Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell concluded ATR’s annual tax press conference with a strong call to rein in the IRS and the Obama administration, which “believes that pursuit of their objectives justifies almost any way of doing it.”
The full text of McConnell’s remarks are below:
“Let me lead off by thanking you for the great work ATR has done over the years in keeping the issue of the IRS and tax reform front and center. It sure needs to be kept front and center, given the behavior of the current administration over the last six years.
Not only has the President succeeded in raising a lot of taxes, you have the — the issue of the agency itself selectively targeting the President’s political adversaries with audits and the like. This is an agency that needs to be reined in. As long as we have the agency, it ought to be a benign tax collector, not a pursuer of any administration’s political adversaries.
Now that we’re in the majority in both the House and Senate, I fully expect both the Ways and Means and — Committees and the Finance Committee to continue to pursue these examples of abuse. But I’m going to say this, any effort by the President to kind of put it off on the agency doesn’t work. In fact, when they were targeting Tea Party groups, the administration was actually publicly asking them to do what they did. And, if I were being pursued by a prosecutor and I worked at IRS, I think my first defense would be, well, you know the President was saying this is what we ought to do. And as Senator Durbin and others were saying, ‘this is what we ought to do.’
So I think we have an administration here that believes that pursuit of their objectives justifies almost any way of doing it.
And so there’s been no organization in our country who’s kept the issue of high taxes and IRS abuse more in the public eye than ATR. And so, Grover, I wanted to come by and thank you for what you all are doing. Let’s keep it up. Hopefully, in the next few years we can begin to slim down the size of government and get taxes lowered once again. Thanks a lot.”