GOP Bill: IRS Must Audit All Abortions

... to verify that they were not paid for with tax money. Teddy Partridge of FDL, quoting Nick Baumann of Mother Jones:

Another step towards smaller, less intrusive government, courtesy of the libertarian-minded teabagger-dominated House majority: Internal Revenue Service agents will be required to determine whether your abortion was paid for with tax dollars. Even more horrifying, income tax return filing forms may need to ask if you’d had an abortion and how you paid for it.

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

The absurdly redundant ‘forcible rape’ language since stripped from this bill, sure to pass the House, was a Trojan horse. The remaining legislation is the most sweeping assault on women’s reproductive health ever undertaken by Congress.

“Were this to become law, people could end up in an audit, the subject of which could be abortion, rape, and incest,” says Christopher Bergin, the head of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit tax policy group. “If you pass the law like this, the IRS would be required to enforce it.”

...

I am not sure what Boehner is attempting to do with this bill. It won't pass the Senate, although if it did, I couldn't tell you with confidence that Obama wouldn't sign it. And it can't possibly be good politics beyond the GOPer base, indeed, probably not even within the entire GOP base. So the only two things this bill can possibly be intended to do are

• send a big FUCK YOU to all Democrats and sensibly disposed independents in the electorate, and
• delay House action on anything that might positively affect the economy.

When this Congress started, and recognizing Obama's utter lack of cojones in facing down Republans on anything whatsoever, I was really depressed that things were going to be worse even than they were in the first two years of Obama's term. Now, I still can't say things look good, but I can find some slight cause for optimism that the GOP will manage to commit suicide, to off itself so effectively that even the Democrats can't turn victory into defeat. We'll just have to wait and see.

H/T ellroon for making me aware of this atrocious bill.