Resolution Relating to the Consideration of House Report 113-415 and an Accompanying Resolution, and Providing for Consideration of H. Res. 565, Appointment of Special Counsel to Investigate Internal Revenue Service

Floor Speech

Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, welcome to witch-hunt week here in the United States House of Representatives. Our economy is slowly recovering, slower than any of us would like. Millions of unemployed Americans have been left behind because their unemployment benefits have expired. Our immigration system is broken. Millions of Americans are living in poverty because they don't earn enough to make ends meet. And we have a pay equity issue where women, on average, earn less than men for doing the same job. I mean, climate change is a real issue and is getting worse.

So what is the response from the House Republican leadership? A jobs bill? No. A fully funded transportation bill? No. An extension of long-term unemployment benefits? No. Comprehensive immigration reform? No. An increase in the minimum wage? No way. A pay equity bill? No. A sensible energy policy? No. Of course not, not from this leadership.

You know, when it comes to jobs or improving the economy, my Republican friends have no ideas. And here is the deal: they are afraid the American people are going to figure this out. And so what do they do? They create distractions and diversions, more investigations, more investigations.

Mr. Speaker, instead of tackling the issues that actually matter to people, House Republicans are once again playing to cheap seats with hyperpartisan political witch-hunts.

Now, this rule before us today contains two bills. One would hold Lois Lerner, the former Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations in contempt of Congress; the other would appoint a special counsel to investigate the targeting of nonprofit groups by the IRS. And that is just today. The House Republican leadership will be doubling down on the crazy later this week by creating a select committee to exploit the tragedy of Benghazi. It is shameful.

This is ridiculous. The IRS clearly overstepped in the way they identified and targeted nonprofit groups. That is not an issue for debate. But an issue of this magnitude and importance, potential abuse by the Internal Revenue Service, deserves to be handled in a bipartisan and professional manner. That standard has not been achieved during these investigations.

I say ``these investigations,'' plural, because multiple committees have spent nearly a year looking into this. From nearly the beginning, Republicans have operated on their own and not in a bipartisan and professional manner. To date, 39 witnesses have been interviewed, more than 530,000 pages of documents have been reviewed, and the IRS has spent at least $14 million of taxpayer money cooperating with all of these requests and investigations.

And what do we have to show for all this work? We have had a circus in the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform--a circus. We have seen Ms. Lerner assert her Fifth Amendment rights, and we have seen Chairman Issa literally cut the mic while Ranking Member Cummings was speaking. In all my years as a Member of Congress and as a staff member, I have never seen such behavior in a committee before, ever.

And during this investigation, we have seen over 30 legal experts come together and state that Chairman Issa's contempt proceedings--one of the bills that we are considering here today--are constitutionally deficient. In other words, more than 30 legal experts--both Democrats and Republicans, and also including former House counsels--believe that the courts would throw this contempt resolution out of court. Now, of course, Chairman Issa is entitled to his own opinion, but we cannot just ignore the legal opinions of more than 30 legal experts, including two former House counsels.

Ranking Member Cummings had a great idea, a sensible idea, and I can't quite understand why my friends on the other side haven't accepted it. He said let's hold a hearing with many of these legal experts and get to the bottom of why they feel Chairman Issa's actions are deficient. But Chairman Issa nixed that quickly and said no way, no hearings.

This is the Oversight Committee. This is the committee that is supposed to be nonpartisan, when you think about it. I mean, the investigations are supposed to have some credibility. But Chairman Issa nixed that. In fact, he is refusing to hold such a hearing.

And actually, it just baffles me. If Chairman Issa firmly believes that this contempt resolution has merit and has legal standing, then what is the harm in holding a hearing and considering these legal experts' opinions?

The truth is that Chairman Issa and the Republican leadership really do not care about doing this fairly, and they never have. This is an exercise in political theater, designed for the conservative media closed information loop.

