By Brandon Moseley
Alabama Political Reporter
In an email sent to supporters, Alabama Republican Party Chairman Bill Armistead said that the IRS has gone too far with its persecution of political groups not in support of the Obama administration and said that it is time to abolish the IRS.
Chairman Armistead said, “The Internal Revenue Service has gone too far! And, we are learning just how far they have gone with their monitoring and intimidation of conservative organizations leading up to the 2012 presidential election. All of this was done for political gain by the Obama campaign. But, they ran into a buzz saw when they began targeting conservative groups like the Tea Party by refusing tax-exempt status and harassing them for information about their organization. No one can tell the story better than Alabama’s own Becky Gerritson from Wetumpka.”
Becky Gerritson, President of the Wetumpka Tea Party, testified before Congress that the IRS demanded that she give them lists of her volunteers, donors, and speakers. They also wanted to know which volunteers might run for office and wanted Gerritson to turn over all of the group’s communications with elected officials and reports on the content of speeches at Wetumpka Tea Party meetings.
Gerritson told the Congressional Committee assigned to investigate reports of IRS misconduct, “I am not here as a serf or vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy. I’m a born free American woman, wife, mother and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being, and to monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. Your post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty. And you have faltered.”
Chairman Armistead asked, “So, what is the answer to the out of control IRS? ABOLISH THE IRS! And there is a plan to do just that. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has a plan to eliminate the IRS and establish a tax that is “Simple, fair, flat, and that protects our freedoms”. It’s a simple plan with a simple implementation. Sen. Cruz’s plan would abolish the IRS, which at last count had 92,000 employees. And, hard as it is to comprehend, Obama plans to add 16,000 more IRS employees to implement the Obamacare tax. In place of the complicated tax system that we currently employ, a simple tax system uniform to all Americans would be implemented.”
Armistead said that the Cruz plan would replace the gargantuan current tax code with its hundreds of forms and thousands of pages of instructions with one document the size of a post card. “The taxpayer would simply write down what they earned the past year. There would be instructions to deduct charitable contributions and home mortgage payments. A simple formula to determine what is owed would then be calculated and the process is over. The plan would also include a standard deduction for low-income earners. That’s it. In one simple paragraph, we fit the entirety of the new tax code, replacing that current tax code that is about 12 times the length of the Bible. One of the main benefits of Senator Cruz’s plan would be to effectively repeal Obamacare, a plan that could never be executed without the small army of 16,000 IRS agents to be hired for the expressed purpose of implementing the gargantuan socialist healthcare policy.”
Chairman Armistead wrote, “The IRS has amassed too much power and it is time to move in a different direction. We pay taxes in this country in order to provide for the defense of this nation and other limited roles that the government should handle. We do not pay our taxes to a government with the expectation that our dollars will be used to suppress our votes and mute our voices, but that is exactly what this President has done.”
