Tag: irs
GOP's Extremist 'First Two Weeks' Agenda Stalled In House

GOP's Extremist 'First Two Weeks' Agenda Stalled In House

Days before the 118th Congress convened, incoming House Majority Leader Steve Scalise outlined an ambitious agenda of right-wing legislation for the new Republican majority to pass during the first two weeks of the new session. A month later, only about half of the "ready-to-go" proposals that the Louisiana Republican prioritized have received a floor vote.

In a December 30 letter to the GOP caucus, Scalise wrote: "In preparation for becoming the House Majority Leader next week, I have been meeting with our incoming committee chairs over the last month to start making plans for legislation on the House Floor so that we can hit the ground running in our first weeks in the majority. We have made it clear that we must change the way we do business in order to improve the legislative process."

Noting that such changes would take time, Scalise added: "In the meantime, we will begin bringing up meaningful, 'ready-to-go' legislation in the House. These commonsense measures will address challenges facing hard-working families on issues ranging from energy, inflation, border security, life, taxpayer protection, and more."

Scalise outlined 11 bills and resolutions that he would bring to the floor without waiting for committee action.

Rather than vote on any legislation, House Republicans struggled through their first week simply trying to agree on who should be House speaker. After days of infighting, they elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on their 15th attempt, early on Jan. 7.

In the three weeks since, the House has taken up and passed just six of the items Scalise listed in his letter.

In a January 9 party-line vote, they passed the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, which would rescind money appropriated in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to help the IRS modernize systems, replace retiring employees, and beef up enforcement of existing tax laws, especially for large corporations and wealthy individuals making over $400,000 a year. If the proposal becomes law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated, it will cost the federal government more than $185 billion over 10 years in lost revenue.

A day later, they formally established a "Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party."

On January 11, they passed two anti-abortion measures: the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would criminalize doctors who do not provide medical care in extremely rare situations in which a fetus survives an attempted abortion; and a nonbinding resolution condemned "recent attacks on pro-life facilities, groups, and churches."

Abortion rights groups condemned both measures as part of a "dystopian political agenda."

Next, they approved two bills to restrict the president's ability to sell petroleum from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The Protecting America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve from China Act, passed January 12, would prohibit any of the products taken from the reserve from being sold "to any entity that is under the ownership, control, or influence of the Chinese Communist Party" or to anyone who doesn't agree to prevent it from being exported it to China.

The Strategic Production Response Act, passed on January 27, would require the Energy Department to agree to increase fossil fuel drilling on federal lands by a comparable amount before any petroleum is drawn from the reserve except in a "severe energy supply interruption."

The remaining five "ready to go" proposals have been delayed, as even some House Republicans raised concerns about them.

The Prosecutors Need to Prosecute Act would require local prosecutors to report data on several types of prosecutions to the federal Justice Department. In a letter to McCarthy and Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, 24 civil rights groups said: "Efforts to pressure prosecutors to use their discretion to send more people to prison and seek longer sentences, such as the Prosecutors Need to Prosecute Act, are a threat to justice, equity, and public safety. … The goal of H.R. 27 is clear: to pressure prosecutors to prosecute more cases more harshly despite bipartisan concerns that the United States already incarcerates far too many people for far too long."

Republican Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs toldRoll Call the bill was a "federalization" of local enforcement, "putting the federal government to solve every local problem."

Another, a nonbinding resolution, would oppose "the misguided and dangerous efforts to defund and dismantle the Nation's law enforcement agencies." This would seemingly conflict with Republicans' vote to slash IRS enforcement funding and Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's call to "defund the FBI."

The Border Safety and Security Act would crack down on asylum-seekers coming to the United States by giving the secretary of homeland security the authority to unilaterally bar them from entering the country and requiring the government to keep them out as long as there is a processing backlog.

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) opposes the bill, telling the Washington Post on January 23, "Trying to ban legitimate asylum claims — one, it's not Christian, and two, to me, it's very anti-American."

