Remember Lois Lerner?
For those who don’t, Lerner was the career bureaucrat who used her position at the Internal Revenue Service to investigate and harass people who applied to the IRS for non-profit status for local tea party groups during the Obama Administration. She was not an Obama political appointee, but merely a nameless, faceless bureaucrat who either decided on her own or was encouraged by the Obama White House to use the power of the IRS to make their political opponents’ lives miserable.
Lois Lerner matters today because the Biden administration remembers how they used the IRS against their political foes and now wants to ratchet up that power. Under the guise of increasing enforcement to stop tax evasion, Biden is asking Congress to force banks to send the IRS in-depth records of all transactions for every individual bank account in America that is larger than $600.
Six-hundred dollars, why would the cancel culture warriors in the Biden administration effectively want the banking information for almost everyone in America? Trust me, they aren’t looking for tax fraud from people with bank accounts of $600.
What they are trying to do is lay the groundwork for establishing a Chinese-style social credit system in America, by having the ability to have your and my financial records available at any time. Currently, banks are required to report cash withdrawals of more than $10,000 under the guise of tracking potential illegal drug deals, but there is no reasonable rationale for tracking every Americans bank accounts that are $600 and above.
Some will say, so what? What harm can be done? And I may have been one of those people in the past, but not anymore. In the past decade, we have seen the devastation to individual lives done by Lois Lerner’s witch hunt. An abuse of power, which she paid no personal price for conducting.
We have also seen an out of control FBI lie and make up charges, first against candidate Donald Trump and then President Trump that continued for years into his presidency. These charges were driven by the FBI and the Department of Justice’s abuse of the FISA Court to legally spy on people associated with the Trump campaign and the President himself – all based upon a politically fabricated dossier. When the dust settled and they finally had to concede that there was never any legitimate basis for the three year attempted coup, the main career bureaucrat actors in that fraud which did more damage to our nation than anything that occurred on January 6, have not seen a day behind bars, even as they financially prosper for their infamous acts.
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We have seen intelligence services use the Patriot Act to spy on American citizens, enveloping the 4th Amendment to the Constitution in high tech obsolescence and no one has gone to jail.
We have seen a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army leak a proven lie about a conversation between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine, in violation of his sacred trust. The President got impeached over the lie, while the Defense Department establishment sought to promote the Lt. Colonel.
We have seen much, much more, and the story remains the same. Every time we trust the administrative state with power with the understanding that it won’t be abused, it becomes a political weapon against those who seek to limit the scope and power of the federal government.
So, excuse me if I immediately think about how the cancel culture which runs Washington, D.C., corporate media and the Silicon Valley tech tyrants might abuse every single American’s personal banking information.
The same people who make a habit of targeting conservative political activists and believe that every voice should be heard, so long as those voices agree with them, cannot be given the keys to our bank accounts. Congress is deciding whether or not to open this Pandora’s Box through an obscure amendment to what will be a multi-thousand page bill.
On this one, when the DC politicians say trust us, America needs to tell them NO as loudly as possible.
Let’s keep the IRS out of monitoring our personal bank accounts. We’ve seen this story before and we know how it turns out and the ending is always ugly.
The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.
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