Young Fresno pilot enters the record books

 

At a luncheon hosted by Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central California today, I had the honor of introducing and presenting an honorary Congressional resolution to Jack Wiegand, an extraordinary young man from Fresno who recently became the youngest person to fly solo around the world. During the event, the 21 year old shared photo slides from his trip, which lasted 59 days and covered 21,000 nautical miles across twelve countries. Congratulations to Jack on his incredible accomplishment.

Grilling the IRS

Photo Credit: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Congress’ Ways and Means Committee held a hearing today with acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller to investigate IRS abuses against conservative groups. One of the revelations concerned a question that IRS official Lois Lerner was asked during her May 10 appearance on a conference panel. In response to a question from Celia Roady, who was sitting in the audience, Lerner for the first time publicly revealed that the IRS had targeted conservative groups.   

Responding to my questioning during today’s hearing, Steven Miller admitted that Roady’s question to Lerner was orchestrated in advance. Note that just two days before that, Lerner had appeared before the Ways and Means Committee and never mentioned the targeting of conservatives. Instead of admitting these abuses to Congress, Lerner and Miller apparently believed the impact of the abuses would be reduced if they were first revealed during a conference panel, in response to a scripted question designed to appear spontaneous. After Miller’s testimony today, Roady admitted that her question was pre-arranged with Lerner.

You can watch my questioning of Miller here, and read about the exchange here and here.

While we made some progress today in bringing the truth to light, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, including who ordered the abuses, whether any government officials outside the IRS were involved, and why IRS representatives outright lied to Congress about this for so long.

You have not heard the end of this story. More likely, it’s just the beginning.    

Yet another Obama administration scandal

It’s recently been revealed that the Department of Justice accessed phone records from the Associated Press while investigating a national security leak. This included seizing AP phone records from the House of Representatives Press Gallery, which is often used for phone conversations between reporters and Members of Congress. I explain my views on the issue in a new article here.  

 

These investigative tactics, especially when considered together with recently revealed IRS abuses and the Obama administration’s dissembling about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, provoke serious concerns about this administration’s commitment to transparency and the rule of law.

 

Congress will continue investigating these matters, and rest assured that we will hold accountable anyone who abused the public’s trust.

The Benghazi Whitewash

Shocking testimony from Gregory Hicks, a top U.S. official in Libya during the September attack on our Benghazi consulate, makes it increasingly clear that the Obama administration misled the American people about the Benghazi assault.

All the emerging evidence shows that the administration tried to spin the Benghazi story to match its triumphant claim that al Qaeda is all but eliminated. A deadly attack on a U.S. consulate by al Qaeda-linked terrorists doesn’t fit the narrative, so the administration dismissed intelligence reports revealing that known terrorists were involved in the attack, insisting instead that it evolved out of a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islamic YouTube video.  

The Weekly Standard today offers new details about Obama officials’ removal of references to al Qaeda and affiliated groups from the CIA’s initial talking points on the attack. (The magazine’s graphic showing the editing of the talking points is below.) This supports the damning findings of an interim investigative report released by five congressional committees, which found that White House and top State Department officials altered the talking points to protect the State Department from criticism; that contrary to administration claims, the talking points were not changed to protect classified information; and that pre-attack reductions in security levels at the Benghazi consulate were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, which contradicts Hillary Clinton’s statements on the issue.    

Then there is the testimony of Hicks himself. Having reported from Libya that the consulate was under terrorist attack, he described to a House committee his shock when he first heard the administration’s false narrative. After challenging its story, he was effectively demoted.

In the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, we will continue to demand an honest explanation of the Benghazi attack and a full account of what seems to be a coordinated cover-up. Four Americans were killed in Benghazi, and the American people deserve to know exactly what happened there and why they were not told the truth.     

 

Tax Reform Now!

Image by Flickr user: Enter the STory / Creative Commons

Tax Day has come and gone. But in the House Ways and Means Committee, we are continuing efforts to simplify and reduce taxes, recognizing tax reform as a vital way to jumpstart economic growth and job creation. I am developing my own proposal to revamp business taxes – explained here and here – that would spur companies to invest, expand, and hire more workers.

Why do we need tax reform?

In the past year, you probably paid unreasonably high taxes and then, like most American taxpayers, you had to pay more money for help in filing your tax forms. And of course, if you made a mistake understanding the mammoth 74,000-page tax code, you could get audited and fined.  

There is no reason our tax code has to be this complex and punitive. It frustrates taxpayers, strangles business start-ups, suppresses economic growth, and allows special interests and big business to game the system. But President Obama doesn’t seem worried; he asked for a trillion dollars of new taxes in his latest budget proposal.

The President’s proposal may be disappointing, but it’s no surprise. The Democrats’ vision of big government costs big money, and that means taxpayers are always asked to give more. President Obama tries to have it both ways, promising all kinds of new government treats to the middle class while vowing that someone else – “the wealthy” – will foot the bill.

When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. The middle class will not be immune to the huge taxes hidden in ObamaCare. They are not exempt from the long economic slump worsened by our indecipherable tax code. And like everyone else, they risk being subjected to huge future tax hikes that will be forced on us to tame our spiraling and unsustainable national debt.

At the risk of putting tax accountants out of business, the Ways and Means Committee aims to bring about a fair, reasonable, and simple code that taxpayers can actually understand – imagine that.      

Sequestration hits, yet America endures

You may have been expecting doomsday if you believed the Obama administration’s shrill warnings about what would happen if the federal government underwent a 2 percent budget cut. But the sequester has taken effect, and the Republic has somehow survived.

Nearly everyone agrees that the sequester – an idea that originated in the White House – was not a good way to cut spending, and it has undoubtedly involved some tough cuts. But when the Democrats demanded yet another tax hike as their price for replacing the sequester with targeted cuts, any alternative path was closed.

The good news is that the Obama administration’s forecasts of sequester doom have been exposed as empty hype. America endures – even though numerous Central Valley families with plans to visit D.C. were disappointed when the President’s office, in a cynical publicity stunt, cancelled public tours of the White House and blamed the sequester. (Miraculously, Congress has found a way to continue offering public tours of the Capitol building.) 

The bad news is that the sequester doesn’t come close to erasing the federal government’s trillion-dollar deficits, its $16 trillion national debt, or the tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities weighing down our entitlement programs. This debt bomb will overwhelm the economy unless we begin balancing the budget. When House Republicans introduce our budget next week, you’ll see our plan to do that.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Senate is also expected to unveil a budget next week – its first in four years – that will surely include the Democrats’ usual mix of imaginary spending cuts and real tax hikes.

I urge you to take a good look at both plans and decide for yourselves which one is more likely to erase the deficit, make entitlements sustainable, and put America back on the path to prosperity.