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The only reason why I am mentioning this plan is the sheer ridiculousness of its foundation. In his editorial in the Wall Street Journal today, Santorum announces that he will pay for his tax plan by “repealing ObamaCare and all of its associated taxes.” That is patently absurd. No matter how much I may dislike Obamacare, the likelihood that it will be entirely repealed is slim to none. To stake an entire tax plan (flat tax at that) on something likely to be unattainable, is a bit foolish and naive.
You can read the plan below in its entirety:
Since 2007, 15,000 American factories have shut down and more than two million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Wages have flatlined; American families are struggling.
In every recovery since 1960, real GDP grew by 4% a year, according to a report from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. The Obama-Biden policies have resulted in a paltry 2.3% annual growth since the recession ended in 2009. This growth gap has cost the country $5.4 trillion in lost economic output and 5.5 million fewer jobs than would have been expected during a normal recovery.
So what is Hillary Clinton’s vision to get the economy moving? She wants to slam investors with higher capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders wants to raise the top personal-income tax rate to 90%.
Donald Trump’s plan to make America great again? He’s offering a complicated tax cut that the Tax Foundation reports will explode the deficit by more than $10 trillion over a decade. Are any Republicans offering serious, specific proposals to scrap the toxic tax code? Jeb Bush wants three rates. Marco Rubio wants two. Rand Paul has proposed a single rate and creating a European-style value-added tax.
America deserves better. That’s why, in my first 100 days as president, I will submit to Congress a comprehensive Economic Freedom Agenda that will abolish the existing tax code. Under “The 20/20 Flat Tax: A Clear Vision For America,” individuals will pay a simple, low 20% individual rate that will be applied to all streams of income. It eliminates the marriage penalty, death tax and alternative minimum tax. It will treat every American the same. No longer will savings and investment be penalized.
Individuals will receive a $2,750 credit, which will replace the standard deduction and personal exemption. The credit will be refundable and replace the Earned Income Tax Credit. The child tax credit will remain. For low- and middle-income workers, the provision will shield much of their basic wages from federal income taxes. They can keep more of what they earn.
In exchange for the refundable tax credit and low rate, itemized deductions will be eliminated, except for two. Charitable giving in any amount will be fully deductible, to affirm and encourage Americans’ generosity. Mortgage interest—up to $25,000 a year—will also be deductible, as a means of helping low- and middle-income workers buy and maintain their family home without subsidizing millionaires and billionaires.
Businesses too will benefit from a flat 20% tax rate. It will replace the current corporate income-tax rate of 39.1% that is only exceeded by Chad and the United Arab Emirates. An initial 0% tax rate on American manufacturers, phasing up to 20% over two years, will help make America the No. 1 manufacturer in the world again.
Companies will be allowed to deduct 100% of their capital costs in the first year. Full expensing will eliminate complicated depreciation schedules and encourage investment in new plants and equipment. To encourage American companies to bring revenues home and reinvest the $2.1 trillion in profits that have been parked overseas, my plan calls for a low 10% rate on business income that is repatriated.
I will eliminate the deductibility of interest and corporate welfare, including all carve-outs, loopholes and tax shelters. No more special deals and favors for the rich and powerful and their lawyers and lobbyists.
An analysis of my plan by the Tax Foundation found that GDP would rise by 10.2% above the Obama-Biden trajectory over 10 years. Capital investment would grow by almost 30% and wages would increase by 7.3%. More than 3.1 million additional jobs would be created beyond current projections.
I will pay for my plan by repealing ObamaCare and all of its associated taxes. My flat tax will reduce federal revenues by $1.1 trillion over 10 years, after accounting for increased GDP growth and job creation. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, repealing ObamaCare will reduce federal spending by $1.7 trillion over 10 years and increase economic growth by 0.7% annually.
Thus, the 20/20 Flat Tax will not increase the deficit. It will allow us to make needed reforms, such as the expansion of Health Savings Accounts, to give patients and doctors, not Washington bureaucrats, more freedom and control over their health care, and to expand coverage. The new tax code will also provide the resources needed to rebuild our military in an increasingly volatile world.
