Hi,

Last week’s circus on the House floor was an absurd means to an inevitable end: Kevin McCarthy is the new Speaker of the House.

This week, the McCarthy era began with a grossly predictable assault on federal spending. The first vote of the Republican controlled chamber to defund the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) successfully passed in the House.¹

They specifically want to undo recent investments made to the IRS designed to strengthen the agency’s ability to crack down on millionaire, billionaire, and corporate tax cheats. In other words: they want to issue handouts to their wealthy donors.

Sign the petition: the US Senate must reject House Republicans' attempt to undermine the IRS for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

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Who will benefit from a weakened IRS? Notably Donald Trump. His recently released tax returns expose a strategy of overseas bank accounts and manipulative real estate evaluations that effectively allowed him to dodge taxes.^2,3 This is exactly why Democrats included an extra $80 billion in funding for the IRS in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.¹ To go after ultra-wealthy tax cheats like Trump.

Republican’s response has been to paint the I.R.S. investments as “militarizing the IRS” and creating “hordes of armed IRS agents” that would target small businesses and working Americans.⁴ They pretend to be serving the interests of working Americans when really, they’re just following the classic GOP playbook of catering to the ultra-wealthy.

This hypocritical fear mongering is also on display in the name of their bill, “The Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act.” A more appropriate name might be something like “The Millionaire, Billionaire, and Corporate Taxpayer Protection Act.”

Claiming their legislation will help working Americans when in reality it will only benefit the top one percent is about to be the status quo for the McCarthy run House. We need to rely on the Democrat-run Senate to hold the line and prevent this harmful legislation from becoming law.

Sign the petition: Tell the US Senate to reject House Republicans attempts to defund the IRS!

Thanks for taking action,

Miguel and the team at Demand Progress

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Sources:
1. NY Times, “House Republicans Vote to Rescind I.R.S. Funding,” January 9, 2023.
2. The Independent, “Trump had foreign bank accounts in China, UK and Ireland as president and one year paid more foreign tax than US,” December 30, 2022.
3. CNN, “Key takeaways from six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns,” December 30, 2022.
4. Reuters, “Fact Check-The IRS is not hiring thousands of armed agents, job ads show opening for specialized unit,” August 17, 2022.

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