After months of their much-hyped but still unproven charges of partisan skullduggery at the Internal Revenue Service, House Republicans this week took an axe to the IRS budget. The cost of the GOP vendetta is massive. Cutting the agency’s funding for the fifth consecutive year, the House in a 228-to-195 vote slashed the overall IRS budget by 13 percent and its enforcement division by almost a quarter. For his part, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) boasted about his role in punishing the IRS by reducing its funding to just $9.8 billion in fiscal year 2015, down from $13.4 billion five years earlier:
I am ecstatic that the House of Representatives supported my efforts today to pass a vitally important amendment which will save hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Rep. Gosar may be thrilled, but no one else should be. Like his GOP allies around the country, he has the math exactly backwards. If it became law, the House budgetary temper tantrum wouldn’t just undermine customer service even as the agency has expanded responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank law. By severely limiting the ability of the IRS to audit, identify and prosecute tax cheats, Republicans will once again cost the United States Treasury billions more in lost revenue. And if you feel like you’ve seen this movie before, that’s because you have.
As it turns out, the unified House GOP caucus was only delivering on RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ April promise that “we’re done playing footsie here with the IRS” over its supposed scandals. But the real scandal is that Republicans and their conservative amen corner have for decades been doing something much worse to the IRS, as you can learn below the fold.
