Charles Rangel: “I do not stand here to get involved in a jurisdictional fight between the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee…”

“I do not stand here to get involved in a jurisdictional fight between the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Appropriations, and there is not a Member of this House that I have more respect for than the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. We have served together over the years, and sometimes even forgot we were Republican and Democrat because he has been such a gentleman even when we disagreed on issues. I am just surprised there is not more outrage on the process. Whether it is Ways and Means or Appropriations, the whole idea that a staff member can contact the Internal Revenue Service, and the Internal Revenue Service drafts a provision of law and then somehow it finds itself in a conference report is something that takes away the integrity, and not of the tax-writing committee or the appropriation committee, but the United States Congress, the House and the Senate. This is outrageous when we are talking about such a sensitive issue. The United States is one of the few republics which has a democracy which has a volunteer system for the filing of income tax. True, we have the threat of what happens if a taxpayer is so unlucky that they are audited and found to have done something wrong, but the whole basis of the system is having confidence that what you are telling them is being held private.”