Republican Congressman Bill Johnson of Ohio hit the nail on the head in his floor speech Tuesday when he said, “The federal government is getting too large and has too much control.”
This line, of course, isn’t anything new to conservatives, who have uttered it almost as long as Obama’s been in office. Unfortunately, it’s taken the reveal of three major scandals in a single week to spread the message to the American people that a smaller federal government is more effective than the mess we now have.
Certainly this is a teachable moment for Americans. But there are still larger and louder voices in the mainstream media who wish to drown out Johnson and others like him, who wish to mitigate the Internal Revenue Service’s abuse of its authority as nothing more than an instance of “low-level” indiscretion. If the Democrats and the mainstream media succeed in selling the American people this fallacy, the lesson will be lost.
The IRS scandal was not an unfortunate anomaly, but rather the predictable fallout of the explosion of new government powers under the Obama administration. Power concentrated in just the hands of a few tends to become corrupted, a fact that the nation’s Founding Fathers were aware of when they drafted the Constitution. That’s why they included the concepts of checks-and-balances and democratically elected representative leaders in our Constitution – so that no one in the federal government could become too powerful.
But this wisdom is completely nullified when the government becomes so swollen and so complex that it’s nearly impossible to hold anyone accountable for anything. And yet the federal government, as Johnson pointed out in his speech, is about to get much larger when Obamacare is fully implemented in January 2014 – bringing with it the largest sex of new tax law changes in 20 years. No wonder the U.S. Supreme Court called it “the biggest tax on the American public in history!”
Not only that, but we get to relish the fact that the IRS will soon enjoy a far greater role in the daily lives of Americans than it was ever meant to, thanks to President Obama and his Democratic cronies. And when you add in the fact that the former head of the IRS’s tax-exempt division now runs the agency’s Obamacare office, it really makes you wonder: Could there be a more explicit violation of the principle of accountability in government?
The simple truth is that when the government expands, its accountability contracts. In a sprawling bureaucracy, it is much easier to dodge responsibility for misconduct. “Plausible deniability” is the name of the game, as we have seen with Jay Carney’s admission that senior members of Obama’s White House staff refused to apprise him of the IRS’s wrongdoings, for fear he might be implicated in them. In such a massive establishment as the IRS, it can be very difficult to find out. And when those at the top feel confident in their ability to deflect or otherwise completely evade any sort of incrimination, power will inevitably be abused at the expense of the American taxpayers.