Mr. Speaker, speaking truth to power is important. Investigating abuses of power is even more important. But abusing the process in the name of investigating abuse is wrong. We have been down this road before. We have seen this kind of witch-hunt steamroll through this very Capitol. But not even Joseph McCarthy was able to strip away an American citizen's constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment, as Chairman Issa is trying to do.

The Congressional Research Service found that the last time Congress tried to hold witnesses in contempt after they asserted their Fifth Amendment right not to testify was in the 1950s and 1960s in Senator Joseph McCarthy's committee, the House un-American Activities Committee, and others. In nearly every case, the juries refused to convict or Federal courts overturned those convictions. This exercise that we are engaged in today is nearly identical to the actions of Senator McCarthy. It was wrong then; it is wrong now.

This is sad because it demeans this House of Representatives. It may be red meat for the extreme

right wing, but for too many Americans, it adds to the cynicism that this is a place where trivial issues get debated passionately and important ones not at all.

Mr. Speaker, the IRS is a powerful agency. The Tax Code, itself, can be either daunting or beneficial, depending on where you sit. The IRS and the Code can be used to help people, like through the EITC, the child tax credit, and the R&D tax credits; or it could be used punitively, as it was during the Nixon administration.

The IRS, under the Obama administration, must be held to a high standard. We must keep politics out of the way the IRS is run and the way it operates. In fact, the hearings, depositions, and investigations held to date actually show that there was no White House involvement in this case--none.

The problem here is that the narrative that my Republican friends have doesn't fit the facts and they are frustrated, so they want to kick the ball down to the court and have more committees, more investigations, more special counsels. Maybe they will find something. In addition, these hearings that were held, these depositions and investigations show that the targeting of nonprofit groups by the IRS was not limited to conservative groups.

Unfortunately, this whole process is so political that my friends, the Republicans on the Oversight Committee, intentionally limited the scope of what they are focused on to just conservative groups. It doesn't matter what happened to progressive groups. The truth is that both liberal and conservative groups were targeted. That is a fact that is conveniently left out of the arguments and accusations posed by my friends on the Republican side.

Mr. Speaker, I understand what the Republicans are trying to do here. It is crystal clear. They do not want to talk about the issues that matter to people. From the economy to the environment to immigration, they don't want to talk about those issues because a majority of the American people disagree with them. They don't want to talk about those issues because they have no ideas, nothing, nothing to offer. They don't even want to talk about ObamaCare anymore now that 8 million Americans have health coverage. They don't know what to do now, so they are coming up with these desperate attempts to try to create distractions. So this is what they are left with: sad little scraps of political nonsense that they keep trying to peddle as leadership.

Mr. Speaker, this rule and resolution are colossal wastes of time. They do nothing. They do nothing at all to try to ensure that the IRS is above politics. They do nothing at all to try to achieve any kind of justice or truth.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and to get on with the business of actually solving real problems that affect real Americans.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I have great respect for the gentleman from Pennsylvania, but I think he has kind of highlighted kind of the differences between the two parties here. He mentioned that we are trying to focus attention on gender inequalities and other issues. We are.

I think there is something wrong when women in this country make 77 cents on every dollar a man makes. I think that is outrageous. I think women ought to be paid the same as men to do the same job. So, yeah, that is an issue, and that is something we should talk about. And it is not just a women's issue, by the way; it is a family issue.

The Senate sent us over an immigration bill that would reduce the deficit by $900 billion over the next 20 years--$900 billion. They did it in a bipartisan way. We can't even get a vote here. We can't even get a vote here in the House of Representatives.

There are millions of our fellow citizens who are unemployed and whose unemployment benefits have run out. We can't even get a vote to extend unemployment benefits for these people--maybe because they don't have a super-PAC, maybe because those aren't their natural constituencies. I don't know what the reason is. But those are important issues. And, quite frankly, yes, that is what the American people want us to be talking about--things that matter to them.

The problem with what we are doing here today, this is so blatantly politically motivated, even in terms of the scope of the investigation, that it just is laughable. It is laughable.

