



Every few years the Republican Party goes on a jihad against the IRS. The most famous was probably Sen. William Roth’s theatrical witch hunt in the 90s that regaled an eager public with stories about jackbooted thugs and “Gestapo-like” tactics. The most recent is the seemingly endless investigation into charges that the IRS targeted grassroots conservative nonprofits at the behest of its partisan masters. These charges have turned out to be almost entirely groundless—just like Roth’s—but don’t make the mistake of thinking this makes them pointless. You just have to wait for the other shoe to drop, as it did yesterday:

The House late Monday night adopted proposals by voice vote to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) amendment to the fiscal 2015 Financial Services appropriations bill would cut funding for the IRS by $353 million. Specifically, Gosar’s amendment would cut that funding from the IRS enforcement account and use it toward deficit reduction. Gosar argued that funding for the IRS would be better used toward reducing the deficit than toward the agency caught in GOP crosshairs….”More directly than financial or condition of the country is the fact that this agency has shown contempt for the American taxpayer.”

The Roth Hearings ended up with reduced funding for IRS enforcement, something that took over a decade to recover from. Now Gosar wants to cut IRS enforcement funding too. Coincidence? Not so much. If you want to reduce taxes on the wealthy, after all, there are two ways to do it. You can either reduce their tax rates or you can make it easier for them to evade the tax rates that already exist. Either way, it’s a boon to anyone with lots of money and good tax planners. But I repeat myself.

In any case, this was always inevitable. The goal of anti-IRS jihads is always to reduce funding for enforcement. And despite what Gosar might want you to believe, very little enforcement has ever been aimed at middle-class taxpayers or small nonprofits. It’s mostly aimed at the rich, for obvious Willie Suttonish reasons. Weakening enforcement actions against the Republican Party’s core constituency has always been the end game for the IRS scandal, and now we’re finally there.