Editors at Issues and Insights warn of the danger associated with a politically motivated Internal Revenue Service.

Our American republic did quite well for nearly a century without the IRS or its forerunner, the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue. Today, federal “revenooers” are the greatest threat to freedom in a country where liberty is already being lost at an alarming rate.

The IRS is more than a mere revenue collector for the federal government. It has often been used an instrument of intimidation, even terror, against political foes, and those who might not be so enthusiastic about paying income taxes, or simply have a financial hardship that limits their ability to pay.

Administrations all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s have used the IRS to target their opponents. Elliott Roosevelt, one of FDR’s sons, said his father “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

And of course most of us recall the IRS sitting on and rejecting applications for tax-exempt status for groups that were trying to organize against the policies of Barack Obama, essentially barring their existence.

Now it’s Joe Biden “turn” to unleash the pain. His misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act created … “​​a small army of IRS shock troops who will abet the progressive-socialist political complex’s consolidation of raw political power while wrecking families, individuals, and small businesses.”

The legislation, passed by a party-line vote in both chambers of Congress, hands the IRS an additional $80 billion, more than six times its current annual budget. …

… Daniel J. Pilla, author of more than a dozen books about the IRS and taxpayers’ rights, and who almost 50 years ago saw the agency seize his father’s business, padlock the doors, auction off its equipment, and then go after the family’s home, has said we should “expect that every conservative political action group and public policy advocacy group in the U.S. will come under IRS attack, a coordinated attack including ‘other law enforcement agencies.’”