Listening to the debate in the Rules Committee last night amongst those on the Oversight Committee, the back and forth, and realizing how broken that committee is, how partisan that committee has become because of the leadership in this House, it is really sad.

No one here is defending the IRS. No one here is defending Lois Lerner. But what we don't want to do is trample on the Constitution, and we don't want to unnecessarily politicize these proceedings, which is what is happening right now.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Just so everybody is clear here, we are not just talking about any attorney. We are talking about legal scholars. Quite frankly, the overwhelming opinion is that my friends are overreaching here, and, again, it makes a mockery of this House and especially at a time when we ought to be doing the people's work.

Millions of our fellow citizens who are unemployed can't even get a vote on the House floor to extend unemployment benefits. These are the people we are supposed to represent. We are telling them, forget it, you are on your own. We have all these excuses why we can't bring that to the floor.

The minimum wage, we have people working full-time in this country who are stuck in poverty. My friends went after people on SNAP, the program that they like to target, a program that provides food to hungry people, and they say everybody ought to get a job. Well, the majority of able-bodied people on that program work, and they earn so little because wages are so low that they still are entitled to some benefit. If you work in this country, you ought not to be in poverty.

So, Mr. Speaker, on both this issue of unemployment and the minimum wage and on the issue of immigration, those are the things we ought to be debating here today. That is what the American people--that would be solving problems, not creating partisan political theater.

So, Mr. Speaker, I am going to ask people to defeat the previous question. If they do, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up legislation that would restore unemployment insurance and provide much-needed relief to countless families across this country.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, wow, when we talk about tyranny, I should remind the gentleman that you have two bills coming to the floor under a closed rule--absolutely closed. Nobody can offer any amendments. It is your way or the highway. They are absolutely closed.

When you talk about tyranny, we can't get a vote on the House floor on unemployment compensation. We can't get a vote on minimum wage. We can't get a vote on pay equities. We can't get a vote on immigration reform.

I don't know what the gentleman is talking about. I mean, it is our side, those of us on this side that can't get our voices heard. Last session, you had one of the most closed Congresses in our history, after you promised a wide-open, transparent process. You have just shut everything down.

Even the scope of what this bill is focused on is closed in a very partisan way to focus only on abuses that deal with potential rightwing groups, conservative groups, but you totally cut out any abuse that might have happened to a liberal group or a progressive group, so I don't know what the gentleman is talking about.

This is a closed process. We talk about democracy and that we need to promote democracy around the world. We need a little democracy here in the House of Representatives. We don't have any.

Let me just say one other thing here, Mr. Speaker. We had 39 experts--39 witnesses that were interviewed by the committee, 39. Not one single one indicated there was any link between the White House and the IRS mess, not one.

I mean, if there had been a few, I guess we could have a debate here about whether we need to go further, but not one. So here is the problem: their narrative doesn't fit the facts, and they are upset about it.

I get it. You were hoping for some juicy conspiracy that doesn't exist, so you have to create more investigations, more investigations, all the while, we are neglecting our work, our duty to the people of this country.

Yes, let's make sure that the IRS is above politics. I am all with you on that. I don't want them tagging anybody for political reasons, and I am committed to that, and so is everybody on this side, but that is not what we are doing here.

This is witch-hunt week. Make no mistake about it because we are doing this today, and then we are doing Benghazi tomorrow. That is the theme of the week, and what a tragedy, what a tragedy when so much more needs to be done.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I respect the comments of my friend, but I think the talk he just gave supports one of the points that we have been trying to make here, and that is we have 39 legal experts, former House counsels, who basically say that what my friends are doing here today are trampling on Ms. Lerner's constitutional rights.

It would seem to me that, if you wanted this whole circus to be a little bit more legitimate, that you would have agreed to what Chairman Cummings had asked for, which was a hearing to bring in legal experts to actually talk about the merits of this before kind of rushing to the floor with this purely partisan bill.

The second thing I would say to my friend from Tennessee is, when you talk about the number of liberal groups targeted, one of the reasons why we are not talking about liberal groups being targeted here is because the majority kind of stacked the deck.

