Victims of Government': Meet the Ill. Man Who Has Been Fighting Washington Bureaucracy For Nearly 25 Years

In what appears to be the first in a series titled “Victims of Government,” the office of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Tuesday released a video showing how government bureaucracy can wreck a man's life.

In the following video, the viewer is introduced Steve Lanthrop, an Illinois man who has been battling government red tape for nearly 25 years.

His crime? Accomplishing something Washington wanted done but had put off for years: Converting a local dump into a lake and saving the area from flooding.

Instead of thanking Lanthrop for his hard work and personal investment, the feds have harassed him for more than two decades for turning a wetland into, um, an even wetter land:

“We need to hear more stories like this. Are you paying attention, Republican message consultants? This is the kind of thing that gets to even the lowest-information voter. This is the sort of red-tape spiderweb everyone dreads stumbling into,” writes Human Events’ John Hayward.

“This is the sort of thing your government spends vast amounts of money on: employing a largely unseen army of bureaucrats and lawyers to spring traps on well-meaning people who make honest efforts to play by the rules, while responding to even the tiniest spending cut proposal by lining up cops and firefighters for pink-slipping,” he adds.

And it appears Sen. Johnson is serious about getting this message out: As the above video show, he has been actively soliciting voters for personal accounts of out-of-control government intrusion.

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Featured image screen grab.