The IRS

Floor Speech

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.

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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