Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold,
the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans' "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops--that is, during an audit, they'd have to detemine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion....The proposal, which House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has declared a top priority of the new Republican Congress, has 221 cosponsors and is expected to pass the House easily. The bill caused controversy and sparked a national protest campaign in January after Mother Jones reported that it would limit the Hyde Amendment's rape exception to cases of "forcible rape." Experts told Mother Jones that move could prevent Medicaid from paying for abortions in many rape cases, including statutory rapes. Despite the presence of many other controversial provisions, the bill regained momentum after its sponsors promised to strip the "forcible rape" language. But during Wednesday's hearing, Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) highlighted the IRS enforcement issue, which has until now flown under the radar.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/gop-bill-irs-abortion-audits there is an irony here that can't be ignored. Last year the Right was falling down crying over the 'death panels' Obamacare would produce.. only to produce their own 'death panel' in AZ..
Last year the fear was all those 1000's of new IRS workers that were going to have to be hired if Obamacare passed, and the horror was then that those IRS workers would be involved in your healthcare... which produced this law, where now the IRS gets to ask you why you had an abortion and then, not only make you tell them your inner most health-related secret, but prove it to them..
I know he's black and all.. but can't we get over that already? I know they expected him to be taken care of by now, but really, does the country deserve this kind of punishment for electing a black African?
How many jobs does this create anyway?
Sure, the GOP knows that they can't create any more jobs than Obama.. and they know that they will block anything he want to do that will create jobs because they wants his numbers low in 2012.. but how to get around that? easy, fill the stomach of the ideological,religious right with anti-abortion,anti-gay,anti-liberal,anti-union,anti-woman legislation to satiate their hunger for awhile..
at what point is this kind of governing enough?
