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.

Rep. Nunes Appointed Chairman of Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade

Today, my office issued the following press release: 

Washington, D.C. – Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) today was appointed by the House Ways and Means Committee as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Trade.  

“It’s an honor to have been given this responsibility at a time when expanding trade is one of the vital ways to improve our sluggish economy,” said Rep. Nunes.

The Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over taxes, international trade, Social Security, Medicare, and various welfare programs, among other areas. The jurisdiction of the Subcommittee on Trade includes tariffs, import and export policies, customs, international trade rules, and commodity agreements.

“During his tenure on the Committee, Rep. Nunes has been a key player in developing economic policies that help create more jobs in this country,” declared Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp. “In his new role as Trade Subcommittee Chairman, his expertise will be critical to creating new opportunities to sell American-made goods and services around the globe while holding our competitors accountable. I look forward to working closely with him to expand America’s share of the global marketplace.”

Rep. Nunes identified progress toward a U.S.-EU free trade agreement and the expansion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as priorities for his tenure as Chairman of the Trade Subcommittee. “Boosting U.S. participation in free and fair trade will benefit both the United States and our trading partners,” he said. “It will open new opportunities to promote economic growth for my constituents in California’s San Joaquin Valley, as well as for the agriculture, manufacturing, and service industries throughout America.”

Congressman Nunes, who represents parts of Tulare and Fresno Counties, also serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was first elected to Congress in 2002.

A Visit to Boomtown

What will pull our economy into recovery? Contrary to the Obama administration’s dreamy pronouncements, it’s not windmills, solar panels, or other forms of “clean energy.” These heavily subsidized industries may eventually produce abundant energy, but that day is far in the future. For now, the 5 million “green-collar jobs” that Obama promised have not materialized, and the million electric cars he vowed to put on the roads are rarely seen.

What’s going to spark our economic recovery is traditional energy – that is, the proven energy sources that transformed America into an industrial powerhouse. As I explained on the John Batchelor show (listen here), I just returned from a trip to Williston, where I saw how oil drilling in the Bakken Formation - which stretches across parts of North Dakota, Montana, and southern Canada – has turned a sleepy North Dakota town into a bustling city. In Williston, the biggest employment problem is that they can’t get enough workers there fast enough to fill all the available jobs. Work on oil rigs often starts at $100,000 a year, and many other jobs offer higher salaries than I’ve seen anywhere else for comparable positions. Housing prices are skyrocketing, and the physical infrastructure is developing at a breakneck pace – the place is an absolute boomtown.




Williston, ND


This is all enabled by horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracking, and other advances in drilling technology and methods. These innovations have helped boost U.S. oil output by 7 percent this year, the biggest jump since 1951. As the AP reports, “U.S. oil output is surging so fast that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest producer.” Furthermore, “Increased drilling is driving economic growth in states such as North Dakota, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana and Texas, all of which have unemployment rates far below the national average of 7.8 percent. North Dakota is at 3 percent; Oklahoma, 5.2.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal finds that America’s recent surge in natural gas production is boosting our manufacturing sector. According to the Journal, “Economists at Citigroup Inc. earlier this year estimated that increased domestic oil and gas production, and the activity that flows from it, would create up to 3.6 million new jobs by 2020 and boost annual economic output by between 2% and 3.3%.”

This boom in oil and gas production is occurring almost entirely on private lands. That’s unsurprising – through its veto of the Keystone XL pipeline, its lavish funding of failing green energy schemes, the thickets of regulation it lays upon oil and gas drillers, and countless other incomprehensible decisions, the Obama administration has repeatedly shown a bizarre hostility to traditional energy.  

As usual, we have to rely on the private sector. America could become the world’s indispensable energy producer, and hundreds – maybe even thousands – of booming towns like Williston could pop up across the nation – if the government will just stay out of the way.