WASHINGTON – U.S. House Republicans remain divided over whether IRS Commissioner John Koskinen should face impeachment over accusations he obstructed investigations into the IRS targeting scandal that consumed the agency in 2013.
Republican Congressman Peter Roskam (IL-06) isn't for moving in that direction, and only one member of the Illinois delegation has signed onto the effort to impeach Koskinen: U.S. Rep. Mike Bost (IL-13).
"Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust," said Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz last October. "He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled."
Chaffetz filed a resolution calling for impeachment proceedings to proceed after Koskinen testified before Senate lawmakers over the targeting scandal, and shortly after the Justice Department said it would not bring charges against Lois Lerner or any of the other IRS officials involved in the processing of applications for tax-exempt status.
Thursday evening, those charges were revived on the U.S. House floor by several conservative members.
"You have an IRS commissioner who breached multiple duties that he owed to the public, and he violated the public trust," the UPI reports Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla. said.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, noted Koskinen was installed as commissioner to reform the IRS after the political targeting was exposed, but "every single duty he had, he breached."
Earlier in the day, however, The Hill reports that Illinois' Roskam said he "was not sure" if it would be a good idea to proceed with the call for impeachment, citing the dwindling length of Koskinen's term, the short congressional schedule and the realities of what the Senate would do if the House took action.
Roskam was active in the U.S. House's investigation into former IRS chief Lois Lerner's alleged dragging out the IRS approval process for conservative groups applying for non-profit tax status.
Roskam said this week if Koskinen were impeached, "the question then becomes who would come along and who would be the new person. And I think that there is an advantage to having the current IRS commissioner in place in that you know exactly what he's going to say, exactly what he's going to defend, and so forth."
None of the other Illinois delegation have signed onto House Resolution 494, other than downstate Congressman Mike Bost.
Roskam’s has made a show of “holding the IRS accountable” when he has actually done NOTHING. But he did get several 5 minute segments on FOX News! I’m sure that made him happy. Roskam is all talk and no action, just another go-along -to-get-along politician. The issue with the IRS is really personal to me, because the tea party group I founded & lead, West Suburban Patriots, was #147 on Lois Lerner’s secret hit list. While my group in Roskam’s district was being persecuted and he knew it, Roskam was nowhere to be found. The voters of the 6th Congressional district had a chance to replace Roskam in the March Primary with a great candidate, Jay Kinzler. Wake up people! The IRS has become the American Gestapo.
Roskam? Just another gutless Establishment Republican?
Exactly Carol! The IRS has become a fascist arm of the Obama administration & federal govt!
How the hell did Peter, Peter, get re elected?
Oh, I forgot, it’s Illinois, and it’s Die Bold machine voting time. That should guarantee easy victories for the girly, establishment stooges, too feckless to exercise their duty to protect the people.
This guy is afraid of his own shadow, I can’t see how the voters of the 6th District can live with themselves after electing this greedy, social climbing can kicker.
Always kicking that can down the road … right Peter?
Just beginning impeachment proceedings in earnest will clean up a whole bunch of departments overnight. In school districts where vouchers begin to receive serious discussion, miraculous improvements have been known to occur almost immediately. Obama can do nothing about impeachments, and they will undermine his hold on the bureaucracy.
As left wing as our Washington bureaucracy may be, protecting itself comes before anything else. That easily trumps loyalty to the current or any president. Our great Congressional representatives don’t even have to shut down the government to impeach Koskinan or any other federal official. The impeachment process is completely political: “If Congress can find enough courage of its (claimed) convictions, it can remove just about any official.”
I hope that everyone, who voted for Roskam, in March, regrets that vote. They should have voted for a conservative, Dr. Jay Kinzler. In Feb. 2014, Roskam voted to increase the debt ceiling. In Dec. 2015, he voted for the omnibus bill that increased Planned Parenthood funding and Obama’s executive orders that give amnesty to illegal aliens.
Illinois RINOs leading from behind again.
There is yet another reason why this man should be impeached: he encourages illegal aliens to use false SSN numbers!
As long as the information is being used only to fraudulently obtain jobs, Koskinen said, rather than to claim false tax returns, the agency has an interest in helping them. “The question is whether the Social Security number they’re using to get the job has been stolen. It’s not the normal identity theft situation,” he said.
“Only to fraudulently obtain jobs”!
Quotes from the Washington Examiner. Here’s another article from Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2016/04/13/irs-admits-it-encourages-illegals-to-steal-social-security-numbers-for-taxes/#347308fd237a
We don’t need to impeach in this case because it is of criminal nature and the sergeant of arms needs to hand cuff this criminal and march him off to the holding cell before he can be tried by a jury for several crimes, including sabotaging our national security in time of war.
It would be nice if the Trump “catastrophe” actually happened and swept out Ryan, Roskam, and these other pathetic blue state RINOs, replaced with leadership that are actually from the states and regions that are the base of this classically liberal, but working class Republican Party. Problem is it won’t happen because this “catastrophe” is all a lie to keep Trump from fixing the country.
The greatest accomplishment of Goldwater in ’64 was sweeping out a generation of Bigger-than-Democrat big government Republicans. That, no doubt, cleared the way for Reagan. Unfortunately, it came at a cost: trashing of the traditional immigration system, welfare-lifestyle instead of bread&soup line safety-net, and 56,000 dead in Vietnam. Make no mistake about it, though, had Goldwater not been the nominee this trash still would have become law. Almost every Republican voted with the left in 1965 to trash our immigration system, even without the loser RINOs.