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Slate’s John Dickerson says the GOP is right to feel outrage at the IRS.
… One of the big complaints I hear from voters, particularly conservative voters, is that the government exempts itself from the burdens it puts on everyday people. So members of Congress are treated differently under the Affordable Care Act than regular citizens, President Obama can decide which laws he wants to follow and which ones he doesn’t, and the IRS doesn’t have to be as circumspect as the rest of us. Sometimes there are good explanations, like the congressional “exemption” from the ACA, but since the IRS is stingy with its benefit-of-the-doubt powers, it has a high bar with the public.
Democrats mocked the elaborate displays of outrage at the hearing—always a safe thing to do—but you don’t have to share Ryan’s view that the IRS is engaged in a cover-up of a scheme to target conservatives to recognize a more universal element to Ryan’s anger. The IRS expects all of us to maintain rigid compliance, spelunk-on-demand for every receipt, and is highly skeptical of what might be garden-variety mistakes until we prove otherwise. So if the congressional system of inquiry feels a little itchy, tight, and irrational, perhaps this will be a learning opportunity or a good topic for the next pricey conference.
Daniel Henninger says the IRS scandal is not Watergate; it’s worse than Watergate.
On Jan. 27, 2010, Mr. Obama used his State of the Union speech to explicitly criticize the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, seated in front of him, for their campaign-finance ruling in Citizens United v. FEC.
The forces Mr. Obama put in motion with this attack were described in a seminal piece for this newspaper by former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith—”Connecting the Dots in the IRS Scandal.” Through 2012, a succession of Democratic senators urged the IRS to investigate 501(c)(4) nonprofit political groups. Mr. Obama himself in a March 2010 radio address spoke of “shadowy groups with harmless sounding names” that threaten “our democracy.”
Here’s a partial list of the American place names where the “tea party” groups audited by the IRS were organized: Franklin, Tenn.; Livonia, Mich.; Lucas, Texas; Middletown, Del.; Fishersville, Va.; Jackson, N.J.; Redding, Calif.; Chandler, Ariz.; Laurens, S.C.; Woodstown, N.J.; Wetumpka, Ala.; Kahului, Hawaii; Sidney, Ohio; Newalla, Okla.
He’s right, these people do live most of their lives in the shadow of daily American life, out of the public eye. Still, they considered themselves to be very much inside “our democracy.” Then the IRS asked them for the names of their donors, what they talked about, political affiliations.
The IRS tea-party audit story isn’t Watergate; it’s worse than Watergate.
Just for reminders, we go back five years to something Glenn Reynolds wrote about the president joking about having the IRS audit his enemies. More corrupt than Nixon.
Barack Obama owes his presidency in no small part to the power of rhetoric. It’s too bad he doesn’t appreciate the damage that loose talk can do to America’s tax system, even as exploding federal deficits make revenues more important than ever.
At his ArizonaStateUniversity commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU’s point by remarking, “I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”
Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it’s hard to see the humor. Surely he’s aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. …
Kimberley Strassel shows the connections between Lois Lerner and Dems.
… But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.
There’s plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?
Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.
Sen. Carl Levin, the head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exchanged at least 12 letters (that we know about) with the IRS in 2012 alone. IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, met with Sen. Levin’s staff in 2013. And former IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller testified that the IRS acted in part because Sen. Levin was “complaining bitterly” to the agency. In what forums? Were email conversations also taking place, behind the scenes, between the Levin office and Ms. Lerner and other IRS officials? …
The Redskins get a defense from Jonathan Turley.
… Even water has become a vehicle for federal agency overreach. Recently, the Obama administration took punitive agency action against Washington state and Colorado for legalizing marijuana possession and sales. While the administration said it would not enforce criminal drug laws against marijuana growers — gaining points among the increasing number of citizens who support legalization and the right of states to pass such laws — it used a little-known agency, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, to cut off water to those farms. The Bureau of Reclamation was created as a neutral supplier of water and a manager of water projects out West, not an agency that would open or close a valve to punish noncompliant states.
When agencies engage in content-based speech regulation, it’s more than the usual issue of “mission creep.” As I’ve written before in these pages, agencies now represent something like a fourth branch in our government — an array of departments and offices that exercise responsibilities once dedicated exclusively to the judicial and legislative branches. Insulated from participatory politics and accountability, these agencies can shape political and social decision-making. To paraphrase Clausewitz, water, taxes and even trademarks appear to have become the continuation of politics by other means.
What is needed is a new law returning these agencies to their core regulatory responsibilities and requiring speech neutrality in enforcement. We do not need faceless federal officials to become arbiters of our social controversies. There are valid objections to the Redskins name, but it is a public controversy that demands a public resolution, not a bureaucratic one.