John Ensign: “this bill that we have before us today is brought forth in a bipartisan fashion. I would like to recognize my colleagues…”

“this bill that we have before us today is brought forth in a bipartisan fashion. I would like to recognize my colleagues on the Committee on Ways and Means, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Portman] and the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Cardin]. They have done outstanding work. This is a very good bill, and I think we are hearing a lot of reasons why this is a good bill today. But the American people have been way ahead of the Congress for many, many years. They have recognized how intrusive the IRS has been. In my city of Las Vegas, the IRS is viewed almost like the KGB or Gestapo was once viewed in other countries. This is not necessarily the fault of individual IRS employees. This is the fault of the U.S. Congress and the Presidents of past, who have passed an incredibly complex Tax Code. Former Representative Sam Gibbons said, in a retreat that we had a couple of years ago, that there was no single Member of Congress more responsible than he himself was for messing up our Tax Code. That was because every single time that they tried to reform the Tax Code, because of all the special interest groups that we have up here, it gets more complex. And the more complex it is, the more incentive there is for the IRS to do some of the shenanigans that they do. I said before that the American people are way ahead of the Congress. The American people are demanding not tax reform, but tax replacement.”