WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator and Ranking Member of the Senate Agriculture Committee John Boozman (R-AR) released the following statement after Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced his opposition to President Biden’s so-called Build Back Better Act:

“The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress are learning the hard way what was apparent to most of us – they never had a mandate to radically transform our country. Their proposals to dramatically expand or create new government programs with a record-setting, multi-trillion-dollar price tag had many Americans fearing the predictable consequences: higher taxes, more regulations, and less power over their own lives. That’s why my Republican colleagues and I have fought these destructive ideas every step of the way.

“As ranking member of the Senate ag committee, I can tell you with certainty that even in failure, this broken process will have a lasting impact on the committee’s ability to come together over crucial legislation. Democrats set out to spend billions without any input from myself, my Republican colleagues on the committee or, perhaps most importantly, stakeholders from the agriculture industry and rural America. Not a single hearing was held to determine how to allocate these dollars. Our committee prides itself on its bipartisan history and by going this reckless route, the Democrats have made it far more difficult to work across party lines in the future.

“Now, it’s time to focus on the issues Americans are confronting like runaway inflation, breakdowns in our supply chain, labor shortages and other difficulties that complicate their lives, squeeze their budgets and make them question their family’s future. I encourage my Democratic colleagues to finally learn the lesson reality has been trying to teach them all year and work in a bipartisan way to help solve these challenges.”

Just a reminder of what Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin saved us from:

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator John Boozman (R-AR) is condemning the Biden administration’s invasive Internal Revenue Service (IRS) surveillance proposal that would allow the tax collecting agency to target Americans’ financial data.

“This is certainly not the route to go. It wasn’t too long ago that the IRS was targeting conservative groups. Now we’re seeing this situation where they’re going to be targeting the vast majority of the population,” Boozman said at a Tuesday press conference. “The idea of your financial transactions going to the IRS is wrong. That’s your business unless they have evidence you’ve done something wrong,”

Under the Biden plan the IRS would receive $80 billion more to hire an additional 87,000 agents and be empowered to snoop on Americans’ finances when their bank accounts pass a threshold of $10,000 in activity as a way to pay for Democrats’ partisan agenda.

Boozman said the plan to centralize personal financial information is the “recipe for the Chinese, Russians or some industrious hacker to get that information. There are all kinds of things that are wrong with this.”

In September, Boozman first warned Arkansans of President Biden’s reckless tax-and-spending bill measure that would expand IRS powers in order to fund his partisan priorities.

Boozman authored a column published in The Hill sounding the alarm on the additional threat to the security of personal information if this policy is enacted. Additionally, the senator has acted to block this overreach as a cosponsor of the Tax Gap Reform and Internal Revenue Service Enforcement Act, bicameral legislation that safeguards taxpayers against IRS targeting and abuse.

Hopefully, these facts will help remind people why we want to make sure Democrats are out of office.