GOP Lawmaker Says IRS committed ‘A Clear Violation Of Their Authority’ and Says Oversight Warranted In Latest Scandal

Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, slammed the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) conduct in an interview with Just the News toward a conservative election reform group and vowed that the matter should be taken up by the Oversight Committee, which he is also a member of. 

Biggs is referencing a current scandal facing the IRS for questions they posed to the Adams, Baldwin, and Covey Foundation, Inc. (ABC) which were deemed to be political in nature. In response to this, the congressman decried the IRS’s improper questions to the organization as “a form of government surveillance of the American people” and declared that they have “no authority…to regulate speech.”

The Arizona Republican further lamented that “[W]e have seen this in the past, we have seen the weaponization of virtually every bureaucracy in America, in the federal government. And so, this is no surprise — actually kind of wondered why we didn’t discover anything sooner from the IRS, especially since … they’re in the process of hiring 87,000 new IRS agents.”

Biggs also expounded that the IRS’s “job is not to regulate speech or to adjudicate whether you have provided misinformation or not. That is a clear violation of their authority, even if you give the most broad interpretation of the 16th Amendment. And so, we’re going to have to attack it through the Oversight Committee, in my opinion.”

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As covered by a previous entry of DC Enquirer on this brewing affair, “The IRS asked ABC if it held particular views about certain topics and to detail them, they asked if there was any policy in place that would prevent the organization from espousing ‘unsupported opinions or conclusions,’ and to explain how the educational content produced by ABC were fair and unbiased.”

The IRS, which already took a long time to process the application, failed to follow up on the concerns the group had about the improperness of their questioning. Phill Kline, a founder of ABC, remarked that the IRS’s behavior was “consistent with Biden’s speech [in September at Philadelphia] that half of the American people are the enemy of America” and where Biden angrily ranted that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

On a brighter note, Kline said he was comforted by the fact that “our elected representatives are taking a look” at IRS misconduct and they are “trying to rein in this abuse because it’s intimidation tactics and abuse of [federal] authority.” Hopefully, the case will be taken up by the Oversight Committee as Andy Biggs thought it should and further light will be shone on IRS misconduct.