To maximize the country’s economic potential I will, on my first day in office, repeal each and every Obama-administration regulation that creates an economic burden of more than $100 million. The Keystone XL pipeline will be approved, and expanded production of domestic fuels will be encouraged, not hobbled by federal regulations.
As a U.S. senator I never voted for a tax increase, and the first two bills I co-sponsored were the Balanced Budget Amendment and the Line Item Veto. I always fought for bold tax cuts and government reform. My administration will be no different.
The stakes for America are too high for the GOP to nominate untested newcomers, first-term senators, or governors without proven national results. I offer Americans a clear conservative vision, serious plans for reform and the experience to get the job done.
Mr. Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, is a Republican candidate for president.
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Dear Mr. O’Connor and Mr. McKinnon,
I read with interest many of the reviews of Jeb Bush’s tax plan. As a CPA for the past 40 years, I find his plan overall to be a good start.
However, in your article in the Wall Street Journal, you included a quote from Ms. Holly Shulman of the Democrat National Committee, who declared, “What’s Jeb’s plan? More massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, all while exploding the deficit or shifting the burden onto the middle class.” As we both know, her claim is utterly outrageous.
Why, then, would you just accept a sound-byte quote without even asking if it is the result of an actual reading and analysis of his tax plan? It’s merely just a knee jerk reaction that she thought a gullible writer might just print. It represents the quintessential example of a pundit talking point. Perhaps the better article would have been that a Democrat spokeswoman made the aforementioned claim, but it was obvious that she never even looked at Jeb’s plan; her comments are simply untrue.
In fact, you yourself contradicted her attacks later in your article when you showed that “the most provocative component of Mr. Bush’s plan is his proposal to scrap many tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy”, which included the elimination of “convoluted, lobbyist-created loopholes”, and capping deductions “used by the wealthy and Washington special interests.”
As journalists who are knowledgeable about economics, if you knew the DNC commentary was detached from any economic reality and basic facts, why would you include it in your article?
Yours very truly.
Dear Mr. O’Connor and Mr. McKinnon,
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It was refreshing to read an Op-Ed about overregulation in the Washington Examiner today. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush is absolutely correct that the explosive expansion of regulations during Obama’s Administration has been a major factor in the tepid economic recovery. I enjoyed seeing a candidate speak to this issue. Below are his remarks in full:
“President Obama has presided over a massive expansion of the federal government during his six and half years in office. He shepherded Obamacare into law — a $1.7 trillion spending bill that vastly increased Washington’s role in the healthcare industry. He has raised taxes by nearly $2 trillion, while adding $8 trillion to the national debt. The president has also imposed more than 2,500 new regulations on the American economy that carry a staggering price tag of $670 billion.
It should come as no surprise then that our economy has limped along during the Obama presidency. The anemic two percent rate of growth on his watch is one of the weakest recoveries in American history and it has resulted in labor force participation falling to a 38-year low. Middle class families’ incomes have fallen by $2,000 and there are six million more people living in poverty today than when Barack Obama took the oath of office.
Right now, federal regulations cost our economy $1.9 trillion a year. This works out to an average of $15,000 per household. We need to cut excessive federal red tape and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in our nation.
Obama-era regulations such as those in Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, and his War on Coal are having a chilling effect on our economy. As president of the United States, I will conduct a spring cleaning of existing regulations to get rid of the ones that are too costly or not providing value to the American people. I will establish a regulatory budget that ensures that for every new dollar of regulations we impose on the American people we cut a dollar of existing regulations somewhere else. I will appoint judges to the judiciary who are committed to reining in regulatory excesses and preventing unelected regulators from exceeding the intent of Congress.
Finally, I will sign into law the REINS Act, which will provide another check on executive agency regulatory authority. The REINS Act would ensure that major rules and regulations are approved by Congress before they can take effect.
Regulations act as a hidden tax on the American people. Reining in their cost is just as important as reducing taxes. When coupled with my bold plan to reduce tax rates and simplify our tax code, my regulatory reform agenda will help drive America to four percent annual growth. Together, these policies will result in the average family seeing their income increase by $3,000 and their tax burden decline by $2,000. This is a significant boost in a middle class family’s budget that will make it easier for them to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, save for college and build a nest egg for retirement.