Long a GOP priority, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act would codify the Hyde Amendment's ban on most federal funding of abortion and would also prevent federal funding of any health insurance plan that includes abortion coverage.

Planned Parenthood has opposed this bill for years, warning it would disproportionately hurt people of color and low-income women.

Finally, the Illegal Alien NICS Alert Act would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local police to be informed any time an undocumented immigrant tries to purchase a gun.

Scalise's schedule for this week promises votes on bills to limit the government's COVID-19 safety response efforts and a resolution "denouncing the horrors of socialism."

None of the remaining "first two weeks" bills are scheduled to come to the floor.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Far Right Pundits Urge 'Game Of Chicken' On Debt Ceiling

Far Right Pundits Urge 'Game Of Chicken' On Debt Ceiling

Prominent right-wing media figures are encouraging House Republicans to use the debt ceiling as leverage to extract their political aims from a Democratic White House and Senate. Their hostage-taking approach courts an economic catastrophe and the unraveling of the constitutional order.

Fox News prime-time host and Republican propagandist Sean Hannity used a Tuesday night interview with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the U.S. Capitol to urge him to ignore critics and play “a game of chicken” when the debt limit approaches later this year, without specifying what Republicans should demand as their price for raising it.

Hannity’s upmarket counterpart Hugh Hewitt, the Salem Radio host and Washington Post columnist, tweeted on Wednesday morning that House Republicans should “adopt the summary line: ‘We won't raise the debt limit until we close the border.’”

An hour later, he promotedNational Review writer Jim Geraghty’s suggestion that they instead demand “repeal of the authorization of 87,000 new IRS personnel.” (Republicans and right-wing media oppose IRS funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act that would increase revenue by targeting wealthy tax cheats.) Hewitt added: “That may even be better than border security. Both building the wall and repealing the 87,000 are key priorities. Pick one.”

It’s not a great sign that right-wing media decided to take a hostage before settling on their demands.

Congress passes laws that dictate how the federal government raises and spends money. Since the revenues brought in by those laws are insufficient to cover the outlays, the U.S. Treasury funds the deficit by selling debt. Congress created the debt ceiling through a 1917 law, setting a statutory limit on the total debt the government can accrue.

Some have argued that the law is unconstitutional because the government can’t run up debts and then refuse to pay them. But the question has largely been moot since Congress has regularly raised or suspended that limit ever since, most recently in December 2021, when it was set to “just under $31.4 trillion”; a figure that will be reached some time in 2023.

The debt ceiling has at times been a focus of intense political debate. Congressional Republicans used the threat of a debt ceiling breach during President Barack Obama’s tenure to push for deficit reduction. That tactic faded from use under President Donald Trump, who was happy to run up large federal deficits.

But with a Democrat back in the White House, Republicans divulged in late 2022 that they would use debt limit brinkmanship to force big cuts to social safety net spending if they took back the House in the midterm elections. And after they won a narrow majority, the party’s right flank reportedly demanded that McCarthy pledge “to not raise the debt limit without major cuts — including efforts to reduce spending on so-called mandatory programs, which include Social Security and Medicare,” as their price for supporting his speaker bid.

The results of a debt ceiling breach would be calamitous.

“Once the government hits the debt ceiling and exhausts all available extraordinary measures, it is no longer allowed to issue debt and soon after will run out of cash-on-hand,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reports. “At that point, given annual deficits, incoming receipts would be insufficient to pay millions of daily obligations as they come due. Therefore, the federal government would have to at least temporarily default on many of its obligations, from Social Security payments and salaries for federal civilian employees and the military to veterans’ benefits and utility bills, among others.”

Hannity, in his comments to McCarthy, suggested that the impact would be negligible, but seems to be conflating a debt limit crisis with the sort of partial government shutdown that occurred most recently during the Trump administration. As CRFB notes, “many more parties are not paid in a default. … While a government shutdown would be disruptive, a government default could be disastrous.”

