I absolutely encourage them:

The House on Wednesday approved legislation that would prohibit performance bonuses for senior executives at the Internal Revenue Service.

Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) amendment to the fiscal 2015 Financial Services appropriations bill was approved on a 282-138 vote, with one member voting present.

Notice, by the way, that Democrat Jose Serrano – the presumably default IRS defender in Congress, because apparently somebody has to be and Serrano was no doubt in the bathroom when the pick was being made – gamely tried to turn this into a morale issue. Here’s the thing, though: this measure was pretty explicitly aimed at senior officials at the IRS. The rank-and-file should be as outraged at the hyper-partisan idiots running the place as the rest of us are. If the rank-and-file are not, well, then I want their morale to suffer.  Because the point of all of this is to teach the IRS Thou shalt not meddle in domestic politics*. If that means spreading the pain around, then that means spreading the pain around.  Negative reinforcement is a wonderful thing.

Yes, I understand that this is rather hard-nosed, not to say inflexible, of me.  Gee. I wonder where I possibly could have learned that kind of behavior from…

Via Instapundit.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Congress is also nibbling at their budget. Although a 3% cut isn’t actually too bad, in this context: it’s enough to get the IRS’s attention while not giving them much ammunition in their pushback. As Jim Geraghty’s fiction work The Weed Agency more or less notes, government agencies assume higher budgets every year like we assume that there’s always going to be oxygen around. Meddling with the money is sometimes the only way to get a bureaucrat’s attention…

*The IRS shouldn’t necessarily meddle in foreign politics, either.  Unless the foreign people who they’re meddling with are, you know, bad or something.