I know how to do this, because as governor of Florida, I cut taxes every year, by $19 billion total. I streamlined regulations and made my state the national leader in small business creation. During the final seven years of my governorship, Florida led the nation in job creation. Our unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent and we added 1.3 million new jobs. Over the course of my full two terms in office, Florida averaged 4.4 percent economic growth.
Secretary Hillary Clinton will double down on the massive expansion of taxes, debt and regulations we have seen under President Obama. I am offering the country a different vision that will empower entrepreneurs and American businesses to grow and provide better wages and benefits to the American people. I look forward to having the debate with Hillary Clinton and her allies on the defeatist Left about how best to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in America and provide a boost to a middle class that hasn’t seen its wages rise in 15 years.”
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The recent Wall Street Journal article discussing the pitfalls of raising interests rates in near future was so utterly fully of incorrect information and assumptions, that I felt compelled to call out the author, Mr. Narayana Kocherlakota, for his pomposity. He contends that raising the interest rates — we’re talking .25% here — would “create profound economic risks….given the prevailing economic conditions.” Though Mr. Kocherlakota recognizes the fragility of our current economy, he fails to recognize that Obama’s economic policies and the Fed’s meddling are the chief sources of the malcontent.
So here we have the current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis blathering on and on as if his point of view — that very low interest rates are necessary and good — is a foregone conclusion. But it’s not. Any economist worth his salt knows that the problem all along is one that Mr. Kocherlakota has not even considered, because it is the exact opposition of his world view. Low interest rates have been the problem all along, not the solution. Yet we have this Fed chief who can’t even understand basic economics and has the audacity to pontificate from the Wall Street Journal on a point that is incorrect.
These sustained low interest rates have been harmful to our recovery. The assertion that inflation is merely 0.3% (and therefore well under the “target 2% rate”) is laughable. Ask anyone who has purchased food or paid energy costs in the last several years, and they will tell a different story. Everything is more expensive than it was a few years ago. Compound that with soaring healthcare costs, rising taxes (at all levels of government) and stagnant wages, and the result is an anemic economy.
For Mr. Kocherlakota to suggest that a .25% rate hike, therefore, would “discourage spending” and “create a drag on economic activity” is a slap in the face to all the Americans who diligently saved for their retirement golden years — only to watch their investments and savings shrink because of the non-existent interest rates and loss of Return On Investment (ROI).
These Fed officials are just out of touch with reality. For instance, QE1, 2, and 3 were miserable failures. The open-endedness of floodgate printing left consumers and investors unsure of what to do with their money for a very long time; now that quantitative easing has ended, with no measurable positive results, we have prolonged, and thus weakened, our ability to recover satisfactorily. But officials like Mr. Kocherlakota believe otherwise.
Case-in-point: Mr. Kocherlakota suggests that, “when the public comes to doubt a central bank’s commitment to its goals, the economy can land in a permanent low-interest-rate trap. The central bank is then much less able to fight recessions effectively.” This is patently untrue. The public doubt stems from ineffective policy by the Fed, which creates market uncertainty and a reluctance to invest. Smart Americans know that the best way to fight recessions are curbing government spending, promoting entrepreneurship, and letting the market correct itself without excessive, unconventional tinkering by a central bank. The public doubt is mainly about the Fed leaders — like Mr. Kocherlakota — who fail basic Economics 101.
What Mr. Kocherlakota and many other Fed officials and Washington bureaucrats fail to recognize, is that artificial monetary policies do not create jobs or businesses, which are the greatest source of expanding an economy. This is achieved by a free market and private capital, with minimal government regulation and reduced government spending. Anything else than that, such as prolonged low interest rates, is a recipe for failure.
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Now this is pretty interesting. Last week, a federal district judge ruled in favor of the House of Representatives against the Obama Administration with regarding to Obamacare payments and Congressional appropriations. Specifically, the ruling allow for House to continue their lawsuit which claims that the Executive Branch (via Health and Human Services and the Treasury Department) has overstepped its authority by overspending on Obamacare beyond what was appropriated to them by Congress.
Rollcall has a great overview of what is at stake, how difficult the question it, how it affects the Constitution, and what it says about the Separation of Powers. You should take a few minutes and read it in full, as this type of lawsuit is fairly rare.
