Michigan legislative action thread
Posted on 06/18/2014 2:37:54 PM PDT by cripplecreek
Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) has received thousands of dollars from the labor union representing IRS agents, leading to strong criticism from Republicans.
Peters has collected $8,500 from the National Treasury Employees Union over his career, according the National Republican Senate Committee. The union has spent more than $100,000 so far in the 2014 cycle, including a $2,500 donation to Peters Senate campaign.
The NRSC demanded that Democrats benefitting from the largesse of the union return the money, since IRS employees are “stonewalling” a congressional investigation into the agency’s admitted targeting of conservative non-profit organizations. The scandal has exploded after the IRS claimed that it had lost two years of emails sent from disgraced IRS official Lois Lerner.
“Gary Peters hasn’t said a word about the missing emails and is sitting back rather than demanding answers,” NRSC spokeswoman Brook Hougesen said in a statement. “This is just another instance of Gary Peters putting his own political career above the well-being of Michiganders.”
The Peters campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Peters, a third term congressman, plays a unique role in the IRS scandal. Congressional Republicans have repeatedly asked for IRS emails to 13 Democratic lawmakers, including Peters, without a response. Congress is exempt from Freedom of Information laws.
Hougesen called on Peters to speak out about the administration’s lack of cooperation with the congressional investigation. The congressman’s silence on the issue, she said, demonstrates that he places higher value on campaign money than transparency.
“Rep. Peters not only refuses to say whether he will return the contributions from the IRS Union, but he refuses to demand additional information from President Obama and the IRS about this deeply concerning scandal,” she said in the statement.
This is not the first time that Peters has been criticized for appeasing campaign donors at the expense of his constituency. He has embraced a hardline environmentalist agenda, including support for coal restrictions and opposition to hydraulic fracturing, while receiving substantial support from green groups. Peters helped Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.) raise $400,000 from radical environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer in February. Reid’s Super PAC has spent more than $2 million attacking Peters’ opponent, Republican Terri Lynn Land.
The NTEU has a long history of giving almost exclusively to Democrats. The union doled out nearly $600,000 to legislative candidates in the 2012 campaign with more than $550,000 going to Democrats. Peters’ congressional campaign received $2,500 from the union during the 2012 campaign.
This is pure bribery. Government workers should not be allowed to organize against their bosses (we the people).
Federal Government employees should never receive bonuses of any kind and should never be allowed to unionize. PERIOD!!
/echo
"Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes after they take off their sunglasses"......or something to that effect.
The real serious issues regarding Peters will be better addressed in the closing weeks before the election. People are prone to suffer from short term memory loss..........
I’m kind of curious about the US patent office employees today.
So that would be $100,000 of taxpayer money directly being used to subjugate the taxpayer. Got it.
I was previously unaware that IRS agents had a Union.
something stinks there alone.
Thank you
20 plus million dollars would go quite a ways towards fixing the VA!!
oh well
It was seven hard drive crashes, the lack of a centralized archive, a practice of erasing and reusing backup tapes every six months, and an IRS policy of allowing employees to decide for themselves which e-mails constitute an official agency record.
that is ABSURD!!
The next time we get a Republican President, remember to put some heat on him to abolish federal unions with a stroke of the pen. The federal workforce is only permitted to unionize because of a Presidential Executive Order.
From Wikipedia:
Executive Order 10988 is a United States presidential executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy on January 17, 1962 that recognized the right of federal employees to collective bargaining.Executive Order 10988 was effectively replaced by President Richard Nixon's Executive Order 11491 in 1969.
The beltway is a theater of the absurd. The Obama administration has been a parade of one grand production after another. It's like they grew a batch of stupid in a petri dish of steroids and then wallowed in it.
IRS to propose specific limits on nonprofits’ political activities
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.