Joe Crowley: “I thank my friend and colleague and ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee for yielding me this time. I do…”

“I thank my friend and colleague and ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee for yielding me this time. I do appreciate and I don't want to call into question the motivation of how this bill came to the floor, but I find it hard to believe that we are here on this particular issue dealing with individuals who work at the IRS and what would be deemed as a fireable offense and somehow not be related to the ongoing investigation into the IRS and the political motivations behind not the gentleman but my Republican colleagues as a whole in bringing this bill to the floor without a hearing in committee. That it just happened to fall onto the floor this afternoon and has no tangential connection to what is happening, I find a little bit difficult to believe. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill because it is not an attempt at better governance, but rather it is a solution in search of a problem. In the months of investigations into the IRS targeting of nonprofits, here is what we found without a doubt: Progressive groups were targeted alongside Tea Party affiliations. There was no interference or coordination in the targeting scandal by anyone at the White House or at the Treasury Department. No IRS agents have ever been cited or even been accused of forcing their own personal political ideology onto the process of granting nonprofit status. In fact, the person who was in charge of the IRS nonprofit office in Cincinnati self-identifies as a conservative Republican.…”