How disastrous? “An actual default would roil global financial markets and create chaos, since both domestic and international markets depend on the relative economic and political stability of U.S. debt instruments and the U.S. economy,” according to CRFB. “A Moody’s Analytics report released in September 2021 estimated that a default could have similar macroeconomic consequences to the Great Recession: a four percent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decline, nearly six million lost jobs, and an unemployment rate of nine percent. In addition, Moody’s predicted a $15 trillion loss in household wealth, with stocks dropping by as much as one-third at the depths of the selloff.”

There are options available to avert such a disaster. The White House and House and Senate leaders could agree on some sort of deal that provides Republicans with a fig leaf. If the House GOP leadership remains intransigent, some of its members could sign onto a dispatch petition putting a clean debt limit increase on the floor. The Biden administration could also act unilaterally by using its authority to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin so the government can pay its expenses; or adopt Matt Yglesias’ plan of “swapping out old bonds with high face values and low interest rates for equivalent-yielding bonds with low face values and high interest rates”; or say that the debt limit is unconstitutional and that Biden will violate it rather than violating all the other laws that require him to spend money.

But Republican extremists and their right-wing media supporters are unlikely to take any of those options lying down. They want chaos and massive, unpopular spending cuts, and are already signaling that they will fight to get them.

And that means we may be looking at two years of a very chaotic Congress.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

House Republicans Waste $185 Billion To Protect Wealthy Tax Evaders

House Republicans Waste $185 Billion To Protect Wealthy Tax Evaders

House Republicans voted on Monday to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service's efforts to crack down on tax evasion by wealthy individuals and large corporations. An estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the bill would cost the government more than $185 billion in lost revenue over the next decade — all money that the Treasury Department is owed by individual and corporate taxpayers.

The Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, which passed the House along party lines, 221-210, would cancel $71 billion in funds over 10 years. The funding, already appropriated in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to modernize and boost enforcement by the IRS, is expected to be more than offset by the additional collected revenue. In total, the CBO estimates the GOP cuts would actually result in the government ending up $114 billion poorer.

The $71 billion is set to allow the cash-strapped agency to replace retiring staff, modernize systems, and improve enforcement of existing tax laws. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen ordered in August that the funds not be used to audit anyone making under $400,000 a year.

But Republican lawmakers unanimously opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, with many falsely claiming that its IRS funding would be used to hire an "army" of 87,000 new agents to "spy on" and target the middle class and small businesses with audits. In reality, much of the money would go to replace the 50,000 IRS employees eligible to retire within five years.

After the GOP won a narrow majority in the midterm elections, incoming Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that his caucus' first priority would be to "repeal the 87,000 IRS agents."

The vote to cut funding to the IRS came just days after McCarthy, as one of his concessions to far-right critics within his own party whose votes he needed to become speaker, agreed to push a 10-year plan to balance the federal budget. Such a plan would require draconian spending cuts, likely including a reduction in spending on safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Enactment of the legislation would make that job even more difficult, requiring another $114 billion in cuts to federal programs to offset the cuts in federal tax revenue. Republicans have pushed to protect defense spending, meaning these cuts would likely have to come from discretionary spending on domestic programs.

The Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscally conservative nonprofit, warned Monday that passage of the bill "would increase deficits by more than $100 billion over the next decade while encouraging tax cheating, expanding the tax gap, and undermining a policy supported by every President since Ronald Reagan, including Donald Trump." The annual tax gap is the difference between what is owed to the IRS and what is actually paid on time.

Chuck Marr, vice president for federal tax policy for the progressive Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, also blasted the bill, calling it "a misleading gambit to protect interests of wealthy tax cheats."

"A key element of a healthy, functioning democracy is a transparent tax system that is fairly enforced so that people and corporations pay what they owe and the well-heeled and powerful cannot flout their responsibility to pay their taxes," Marr wrote. "Efforts to protect wealthy tax cheats and purposely undermine the IRS's ability to enforce tax laws are anti-democratic and should be resoundingly rejected."

