Undeterred by the failure of his previous attempts to legislate Exile and Punishment for Apoplectic Taxpayers Residing In Other Territories, on Monday Jack Reed (D-RI) introduced his third amendment to ban covered expatriates — people who found financial success overseas thanks to the countries to which they emigrated many years ago, or ordinary wage-earners who in the past five years missed some of the dozens of pages of confusing tax forms that Americans abroad must file and that Homelanders have never seen.
The number of this latest amendment is S.A. 1609. It appears at page S5075 of the Congressional Record for Monday, 24 June 2013; the text is identical to the earlier S.A. 1233 we discussed two weeks ago, including in its misspelling of “principal purpose” as “principle purpose”. However, it is not an amendment to the immigration reform bill itself, but rather a second-degree amendment to Patrick Leahy (D-VT)’s border security amendment S.A. 1183 — in a manner heavily reminiscent of Carl Levin’s FATCA, which after its repeated failure as a standalone bill was moved as an amendment once he finally finally find somewhere to sneakily insert it. The Senate already invoked cloture on S.A. 1183, and scheduled it for a final vote on Wednesday (tomorrow).
I’ll leave it to Tim or others to comment further on the parliamentary procedure implications of this. As he mentioned earlier, even if the amendment passes, the House might still “blue slip” the whole bill if they agree that permanent exile for ex-citizens or other provisions of the bill violate the Constitution’s Origination Clause requiring that all bills raising revenue come from the House. However, note that this version of the amendment, unlike S.A. 1252, does not include the provisions of the original Ex-PATRIOT Act that would hit covered expatriates with an additional 30% tax on U.S.-source capital gains (like that already imposed on non-resident aliens present in the U.S. for half the year or more).
Reed got this inserted into the Senate Appropriations Committee report on the latest DHS appropriations bill:
https://beta.congress.gov/congressional-report/113th-congress/senate-report/198/1
DHS made a statement to the committee about immigration issues in general, but didn’t mention anything like the above:
http://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/07/10/statement-secretary-homeland-security-jeh-johnson-senate-committee-appropriations
Still looking for info.
@eric
I am so glad I don’t give a damn. I am never going back there again. I am so glad it doesn’t even affect me, though my heart bleeds for those it does. But sometimes I think the sooner we all forsake America, the sooner they might come down from their high horse. It would just be a lesson in humility.
@eric, thanks for staying on top of this. Amazing that Reed just won’t quit!
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the law to which Reed is referring here places burden of proof on the government. In other words they have to show evidence that someone’s motivation for expatriation was tax avoidance.
The failed Casey-Schumer “Ex-PATRIOT” attempted to shift burden of proof to anyone who is a “covered” expartiate is automatically guilty until proven innocent, but that never passed. So do I understand correctly that if Reed is successful at provoking the state dept to “issue regulations”, presumably those regulations would have to involve determination of proof of motive before anyone could be excluded? Is that right?
PXP