Catherine Engelbrecht is a hero in this country, although the federal government probably doesn’t think so and I doubt she’ll be getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom draped around her by Barack Obama. But that’s exactly why she’s a hero – because she has no intention of letting the government treat her as a subject. And that should serve as an inspiration for the rest of us, because we shouldn’t either.
Catherine was on my show this morning after I read the latest about her from our friends at Rare. If you don’t know the background, Catherine is the founder of True the Vote, which she established after working as an election volunteer and noticing all kinds of irregularities going on. Her purpose in creating True the Vote was to ensure that elections were fair and not manipulated by fraud.
The left didn’t like that and they retaliated hard against Catherine, making all kinds of accusations against her, which were quickly parroted by the Democrat Party propagandists at MSNBC as well as Democrat members of Congress including Elijah Cummings and Sheila Jackson Lee. And when True the Vote applied for tax-exempt nonprofit status, you can probably guess what happened. Naturally, the IRS came after not only her nonprofit but her business as well. Bringing audits and inquiries that found nothing, they nonetheless fined Catherine and her husband $20,000 – just because they’re the IRS and they can!
But Catherine refused to take this lying down. She sued the IRS, demanding, among other things, that they give her a yes or no ruling on her nonprofit status. The finally gave her a yes – she certainly qualifies, after all – probably in the hope that it would shut her up. But there was more to the suit. Catherine also went after the IRS for outrageous demands it made of her, some of which she outlined on the show today:
“They wanted to know everywhere I had ever spoken, to whom I had spoken, who was in attendance when I spoke, and, Herman, everywhere I intended to speak through 2013.”
That’s similar to what happened to me over 20 years ago when I got audited by the IRS and they wanted to know all the places I had spoken as vice president of the National Restaurant Association.
They didn’t stop there, either. They demanded to know if Catherine had future political ambitions, as if that is any of their business.
We featured Catherine Engelbrecht’s entire 7:12 testimony on our show yesterday, and she deserves congratulations for being a fighter. In her testimony, she said she is not a victim because she’s going to fight.
“When we think about victims, victims are victims because they have no option. They are helpless,” she said. “We in this country are not helpless and I think we’ve forgotten just how loud our voices can be.”
In addition to True the Vote, Catherine further promotes this cause at WeWillNotBeSilenced.org.
We need more heroes like Catherine, because we are not subjects! The Declaration of Independence says the government derives its authority to govern from the consent of the governed. They do not have our consent to treat anyone the way they treated Catherine, and the only way they will get away with is if good people stand by and do nothing. Instead of doing that, we need to follow Catherine Engelbrecht’s lead.
