Category Archives: ethics

The IRS Refuses

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House Ways and Means Committee chairman Jason Smith (R, MO) and Committee member David Schweikert (R, AZ) are pressing IRS Commissioner David Werfel for information regarding the IRS’ destruction of 30 million tax documents two years ago. They’ve sent a letter to Werfel

asking for the memorandum that explained the recommendation for the “unprocessed, paper-filed informational returns.”

Schweikert told Just the News‘ The Center Square

[W]e’ve never been able to get a satisfactory answer from the IRS of why this was done was done, and is that policy that allowed it to happen? Is there a way to make sure this never happens again?

The IRS is being its usual uncooperative self, though:

The committee is looking for the memo by August 8, but the tax agency has not complied with previous requests for additional information. For example, the committee asked for the memo on May 17, 2022, but the IRS said on May 18, 2022, it would be too risky and declined to provide it, according to the letter.

The IRS isn’t the only Federal agency that refuses to cooperate. The DoJ is famous for its uncooperativeness, and so are State and DoD. There are others. DoJ is especially egregious because it just as routinely refuses to enforce Congressional subpoenas.

There is another way for Congress to get cooperation, or at least to sanction the agencies refusing to cooperate. Congress can apply the Holman Rule to reduce, even eliminate, the salaries of individual Federal employees who refuse. Congress can reduce, even eliminate, funding for the agency that refuses, or whose personnel refuse, to cooperate.

Congress should stop dickering over the matter, too. Immediately on first refusal, one of both of the above measures should be undertaken.

That, though, takes more political courage than too many incumbent Congressmen have so far demonstrated.

Not Successful?

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The Wall Street Journal thinks so regarding Texas border security. Here’s their headline and subheadline from last Friday:

Texas Spent Billions on Border Security. It’s Not Working.
Operation Lone Star, with $4.5 billion spent so far, has had little effect on migration while facing charges of civil-rights abuses

And this, in Findell’s third paragraph:

The program is an explicit challenge to the national government, which by law controls international borders and immigration enforcement.

The rest of her piece follows closely on her headline while largely ignoring that key datum in her third paragraph.

On the other hand, there are some actual facts regarding Texas’ Operation Lone Star:

Since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the multi-agency effort has led to over 394,200 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 31,300 criminal arrests, with more than 29,100 felony charges reported. In the fight against fentanyl, Texas law enforcement has seized over 422 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.

That sounds pretty successful to this poor, dumb Texan. That’s also despite the national government’s—President Joe Biden’s (D) administration’s—conscious decision to not control our southern border, to instead allow record millions of illegal aliens to flood across that border.

The idea that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) administration faces civil-rights charges is literally, narrowly true. The cases brought, though, are risible. There’s nothing at all abusive about transporting illegal aliens—who volunteer for the trip—to loudly avowedly sanctuary cities where, by those cities’ proclamations, all illegal aliens are welcome. (Progressive-Democratic Party mayors, like New York City’s Eric Adams, now are whining about having the influx of illegals into their cities, but those plaints are just that—empty whining. Were Adams, et al., actually serious about no longer wanting the illegals, he and his cohorts would cancel the sanctuary status of their cities.)

An Opportunity to Reverse Kelo

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Kelo v City of New London was a 2005 case involving our Constitution’s 5th Amendment Takings Clause: a homeowner who didn’t want to sell her home in New London, CT, to a property developer who said he needed the property to finish out the development of shopping mall. New London agreed on the developer’s representation that his mall would produce more tax revenue for the city than the homeowner’s property tax remittances. In the resulting suit, the Supreme Court decided that government has the authority to commit such a Taking and redistribution for the public purpose of increasing government’s tax revenue.  The Court said that one man’s private purpose is superior to another’s so that other must surrender his property to the one.

What the Takings Clause actually says is

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

For public use, not for public purpose, and certainly not for a private enterprise’s claimed public purpose.

Now a case is developing that should end in the Supreme Court and present the Court with an opportunity to reverse that shameful ruling.

A public school district in Texas is pursuing an eminent domain process to remove a 78-year-old man from the home that his family has owned for more than a century in order to build a high school football stadium parking lot.

The 78-yr-old homeowner’s daughter, Tara Upchurch:

I want you to understand what the significance of this place is for my father. It is where he played as a child with his grandparents, where he woke up 4 a.m. to milk cows, it’s where he spent 39 years happily married to my mom, and it’s where he raised a family, and it’s a place we never thought he would leave[.]

On the other hand,

Aldine ISD is planning to build a $50 million football field and parking lot on his property and is using eminent domain options after the Upchurch family rejected an initial offer to purchase the property last year, KPRC reported. Eminent domain allows the government to acquire private property for public use.

Aldine ISD wants it, and its desire is more important than a property owner’s…ownership. Well, then. That settles it. That’s what Kelo has wrought.

Private property ownership isn’t actually ownership: if another private entity wants it, all that one needs to do is to persuade a government or quasi-government that its desire is greater than the original owner’s ownership, and the owner must give it up.

This is the mess that Kelo caused, and this is the mess that the Supreme Court should get an opportunity to clean up, and it should clean it up.

More Coverup

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Recall that President Joe Biden has had (and still has?) classified documents squirreled away in his garage at his house in Delaware, albeit protected by the presence of his Corvette. Recall, further, that Biden has had classified documents squirreled away in a variety of unsecure locations ever since he walked away with them when he was a Senator and had no legal ability to possess them anywhere. Among those unsecure locations is the library at the University of Delaware. And now,

Delaware’s highest court has blocked a request by conservative groups seeking to access President Joe Biden’s Senate papers at a state university.
The July 6 ruling by the Delaware Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that sided with the University of Delaware in denying a request from Judicial Watch and another group seeking access to the records, which Biden gifted to the public university in 2012.

But,

The university says Biden donated the documents on the condition they not be released until they have been “properly processed and archived.”

But, but: that was 11 years ago. Why is the University so slow in the processing and archiving? Its slowness raises other questions in my pea brain:

What classified documents are among those documents?

What information regarding Tara Reade, who accused Biden of sexual assault in 2020, is among those documents?

What else is the university hiding for Biden’s sake?

A Good Move

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It needs a parallel move, as well. Sadly, both are pipe dreams in the current government.

Recall that President Joe Biden (D) has pushed, through the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his Loan-Level Price Adjustment rule which penalizes Americans with good credit scores by requiring mortgage lenders to charge them higher interest rates in order to lower the rates charged those mortgage borrowers who have poor credit scores.

Senator Roger Marshall (R, KS) and Senator Mike Braun (R, IN) have introduced the Middle Class Borrower Protection Act that would block Biden’s move.

This is a good initial move, but it wants a separate, parallel move: reduce the funding of the FHFA by the aggregated dollar amount of the loan rate increase that Americans with good credit scores would be forced to pay were the Biden Rule left intact. Leave that reduction in place, and freeze the FHFA’s remaining budget at its current level for a minimum of five years (to remove it from election cycles), with automatic extensions of the freeze until Congress is satisfied that no one in the agency is working on ways to get around the MCBPA’s bar.

Sadly, both are pipe dreams at present: there are too many Progressive-Democrats in the Senate for either legislation to pass.