Possible Impact
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Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.
As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's
pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and
fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice
Department? You do not.
By PEGGY NOONAN
Updated May 17, 2013, 6:43 p.m. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578487460479247792.html
We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The
reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from
sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one
likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press
and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the
administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't
look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president
enjoyed is gone.
Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.
As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's
pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and
fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice
Department? You do not.
The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's
shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the
papers, just like you.
But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration.
Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.
A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant,
arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries,
that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the
third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.
The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted
abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The
second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.
In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea
Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed
ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls,
membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of
all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and
copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are
you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact
political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the
U.S. Constitution.
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have
opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho
businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million
dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first
time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also
soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's
attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return
and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare."
Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A
conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions
about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out,
but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're
afraid of saying they were audited.
All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election.
They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and
shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to
overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit
by audit.
It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again,
only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely
possible that only one IRS office was involved.
Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who
finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of
what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of
"frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including
Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a
few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get
the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew
what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to
target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May
2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level
IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.
The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal.
But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't
understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the
revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and
bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would
react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone
number.
And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one
in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder
doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the
passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant
at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this.
That fate put it on his plate.
We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan
shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it
not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed
to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us
harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the
government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract
the U.S. government from its essential business.
But that bias does not fit these circumstances.
What happened at the IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case
deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that
position's powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be
cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if
they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped
now, it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have
even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.
And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to
make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing
point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual
partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our
ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.
This is one of the best articles to date about the Scandals in DC.
(And I've read a bunch of them today!)
As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's
pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and
fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice
Department? You do not.
By PEGGY NOONAN
Updated May 17, 2013, 6:43 p.m. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578487460479247792.html
We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The
reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from
sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one
likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press
and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the
administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't
look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president
enjoyed is gone.
Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.
As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's
pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and
fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice
Department? You do not.
The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's
shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the
papers, just like you.
But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration.
Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.
A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant,
arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries,
that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the
third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.
The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted
abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The
second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.
In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea
Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed
ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls,
membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of
all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and
copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are
you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact
political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the
U.S. Constitution.
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have
opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho
businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million
dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first
time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also
soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's
attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return
and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare."
Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A
conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions
about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out,
but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're
afraid of saying they were audited.
All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election.
They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and
shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to
overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit
by audit.
It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again,
only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely
possible that only one IRS office was involved.
Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who
finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of
what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of
"frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including
Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a
few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get
the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew
what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to
target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May
2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level
IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.
The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal.
But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't
understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the
revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and
bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would
react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone
number.
And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one
in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder
doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the
passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant
at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this.
That fate put it on his plate.
We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan
shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it
not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed
to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us
harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the
government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract
the U.S. government from its essential business.
But that bias does not fit these circumstances.
What happened at the IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case
deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that
position's powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be
cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if
they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped
now, it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have
even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.
And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to
make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing
point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual
partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our
ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.
This is one of the best articles to date about the Scandals in DC.
(And I've read a bunch of them today!)