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted media coverage of the CBO's scoring on Monday, observing that the GOP bill was "Good for tax cheats, bad for the economy."

President Joe Biden said he plans to veto the legislation, though it's unlikely to reach his desk with a Democratic-controlled Senate.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Welcome To The Dead On Arrival Congress, Where Rhetoric Is All That Matters

Welcome To The Dead On Arrival Congress, Where Rhetoric Is All That Matters

I’m going to be reporting on everything these Republican goofs do for the next two years. To help me cover their lying, scheming asses, you can buy a subscription right here.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has successfully navigated its way into its performative normative future by winning its first two votes. They passed the Kevin McCarthy Defenestration Act, otherwise known as the House rules, and they passed “The Family and Small Business Protection Act," otherwise known as the We Hate Taxes Act.

Big whoop. The new House rules allow Kevin to wield his gavel unless and until five of the Freedom Caucus decide to take that freedom away from him by invoking their new powers to vacate the chair – aka, fire the Speaker – on a motion that can now be made by a single member. Our boy Kev isn’t merely walking on eggshells, he’s dog-paddling through raging rapids trying to keep himself from going down the 100-foot falls that he can see lying straight ahead.

Then they made good on their promise to cut the money for the 80,000 or so new IRS employees scheduled to be hired over the next decade, funding for which was built into the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden late last year. Republicans brought back the so-called “Holman rule,” a provision dating to the 19th Century which allows the House to amend spending bills at will, cutting out stuff they don’t like (new money for the IRS), also allowing them to terminate federal employee positions they oppose, such as the 80,000 or so new IRS employees funded by the passage of last year’s spending bill.

That little legislative jewel is dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate, not to mention if it were ever to reach the president’s desk.

But who cares! They’re out there in the halls of Congress this morning giving interviews before any microphone they can find bragging about firing the 87,000 new IRS “agents” they claim will be hired over the next decade. A bald-faced lie, naturally: The Treasury Department has said that the money in the Inflation Reduction Act will be used mainly to hire customer service representatives, computer scientists, and to replace the 52,000 IRS employees who are scheduled to retire over the next six or seven years.

Only a small percentage of the new employees will be serving as IRS agents, but you won’t be hearing that from Marjorie Taylor Greene or any of her MAGA compatriots. They’re out there claiming they’re saving middle class Americans from being audited, when the truth is, none of the money appropriated for the IRS will be spent on enforcement of IRS rules on families making less than $400,000 a year. According to The Hill, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, an appointee of Donald Trump, sent a letter to the Senate last August stating “that the funds from the legislation would be used to up examination of large corporations and high-net-worth individuals.”

But try finding that bothersome little detail escaping the lips of a Republican member of Congress.

The White House announced that President Biden woul veto the bill passed yesterday by the House if it somehow accidentally ends up on his desk: “With their first economic legislation of the new Congress, House Republicans are making clear that their top economic priority is to allow the rich and multi-billion dollar corporations to skip out on their taxes, while making life harder for ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe.”

Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which analyzes any spending legislation with respect to its possible effect on the deficit, announced yesterday that, if it were to become law, the Republican bill would lead to increases in the deficit over the next decade of $114 billion by reducing tax revenue by an estimated $186 billion.

So, every time a Republican member of the House opens his or her mouth and starts yapping about the deficit, a reporter on Capitol Hill should ask them about the more than $100 billion they just advocated adding to the deficit.

If I were a Capitol Hill reporter, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for an answer, however. With a Democratic Senate and a Democrat in the Oval Office, exactly nothing the House passes on a party-line vote over the next two years will become law. Everything the Republican House says and does will be performative, from Jim Jordan’s Judiciary subcommittee that is supposed to investigate “the weaponization of the federal government” to any sort of tax cuts they might be contemplating. The 118th Congress won’t be about legislating and laws but rather about rhetoric, pure and simple.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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