On Monday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” conservative radio show host Mark Levin, who may have prompted the recent revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups, said that the response from House Republicans has left much to be desired.
Levin had a number of suggestions as to how Congress should exercise its authority in getting answers from the IRS.
“The point is, I don’t think we should make a decision and say you know, ‘I can’t believe people are capable of this’ or “I can’t believe that this would be’ — they need to investigate this,” Levin said. “And the way you investigate this is use the full powers that Congress has in its oversight powers to issue subpoenas, to get documents, to interview people, depose them, to bring people in and make them testify under oath, and to do it publicly because the government belongs to us and that includes the Internal Revenue Service.”
Levin maintained that there is contempt for the conservative movement within halls of Congress and the Republican Party. But he also added that House Republicans were late in their investigation, calling them “impotent.”
“I’ll tell you something else — the president should have apologized to these tea party and conservative groups,” he said. “Members of Congress who have been thumbing their nose at them should do the same, and again, I know this is unpopular — the Republican Party that has nothing but contempt for the conservative movement and these tea party organizations now coming to their rescue — they owe us an apology too, because in the House of Representatives, I want to say it for a third time — what they did was impotent. What they did, it is not — great, they’re going to hold hearing on Friday, I understand. OK, we’ll take it — a year late, but we’ll still take it.”
“But again, I want to tell you, there are a couple of law enforcement folks at the Treasury Department, and the inspector general’s office who did their jobs,” he continued. “When we wrote them and we laid the matter out, they interviewed me and we gave them everything we had and they interviewed a number of other people. And there are other legal groups like [chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice] Jay Sekulow’s group who deserve credit, too, for representing a number of these groups. The fact of the matter is there’s a reason why people are so negative on the federal government. They should be.”
