There was "
not even a smidgen of corruption" at the IRS,
Barack Obama
tells us. Obama blamed the targeting on rules that were "difficult" to
interpret and that caused "bureaucratic" mistakes, but the rules have
been in place since 1959 and until 2010 there didn't seem to be a
problem implementing them, nor was there any targeting of disfavored
political groups.
We know Obama's lying partly because his lips were moving,
but it was made clearer in the latest congressional hearing on the
political targeting perpetrated by the IRS on Obama's opponents.
House
Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) revealed a June 2012 email
from Treasury attorney Ruth Madrigal to IRS officials, including Lois
"Plead the Fifth" Lerner, regarding the political activity of tax-exempt
groups and how the IRS could more easily keep tabs on those groups
"off-plan," which Camp noted means "hidden from the public." No wonder
Lerner refused to testify before Congress.
The
email reveals that the proposed new rules published in the Federal
Register in November 2013 were actually being ironed out at least by
2012, and other evidence suggests it was as early as 2011. That means
the IRS's targeting was clearly intentional and officials wanted to
codify such tactics. Furthermore, the political targeting wasn't, as
Obama claimed, the result of "confusion" over the old rules. Indeed, IRS
officials seemed to believe the Supreme Court had erred in its Citizens
United decision on campaign finance reform, and they sought to rectify
that via regulation.
Even
the ACLU -- no friend of conservatives -- warned of its "serious
concerns" with the proposed IRS regulations, saying that the IRS
"threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political
discourse in America." Indeed, the First Amendment was written to
protect political discourse precisely of the kind coming from the Tea
Party.
Nevertheless, new IRS Commissioner John Koskinen did the unthinkable at the hearing:
He
apologized for his agency's targeting of Tea Party groups. It's
"intolerable," he said, and "It won't happen going forward."
Furthermore, "to the extent that people suffered accordingly, I
apologize for that." His apology is all fine and good, but it
doesn't fix the problem or stop the proposed new rules from codifying
the abuse. It also doesn't hold anyone accountable for effectively
silencing the Tea Party in an election year. (In fact, IRS officials
just received
$62.5 million in bonuses.)
Given what we know so far, the very legitimacy of Barack Obama's
re-election can be called into question because of a serious and
scandalous abuse of power that went far beyond some "bureaucratic"
mistakes in a Cincinnati office.
