With Glenn still off air resting his voice, Buck Sexton took to radio Tuesday to discuss what he called the "ultimate self-licking ice cream cone," the IRS. Unchecked in its authority and without safeguards or accountability, the IRS exists just to exist, he said, and to enlarge itself. With 70,000 pages of tax code, the IRS can make your life very difficult even if you're found guilty of absolutely nothing. It's no wonder the mere mention of the IRS elicits fear and disgust from even the most thorough tax payers striving to be on the up and up all the time.
Buck posed the question, "What happens, my friends, if you decide that you're not going to answer the questions posed to you by Congress, if you lie, if you destroy evidence? Well, for most of us, that would mean you would be in a whole lot of trouble. But if you're a very senior IRS official, it wouldn't mean much at all. You wouldn't be fired. You wouldn't be brought up on charges."
Some are calling for the head of the IRS, Commissioner John Koskinen, to be removed from office, but Buck said that's not enough.
"It doesn't do anything. It doesn't change the fact that as we know, because of their own admission, the IRS targeted people in this country for harassment or special treatment as you can call it," Buck said.
Ever-present and ever-watchful, the IRS can target and harass you for being a "dissident" or not going along with what they want you to do, Buck said.
"It has a Soviet feeling, doesn't it?" Buck said. "Special treatment for those who believe that there should be a smaller government. That government should be limited. If you were a patriot group. If you were a group affiliated with the Tea Party, you were targeted, again, in a presidential election year."
Buck went on to share a story courtesy of The Wall Street Journal about how closed-circuit this sort of insider DC bureaucratic system is.
From the article:
On Feb. 2, 2014, Kate Duval, the IRS commissioner’s counsel, identified a gap in the Lerner emails that were being collected. Days later, Ms. Duval learned that the gap had been caused in 2011 when the hard drive of Ms. Lerner’s computer crashed.Despite all this—an internal IRS preservation order, a congressional subpoena, and knowledge about Ms. Lerner’s hard-drive and email problems—the Treasury inspector general for tax administration discovered that the agency on March 4, 2014, erased 422 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 emails. (Congress learned of the discovery only last month.)
Ms. Duval has since left the IRS and now works at the State Department, where she is responsible for vetting Hillary Clinton’s emails sought by congressional investigations of the Benghazi attacks.
Buck invited the audience to guess what her job entails at the State Department.
"Who wants to just toss something out there?" Buck said. "She is responsible for vetting Hillary Clinton's emails sought by investigations of the Benghazi attacks. Yeah. Let that one bounce around for a minute."
It's amazing, Buck said, that while you and I can't run away from the IRS (there is nothing they can't do, nobody they can't find), when it comes to something like enforcing immigration law, that's suddenly too much for the government to handle.
"This administration, you have to give them credit, they've given us all a lesson in all this, we can't be surprised about this in the future. If you didn't already know about this, now you know. Whatever else you think you've got in terms of rights and liberty, no, no, it's just what the statists in D.C. decide to let you hold onto before they pull it out of your grasping fingers," Buck said.
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