The House can pursue some constitutional claims in a lawsuit against the Obama administration over appropriations and implementing the health care overhaul law, a federal district judge ruled Wednesday.
The ruling means Congress has cleared a high procedural hurdle in the separation of powers case, one that usually stops the judiciary from stepping into fights between lawmakers and the executive branch.
The House has legal standing to pursue allegations that the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Treasury are spending $175 billion over the next 10 fiscal years that was not appropriated by Congress, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., wrote in the 43-page ruling.
The House lawsuit asks the court to declare the president acted unconstitutionally in making payments to insurance companies under Section 1402 of the health care overhaul law (PL 111-148, PL 111-152) and to stop the payments.
House Speaker John A. Boehner said the court’s ruling showed that the administration’s “historic overreach can be challenged by the coequal branch of government with the sole power to create or change the law. The House will continue our effort to ensure the separation of powers in our democratic system remains clear, as the Framers intended.”
Wednesday’s ruling does not address the merits of the claims. Collyer acknowledged that the court was taking a rare step, but doing so carefully into a high-profile dispute, so that it wouldn’t give the House standing to file other similar lawsuits.
“Despite its potential political ramifications, this suit remains a plain dispute over a constitutional command, of which the judiciary has long been the ultimate interpreter,” Collyer wrote. “The court is also assured that this decision will open no floodgates, as it is inherently limited by the extraordinary facts of which it was born.”
The dispute focuses on two sections of the health care overhaul law. The administration felt it could make Section 1402 Offset Program payments from the same account as Section 1401 Refundable Tax Credit Program payments. House Republicans say the health care law doesn’t permit that.
The Obama administration, during the fiscal 2014 appropriations process, initially asked Congress for a separate line item for 1402 payments. Congress did not include money for such a line item. During oral arguments in the case in May, Collyer questioned government lawyers about why the administration could ignore Congress and then argue that the House couldn’t sue them.
The administration argued that the House has other options, such as political remedies or passing other legislation, they said.
Jonathan Turley, the attorney for the House, said in a statement that the ruling means that the House “now will be heard on an issue that drives to the very heart of our constitutional system: the control of the legislative branch over the ‘power of the purse.’ We are eager to present the House’s merits arguments to the Court and remain confident that our position will ultimately prevail in establishing the unconstitutional conduct alleged in this lawsuit.”
Turley said the administration had argued that Congress couldn’t seek judicial enforcement of its constitutional status. “The position would have sharply curtailed both the legislative and judicial branches. The Court has now answered that question with a resounding rejection of this extreme position,” he said.
The case at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is U.S. House of Representatives v. Burwell, No. 14-cv-1967.
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A piece from the Washington Times this week hammers out what most of us already know — that Obamacare is lagging severely behind its initial projections for participants. The lackluster enrollment in turns impacts the financial side of Obamacare because it has missed key targets that were counted on in budget planning.
The Obama Administration has tried all sorts of gimmicks so far to tout Obamacare as a success. First it was caught counting dental plans among enrollment figures to bolster numbers, and then it slashed last year’s CBO estimate for 2015 enrollees by more than three million down to 9.1 million in order to show success if it passed the target amount (hint: it did, at 9.9 million).
Additionally, the Obama Administration has delayed implementing various parts of the bill due to backlash from citizens and businesses alike over plan availability, and also as an effort to stave off sharp premium increases which we were told would never happen. Remember how Obamacare would save $2500/family?
The article is a good overview of the current state of Obamacare. It’s worth it to read in full below:
President Obama will need to more than double the number of Americans enrolled in Obamacare exchange plans to reach 21 million next year, the target set in budget projections, in what is shaping up as the next major test for the health care law.
As of June, the Department of Health and Human Services counted 9.9 million customers who have bought plans through the federal HealthCare.gov portal and a handful of state-run exchanges.
That puts the administration ahead of it’s own estimates for 2015, but is less than half what the Congressional Budget Office projected for 2016, showing just how much work officials have ahead of them as the next round of enrollment begins in less than two months.
That puts the administration ahead of it’s own estimates for 2015, but is less than half what the Congressional Budget Office projected for 2016, showing just how much work officials have ahead of them as the next round of enrollment begins in less than two months.
