Promise me you will never run for office again and we will drop this case." So spoke Lois Lerner.
By George F. Will
The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obamas party.
Whats been said of confession that it is good for ones soul but bad for ones reputation can also be true of testifying to Congress so Lois Lerner has (again) chosen to stay silent. Hers however is an eloquent silence.
Furthermore congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives by delaying what once was the swift routine granting of tax-exempt status.
So the IRS far from repenting of its abusive behavior is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups many of which are conservative to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140000 comments most of them complaints some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define candidate-related political activity" and to narrow the permissible amount of this.
Lerner is so far the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior.
And from Obamas. After calling the IRS behavior outrageous" he now says there is not a smidgen" of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his
administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns.
Obama breezily says there was nothing more sinister than boneheaded decisions" by wayward and anonymous IRS underlings. Certainly boneheadedness explains much about this administration. Still does he consider it interesting that the consequences of IRS boneheadedness were not randomly distributed but thwarted conservatives?
The rules that Obama says befuddled the IRS boneheads to his benefit read today exactly as they have read since 1959. For half a century they did not prevent the IRS from processing applications for tax-exempt status in less than three months. Some conservative group should offer $10000 to anyone who can identify a liberal group that had the experience scores of conservative groups have had an application delayed more than three years and receipt of an IRS questionnaire containing at least 60 questions.
Speaking of questions:
- Can anyone identify a Democratic Senate candidate whose tax records were leaked as Christine ODonnells were when she was the Republican candidate in Delaware in 2010?
- Is it a coincidence that in January 2011 after Catherine Engelbrecht (right) requested tax-exempt status for two conservative groups she founded in Texas King Street Patriots and True the Vote the
Engelbrecht family business was notified of its first IRS audit?
- Does James Comey wonder why (this was before he became FBI director) five months after Engelbrechts tax-exemption request FBI agents appeared seeking information about attendees at the King Street Patriots meetings?
- Were five subsequent FBI contacts checking in" for updates" on the groups activities really necessary?
- Why did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives show a sudden intrusive interest in the Engelbrechts business which has nothing to do with alcohol or tobacco or firearms or explosives?
The idea that politicians should write laws restricting people critical of them is as perverse as the idea that the sprawling opaque IRS bureaucracy should be assigned to construe and apply such laws. It is bad enough that there is the misbegotten Federal Election Commission to do what the First Amendment forbids government regulation of the quantity content and timing of political speech.
This column has previously noted that in 1996 a Republican Senate candidate called the FEC to dispute campaign finance charges made by Democrats. The head of the FECs enforcement division told the Republican: Promise me you will never run for office again and we will drop this case." So spoke Lois Lerner.
There almost certainly are people above her and beyond the IRS who initiated or approved the IRSs punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerners history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises.
Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys.