They formed the rules. They only want to focus on conservative groups, so that is why there is even more evidence of the fact that this is a purely partisan exercise.

I just want to say, so my colleagues are clear, not one witness--not one single witness interviewed by the committee identified any evidence that political bias motivated the use of the inappropriate selection criteria.

The inspector general, Russell George, was asked at a May 17, 2013, hearing before the Ways and Means Committee, ``Did you find any evidence of political motivation in the selection of the tax exemption applications?''

In response, the inspector general testified, ``We did not, sir.''

Oversight Committee staff asked all 39 witnesses whether they were aware of any political bias in the creation or use of inappropriate criteria. Not one identified even a single instance of political motivation or bias.

Look, there needs to be reforms to the IRS. We need to make sure that the IRS is above politics, but bringing this political circus, this witch-hunt, to the floor purely because it polls well amongst your base is ludicrous.

It is ludicrous because we should be focused on extending unemployment benefits for people who have lost their unemployment compensation. We should be raising the minimum wage. We should be passing immigration reform.

We should be dealing with the pay equity bill, so that women get paid the same amount as men do for working the same job.

It is also a family issue. We ought to be focused on getting this economy going; but instead, because my friends on the other side of the aisle don't have a clue on what to do, they are asking to look over here, let's do a distraction, let's do a diversion. I think this is outrageous.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, let me just say this because facts are important, Inspector General J. Russell George testified before the Oversight Committee that his audit did not look at the IRS be-on-the-lookout list with regard to progressive groups. That is what the inspector general testified, so let's stop this partisanship.

I would say to my colleagues, if my friends want to do this correctly, if they want to do this in a way that has some credibility, they ought to do this in a nonpartisan way.

It is really quite shameful that the Oversight Committee has become so polarized and so politicized and that this whole issue is being brought before us in this way that really, quite frankly, I think is beneath this House.

We ought to do a proper oversight, but not purely because it polls well or do it in a way that plays well with a political base. We ought to do it in the right way.

The IRS should not be involved with politics, period. Whether it is going after conservative groups or liberal groups, that is absolutely unacceptable, and we ought to make sure that doesn't happen, but that is not what we are doing here.

What we are doing here is a witch-hunt. This is the first witch-hunt bill of the week. We have several that we are going to be doing this week, and I think our time could be better spent on helping the American people get back to work.

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Mr. McGOVERN. I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, the Committee on Ways and Means Democrats found out that there was extensive scrutiny of liberal progressive groups, groups that had names ``Progressive,'' ``Occupy,'' and ``Acorn'' in their name. That is the Ways and Means Committee. That just goes to show how partisan this process has become, how politicized it has become. This is beneath this House.

If you do oversight, it ought to be nonpartisan. This has turned into a circus. This has turned into a witch-hunt. Enough of this. Let's start doing the people's work.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This is a circus, and it is really sad that we are here on the floor debating this.

Just for the record, witnesses testified that progressive groups got a multitiered review and that liberal groups like Emerge went through a 2-year process before getting denied.

The other thing you ought to know is that the IRS has begun a path to reform. It has implemented all the inspector general's recommendations, including going above and beyond by eliminating BOLOs altogether.

Mr. Speaker, if this were done in a fair and professional manner, we wouldn't be having this controversy today, but the exact opposite happened in the Committee on Oversight. It was a joke. We all saw it on TV. Enough of this. Enough of this. Let's start doing the people's work.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment that I will offer into the record along with extraneous materials immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Massachusetts?

There was no objection.

Mr. McGOVERN. This is on extending unemployment compensation benefits. It might be nice to do something that might help somebody around here, that might help the American people, instead of doing this witch-hunt, this week of investigations, this week of distraction, when our economy needs our attention, when people need jobs, when people's unemployment needs to be extended.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question. I urge a ``no'' vote on this rule, which is a closed rule, two closed rules. Again, when we do oversight, it ought to be nonpartisan. This has become a partisan joke.

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