“It is definitely something that people pay attention to,” said Rachel Klein, director of organizational strategy at Families USA, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable health care.
The tax during the first year was $95 or 1 percent of income above the filing threshold — a relatively minor bite. This year, the penalty will be $325 or 2 percent of income, and by 2016 it will be $695 or 2.5 percent of income.
“The substantial increase in penalties under the individual mandate next year is a big wild card,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy organization. “We’re in unchartered territory here about how effective these bigger penalties will be in nudging people to get insured.”
“The marketplaces are working,” Mr. Levitt added, “but higher enrollment would both improve the insurance risk pool and reduce the number of Americans uninsured.”
The individual mandate was included in the Affordable Care Act of 2010 to make sure enough healthy Americans signed up, spreading out the costs for higher-risk customers.
A divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld the mandate in 2012 as an appropriate use of Congress’ taxing power.
But congressional Republicans are still intent on scrapping the health care law, and may use a fast-track budget procedure known as “reconciliation” to take a swing at it.
GOP leaders say they may not be able to eviscerate the law through the budget, but Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, said repealing the individual mandate is “definitely on the table.”
“This law is only being held together by mandates and coercion, and that’s why we continue to look at ways to repeal the mandates and give people more freedom and choices,” Mr. Buck said.
Even as it struggles to meet the 2016 enrollment projection, the Obama administration is on track on other measures, including a CBO estimate that 17 million fewer people lack insurance this year because of the health care law.
But in setting lofty goals for the exchanges, the CBO estimated the effect of the individual mandate and other potential changes, including the belief that employers would shift workers onto the exchanges or that customers would enter the Obamacare marketplace ahead of late 2017, when they can no longer hold plans that do not comply with the law.
Under political duress, the White House let customers transition to compliant plans to keep Mr. Obama’s notorious promise that people who like their plans can keep them under his law.
Sizing up reality versus long-range estimates, Health and Human Services has begun to set its own, more modest goals for exchange enrollment, ignoring CBO’s guess of 12 million for 2015 and setting the mark at 9.1 million enrollees. So far, it’s besting its less ambitious goal.
The agency says it is doing its own evaluation of the marketplace and will likely announce its enrollment targets for 2016 before signups begin in November.
“At this point, the Congressional Budget Office’s projected enrollment total for 2016 seems overly optimistic,” Mr. Levitt said. “Enrollment may reach that level eventually, but I doubt it will happen by next year.”
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Kasich recently discussed the minimum wage while on the campaign trail Kasich was receptive to the possibility of raising the minimum wage 1) if the hike was “reasonable.” and 2) and when it made “sense” between management and labor.” Giving his answer in fairly broad terms allowed to Kasich to appear supportive of this policy at least in some circumstances, while also recognizing that such policy is not always beneficial, thereby satisfying potential voters on both sides of the aisle.
Kasich also went on to say that he favored state-level minimum wage policy over federal, because of the variation in economies and standards of living; his answer guarded him against outright supporting a blanket federal minimum wage rate hike — and it should. Even if Kasich were for state-level minimum wage increases, there is virtually no excuse for him to support a federal one. Anyone trying to argue that the minimum wage level should be the same in both New York and Arkansas is ludicrous. People may think that it helps, but when the minimum wage is way out of proportion for a jurisdiction in which it applies, the policy becomes especially harmful to businesses and workers.
Though Kasich’s answer was okay, he could have taken a better position. You can understand someone not wanting to take an absolute firm position on the minimum wage, considering that ⅔ of Americans favor it in some form or another. But it is also not honest to suggest that you are for it, without making it clear that your receptivity is merely to accommodate the will of the people, without trying to get the message out that the minimum wage, is in fact, a terrible thing.
What Kasich should say is that it is unfortunate that most people in the country do not understand that a minimum wage is a bad thing for the economy. It would have been preferable for him to explain that a minimum wage keeps people remaining in poverty — — but if that is what the people want, he won’t stand in the way. For his part, Kasich is not a full-throated advocate of a minimum wage, but he could have done a better job educating the voters on the pitfalls of such policy.
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The recently revived debate about birthright citizenship is both ridiculous and baffling. The language of the Constitution is quite clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Commonly known as the “Citizenship Clause”, it is the first sentence of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, passed in 1868.
