During an interview with Just News, GOP Rep. from Arizona, Andy Biggs, who is also the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, blasted the Internal Revenue Service’s behavior with the conservative election reform group (ABC) and certified that the issue should be held up by the Oversight Committee.
Biggs is pointing toward a current controversy involving IRS and the queries they asked from Adams, Baldwin, and Covey Foundation, Inc. (ABC), which were supposed to be political.
In response to this, the Republican Rep criticized IRS’s unreasonable questions to ABC as “a form of government surveillance of the American people.”
He declared that they have “no authority…to regulate speech.”
Biggs further complained:
“[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 explained:
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.”
According to a previous report by DC Enquirer:
“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 took a long time to start processing the application and still, failed to dig into the unreasonable questioning issue that the group had.
A founder of ABC, Phill Kline, complained that IRS’s conduct 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 the bright side, Kline stated that he was satisfied after knowing that “our elected representatives are taking a look” at IRS’s misbehavior and there were “trying to rein in this abuse because it’s intimidation tactics and abuse of [federal] authority.”
It looks like, the lawsuit will be held up by the Oversight Committee as Andy Biggs assumed it should, and IRS’s bad conduct will be lightened.
