House Majority Leader McCarthy: the IRS scandal may be the tip of the iceberg and the Obama administration deals with scandal after scandal

 Rep. Kevin McCarthy, House Majority Leader, gives us his weekly view from Capitol Hill. In his words:

 "As a Conservative, I believe in limited government. Freedom is the engine that drives America’s greatness, but the unprecedented growth of the federal government in recent years threatens to undermine this freedom. While President Obama and Washington Democrats used their

supermajority to greatly expand the Federal government from 2008 to 2010, the increasing power wielded by unelected bureaucrats in Washington is equally troubling. And nowhere has this become more apparent recently than with the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

 "The revelation that the IRS unlawfully targeted groups because of their political views was shocking, to say the least. But the recent claims that two years’ worth of emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner are now “lost” is unacceptable and simply hard to believe. This week, the House Oversight Committee released an email chain between Ms. Lerner and an IRS technology specialist from April 2013, less than two weeks after the IRS scandal came to light. In the thread, Ms. Lerner inquired about the ability to search for instant messages sent on the IRS email server, telling her colleagues about the “need to be cautious about what we say” since Congress could later request to see these messages. When told that the IRS software was not set to automatically save these messages, Ms. Lerner replied: “Perfect.” The disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s emails, in combination with her refusal to testify on multiple occasions and the latest revealed memo to her staff to cover their tracks, leads me only to believe that she has something to hide, and the House will not stop until we get to the bottom of this scandal.

  "In addition, the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held a hearing on Tuesday in which several whistle-blowers offered shocking testimony detailing extreme dysfunction in the VA. They confirmed troubling reports of a VA that has neglected veterans, falsified records, and harassed those employees who attempted to expose such failings. Personnel change is a necessary first step in reforming the VA, but these problems will persist until there is a complete change in the culture of the VA. The men and women who have fought so bravely for us deserve nothing but the best, and I will continue my fight to ensure increased accountability within the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, and provide greater care for our veterans and their families.

 "Our government should represent the representative democracy that our Founders envisioned and established. Yielding more and more power to unelected bureaucrats to intervene in our everyday lives runs counter to that vision and I will continue to work to rein them in.