This understanding of the 14th Amendment was codified four years later in 1871 in the case, Wong Kim Ark which granted citizenship “to at least some children born of foreigners because they were born on American soil (a concept known as jus soli)”. It is also worth noting that at the time of the Amendment, there was no such thing as illegal immigration, so the legal status of the parents was not an issue; the first law restricting immigration came in 1875.
The Constitution is clear, and there is no way to change it. There should be, and probably is in some way, a law against the budding practice known as “birth tourism”, which allows for a woman to come travel to this country — on a tourist visa — for the sole purpose of having a baby on American soil so that the child can be granted U.S. citizenship. Coming into the country with the intent to subvert the Constitution could be made a crime if it is not already so. For instance, the child will still be granted citizenship, but the parents become criminals — and can never come back to this country.
For those whose parents are here for some time, even if the parents are illegal, the law is clear: their birth in this country confers U.S. citizenship. But if you come here intentionally to subvert the law, the consequences should be so severe, that it makes people think twice about doing it. That should cut down on the amount of rogue circumstances for which people try to gain citizenship with no intent to reside in this country, while simultaneously protecting the 14th Amendment.
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A court ruling on Friday was a victory for those seeking information requests to the White House. A group called “Cause of Action” sued the IRS in 2013 trying to ascertain if the White House ever requested private taxpayer information, especially in light of the IRS scandal.
The requests, however, were declined by the IRS, who cited section 6103 of the tax code, which is the section governing taxpayer confidentiality laws. They argued that “the existence of those requests would be protected by confidentiality laws and couldn’t be released, so there was no reason to make the search.”
The judge however, Amy Berman Jackson, disagreed with their response, noting that “the agency couldn’t use the privacy protection ‘to shield the very misconduct it was enacted to prohibit.’” The IRS was subsequently ordered to turn over any and all recorded requests from the White House seeking taxpayer information. In December 2014, TIGTA acknowledged the existence of about 2500 documents that fit the FOIA request, from “Cause of Action”, asking for communication between the IRS and the White House. It will be interesting to see what these documents reveal.
There’s already been some hints at confidentiality impropriety. Remember that in August 2010, Austan Goolsbee spoke about the Koch Brothers’ tax structure in an anecdote to attack businesses and openly discussed tax information about their business structure that was not publicly available. Additionally, in October 2010, the agency sent a database on 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups containing confidential taxpayer information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to documents obtained by a House panel.
It wouldn’t be a stretch, therefore, to imagine that the White House, the “most transparent administration ever”, also requested or received confidential taxpayer information in collusion with the IRS.
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Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chairman of the Subcommittee on Health Care, Benefits, and Administrative Rules, also recently called on President Obama to remove John Koskinen from the head of the IRS. Alternatively, they propose Congressional impeachment if Obama does not due his due diligence and remove Koskinen himself.
DeSantis and Jordan made their case in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and is reprinted below in its entirety, as it provided a thorough summation of Koskinen’s incompetence:
“Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen needs to go.
When it was revealed in 2013 that the IRS had targeted conservative groups for exercising their First Amendment rights, President Obama correctly called the policy “inexcusable” and pledged accountability. He even fired the then-acting IRS commissioner because he said it was necessary to have “new leadership that can help restore confidence going forward.”
Unfortunately, Commissioner Koskinen, who took over in the wake of the IRS targeting scandal, has failed the American people by frustrating Congress’s attempts to ascertain the truth. A taxpayer would never get away with treating an IRS audit the way that IRS officials have treated the congressional investigation. Civil officers like Mr. Koskinen have historically been held to a higher standard than private citizens because they have fiduciary obligations to the public. The IRS and Mr. Koskinen have breached these basic fiduciary duties:
• Destruction of evidence. Lois Lerner, at the time the director of the IRS’s exempt-organizations unit, invoked the Fifth Amendment on May 22, 2013, when appearing before Congress; her refusal to testify put a premium on obtaining and reviewing her email communications. On the same day the IRS’s chief technology officer issued a preservation order that instructed IRS employees “not to destroy/wipe/reuse any of the existing backup tapes for email, or archiving of other information from IRS personal computers.”
