WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, today joined guest host Charles Payne on Your World with Neil Cavuto to discuss his new legislation to stop the Internal Revenue Service from snooping on Americans.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s invasive American Rescue Plan tax provision: “Well, it was slipped into the American Rescue Plan—that’s what they called that so-called ‘COVID pandemic relief package’ that they shoved through on a completely partisan basis last March. What they want to do is what they couldn’t do with individuals, that’s to try to access all of our transaction data $600 or greater. So, they’re going to force it onto small companies, because every third-party platform—whether it be Venmo, PayPal, or the like—any transactions that exceed $600 in a year are going to have to be reported to the [Internal Revenue Service]. Again, more invasion of our privacy. And Charles, you know the American public hasn’t trusted the IRS with our private data and our privacy since Lois Lerner was at the Obama Administration, and certainly not after ProPublica received the leaked IRS information during the Biden Administration’s first year that exposed individual taxpayers’ private data just for partisan gains.”
Hagerty on his new legislation, the SNOOP Act: “It looks as though the Biden Administration is looking to the Chinese Communist Party for their policies in terms of dealing with Americans and our privacy. It’s unacceptable. It’s wrong. This is not going to be popular with America at all. Now that we’ve found out what’s in it, my legislation will strip it out. And that’s exactly where we need to be—back to something we can trust with the IRS. You know, I questioned Treasury Secretary [Janet] Yellen after the ProPublica leak. I asked her when was the IRS going to be held accountable. We still haven’t had any accountability for the leak of private individual information last year by this Administration. We certainly don’t need to be moving in this direction.”
Hagerty on the Biden Administration emulating the CCP: “Again, it’s back to what you said: it’s just like the Chinese Communist Party, they’re setting the goal post for this Administration—video surveillance, you know, invading our privacy, monitoring every transaction that we do, this really does scarily sound like the Chinese Communist Party, and that’s where the Biden Administration wants to take us.”
Hagerty on bipartisan opposition to IRS overreach: “Yes, I think [passage] may even happen before, because even my Democrat colleagues, as they look at this, and as they look to their constituents, this is not popular in America, Charles. And if they intend to implement this through this American Rescue Plan, it’s going to receive a lot of backlash in Democrat states as well as Republican ones.”
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