that they would never be able to get away with the conduct I just outlined.

So I think the question that we here in this body have to answer is: Should the IRS be able to get away with conduct that a taxpayer would never be able to get away with? Can we really accept that the IRS gets to live under a lower standard of conduct than the taxpayers that the agency wields so much power over?

We know how this began. The IRS abused its authority. They targeted Americans based on their First Amendment beliefs. They got caught red- handed; so, Congress investigated.

Now, the Department of Justice was supposedly investigating, but that was baked in the cake from the beginning. They were not interested in this case. And, of course, they did not pursue prosecutions. Ultimately, even though Lois Lerner was held in contempt, they didn't pursue that even to the grand jury.

So Congress has tried to get to the truth of this, and Congress is even taking some action, like cutting funding for the IRS. Of course, when we cut funding, all they did was stop answering the phone calls. They didn't take it out of the bureaucracy. They just basically harmed the taxpayers.

So we are trying to get to the truth. We subpoena documents from the IRS, we bring in the Commissioner, John Koskinen, to testify, and we are trying to get the truth on behalf of the American people.

And yet, what has happened?

The IRS destroyed 400 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 of Lois Lerner's emails that were under not one, but two congressional subpoenas.

Commissioner Koskinen came to the Congress and made multiple statements that are demonstrably false. He breached his duty to correct the record once it was clear that some of his statements were false, such as the fact that he said we will produce every one of her emails. Koskinen even claimed that the IRS went to great lengths to ensure that Congress was given all documents, yet the IRS failed to conduct even basic investigation, such that the inspector general found a thousand emails that were in the IRS' possession all along. It took them 2 weeks to find it.

The IRS didn't look at Lerner's BlackBerry. They didn't look in other areas which were obvious that you would want to look at.

Great lengths?

Give me a break. As Judge David Sentelle noted today in the D.C. Circuit, it is hard to find the IRS to be an agency that we can trust.

So I think the question is: What is the remedy for them frustrating the American people's inquiry into their targeting of Americans?

I have argued, along with my colleagues here, that the appropriate remedy is found in the Constitution, which provides for impeachment of civil officers.

You have an IRS Commissioner who breached multiple duties that he owed to the public, and he violated the public trust, which is what Alexander Hamilton said was kind of the touchstone for what an impeachment should be in the Federalist Papers. Impeachment is not a prosecution or a punishment. It is really a constitutional check.

I think as you listen to some of the conduct that the IRS engaged in--my colleagues will go into more of it--obviously there is a need to get the truth, but there is also a need for this institution here to stand up for itself. It is really a question of the House's self- respect.

How much longer can we, as elected officials, allow the bureaucracy to simply walk all over the Congress?

We are supposed to be the people's representatives. We are supposed to be able to do justice for them when the government is not acting appropriately.

Fear of a media backlash or that people in the beltway will say you shouldn't be doing it, that is no excuse for our failure to discharge our basic constitutional duties.

As James Madison said: ``Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.'' No government agency is above oversight and accountability by the people's representatives.

And so as it stands now, we have filed articles of impeachment that have basically been collecting dust for several months. We think they should be brought up on the Committee on the Judiciary and we should have a debate about whether this Commissioner's conduct satisfied the standards of conduct that the Founding Fathers envisioned for civil officers of the United States.

I think any taxpayer who looks at what the IRS did will instinctively say, you know, it just ain't right that they are able to get away with that when they are dealing with the Congress, but I would never be able to get away with that when I am dealing with the IRS.

I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan), my friend and colleague, a guy who has been really, really fearless on holding the IRS to account.

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Mr. DeSANTIS. I appreciate my friend from Florida. Those were very well-received comments.

I would also like to just mention that Mr. Palmer from Alabama--who is serving up there--and I were discussing before he had to go up and serve in that duty--and I think it was a good point: if this were a private business and the private business had behaved this way--in the face of the IRS--the CEO would have been fired because it just would have been absolute hell for the company.

And that is one reason why the American people are so frustrated with government. There are different standards that apply for people in Washington versus the rest of the American people and the taxpayers. And that is just totally intolerable in a Republican form of government.

And I make one other point that I think sometimes gets lost. When you start talking about what are impeachable offenses, people tend to think of it in terms of criminal offenses. And while there are criminal offenses that would qualify as impeachable offenses, the two are not mutually exclusive. And, in fact, the Founders believed that the real reason you needed impeachment was for things that may not necessarily be criminal, but that were breaches of the public trust.

Joseph Story, the preeminent Supreme Court Justice, noted that:

Impeachable offenses are aptly termed political offenses growing out of personal misconduct or gross neglect or usurpation or habitual disregard for the public interest. They must be examined upon very broad and comprehensive principles of public policy and duty.

I think that is tailor-made for this instance. Some of the false statements maybe do violate statues, but we don't have to get into that. We can simply say: Has he violated, has he shown a disregard for the public interest, has he been--even grossly negligent would be actionable--and I think that is clearly the case here.

I echo my friend from Florida that said we need to get the dust of the impeachment resolutions, we need to get it up to Judiciary and pass it out, and then let's let the House make a decision about whether that is valid or not.

Some people say: Well, the Senate may not want to do it. They will have to defend their votes then. And that is fine with me. I think most Americans want the IRS to live at least under the same standard they do. I think it should be a higher standard, given all the power they have.

I appreciate my colleagues for coming and discussing this issue. The articles have not been brought up, but we are not forgetting, many of our constituents are not forgetting, and really the time to act is now. If we don't--this is absolutely true--the IRS will have gotten away with everything. That is unacceptable.

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