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The public should be frightened that Democrats have passed new legislation to weaponize the already abusive Internal Revenue Service.
For nearly a century, presidents and members of Congress have used the IRS to harass and incriminate political foes. In addition to collecting revenue to fund the government, the IRS is a hit squad that destroys reputations and criminalizes dissenters.
A lot of pain can be inflicted under the guise of tax “auditing.” The bill President Joe Biden signed Tuesday, erroneously labeled the Inflation Reduction Act, will mean more audits and investigations. The law roughly doubles funding for the IRS’s enforcement division, adding as many as 80,000 agents and auditors.
Biden, meanwhile, is starving the Defense Department, requesting too little funding to even keep up with inflation, despite Russian and Chinese aggression. Yet his legislation will make the IRS three-quarters the size of the Marine Corps. Who’s Biden making war on?
While the bill increases the IRS’s muscle, it fails to impose serious criminal penalties if the IRS leaks confidential taxpayer information or goes after political targets. History shows the danger ahead.
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who opposed his New Deal and adversaries like Sen. Huey Long and Father Coughlin.
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the IRS gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover access to its files, allowing him to weaponize tax information against the National Council of Churches, the NAACP and Dr.