Several weeks later, on Aug. 2, the House Oversight Committee issued its first subpoena for IRS documents, including all of Ms. Lerner’s emails. On Feb. 2, 2014, Kate Duval, the IRS commissioner’s counsel, identified a gap in the Lerner emails that were being collected. Days later, Ms. Duval learned that the gap had been caused in 2011 when the hard drive of Ms. Lerner’s computer crashed.
Despite all this—an internal IRS preservation order, a congressional subpoena, and knowledge about Ms. Lerner’s hard-drive and email problems—the Treasury inspector general for tax administration discovered that the agency on March 4, 2014, erased 422 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 emails. (Congress learned of the discovery only last month.)
Ms. Duval has since left the IRS and now works at the State Department, where she is responsible for vetting Hillary Clinton’s emails sought by congressional investigations of the Benghazi attacks.
• Failure to inform Congress. Mr. Koskinen was made aware of the problems associated with Ms. Lerner’s emails the same month Ms. Duval discovered the gap. Yet the IRS withheld the information from Congress for four months, until June 13, 2014, when the agency used a Friday news dump to admit—on page seven of the third attachment to a letter sent to the Senate Finance Committee—that it had lost many of Ms. Lerner’s emails.
During that four-month delay, Mr. Koskinen testified before Congress under oath four times. On March 26, 2014, he appeared before the Oversight Committee and pledged that the IRS would produce all of Ms. Lerner’s emails, not mentioning that the IRS already knew of the problems with her emails and hard drive. Mr. Koskinen deliberately kept Congress in the dark. Based on testimony received by the committee, we now know that the IRS appears to have spent the four months working with the Obama administration to fine-tune talking points to mitigate the fallout.
• False testimony before Congress. Mr. Koskinen made statements to Congress that were categorically false. Of the more than 1,000 computer backup tapes discovered by the IRS inspector general, approximately 700 hadn’t been erased and contained relevant information. But Mr. Koskinen testified he had “confirmed” that all of the tapes were unrecoverable.
He also said: “We’ve gone to great lengths, spent a significant amount of money trying to make sure that there is no email that is required that has not been produced.” In reality, the inspector general found that Mr. Koskinen’s team failed to search several potential sources for Ms. Lerner’s emails, including the email server, her BlackBerry and the Martinsburg, W.Va., storage facility that housed the backup tapes.
The 700 intact backup tapes the inspector general recovered were found within 15 days of the IRS’s informing Congress that they were not recoverable. Employees from the inspector general’s office simply drove to Martinsburg and asked for the tapes. It turns out that the IRS had never even asked whether the tapes existed.
Three weeks after the 422 other backup tapes were destroyed by the IRS, Mr. Koskinen told the committee that he would produce “all” Lerner documents. This statement was clearly false—you can’t give Congress “all” of the material if you know that you have already destroyed some of it.
• Failure to correct the record. After his false statements to Congress under oath, Mr. Koskinen refused to amend them when given the opportunity at a public hearing earlier this year. If a lawyer makes a false statement to a court, he has a duty to correct it. Civil officers like Commissioner Koskinen have a duty to the American people to revise their testimony when it contains inaccuracies.
• Failure to reform the IRS to protect First Amendment rights. Mr. Koskinen hasn’t acted on the president’s May 2013 promise to “put in place new safeguards to make sure this kind of behavior cannot happen again.” A Government Accountability Office report released last week found that the IRS continues to lack the controls necessary to prevent unfair treatment of nonprofit groups on the basis of an “organization’s religious, educational, political, or other views.” In other words, the targeting of conservative groups may very well continue.
If the president doesn’t remove Mr. Koskinen from his post, then Congress should remove him through impeachment. The impeachment power is a political check that, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65 in 1788, protects the public against “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story echoed Hamilton in 1833 when he distinguished impeachable offenses from criminal offenses, noting that they “are aptly termed political offenses, growing out of personal misconduct or gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard for the public interests . . . They must be examined upon very broad and comprehensive principles of public policy and duty.”
John Koskinen has violated the public trust, breached his fiduciary obligations and demonstrated his unfitness to serve. Mr. President, it’s time for Commissioner Koskinen to go. If you don’t act, we will.”
