This information might come as a surprise to Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and a good number of his fellow Republicans: The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency that is responsible for law enforcement. The Internal Revenue Service is the same way.
The majority of people already consider the FBI to be an elite law enforcement agency. However, in addition to investigating tax evasion and fraud, the IRS also investigates other types of crimes.
To name only a few examples, there is organised crime, the trafficking of drugs, illegal gambling, the washing of money, and public corruption.
Republicans, like Grassley, want to portray themselves as staunch supporters of law enforcement and are appalled by the prevalence of violence in the United States.
In point of fact, the vast majority of Republican senators present at a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee either completely disregarded or hardly discussed the real topic of the meeting.
Instead, they put on a show of how concerned they are about acts of violence and threats made against law enforcement officers, judges, organisations that oppose abortion, and inhabitants of particular cities that are governed by Democrats.
According to Grassley, “the baseline is rising,” which translates to “greater rates of violent crime are becoming the new norm.”
“Anti-police rhetoric, de-policing activities, progressive prosecution, bail reform, and movements to defund the police are some of the key drivers of this spike in violent crime,” Exactly one week ago, in this same committee, at our hearing about attacks on police, we discussed the crisis that is currently being faced by law enforcement officers.
This is by no means a recently emerging pattern or trend. In the United States Congress, it frequently seems as though two or more hearings are taking place simultaneously, with each party pursuing quite different and almost entirely unconnected objectives.
It is probably accurate to say, for instance, that some Democrats tend to be less concerned about assassinations of doctors and health care workers who provide abortions than they are about vandalism of anti-abortion family planning centres and protests outside the homes of Supreme Court justices. This is in contrast to the level of concern that these Democrats have regarding the vandalism of abortion providers.
The fact that the hearing was intended to be about threats, bullying, and intimidation of poll officials and employees made this specific demonstration particularly noteworthy.
As we learned during the hearings of the select committee on January 6, certain election workers who were directly targeted by the previous president of the United States, Donald Trump, were forced to leave their homes for an extended period due to threats and harassment.
One would assume that senators in the United States, regardless of their party affiliation, would consider the safety of elections and the individuals who uphold the law and carry out the duties of democracy to be, if not of equal importance, then at the very least of some interest. To cut a long tale short, the answer is no, it is not.
To get more specific, some of these same senators are now engaging in what Grassley could call “anti-law enforcement rhetoric” in response to the news that the FBI searched the Florida property of the former president of the United States, Mar-a-Lago, allegedly in search of secret papers.
For instance, Senator Ted Cruz has been quite vocal on Twitter regarding the politicisation, corruption, and “weaponization” of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri who was photographed doing a fist pump in solidarity with those who rioted in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, stated in a tweet that the action taken by the FBI was an “unprecedented assault on democratic values and the rule of law.”
When an armed supporter of Donald Trump turned up and attempted to attack an FBI office in Ohio, and when armed supporters of Trump demonstrated in front of an FBI office in Phoenix, I can’t think that anyone was particularly surprised by either event.
During this time, Grassley continued his peculiar campaign of fearmongering against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In an appearance on Fox & Friends on Thursday, he posed the following question: “Are they going to have a strike team that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business owner in Iowa?”
This remark was made in answer to a query regarding legislation that was passed by Congress just the week before last that would spend almost $80 billion on tax enforcement.
Hatred for the Internal Revenue Service is evidently not hard to stoke up. However, in my experience (which I actually have had, due to an oversight that deposited our tax payment in the wrong account one year), the Internal Revenue Service does not send out strike forces but rather letters.
Most of the time, rather than using an assault rifle, they will take bank accounts and garnish pay from behind a computer.
NBC News claims that the organisation is so severely understaffed that employees have been required to carry in their own office supplies, just like they would if they were teachers in a school.
Read more:-
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- There is a Division Among Montana Senators on the Inflation Reduction Act, and They Are Working to Change It
- The Fourth Check on the Stimulus- a Summary of the News for December 6
The vast majority of employees at the Internal Revenue Service, including accountants, office workers, computer technicians, and even auditors, do not carry concealed weapons.
It would appear that some IRS agents whose jobs require them to investigate violent criminals like gangsters and drug dealers are permitted to carry guns in the same manner as other law enforcement personnel.
They will be at greater risk as a direct result of the actions of Senator Grassley and other self-proclaimed “protectors” of the police.
