IRS scandal isn’t just going away

Published 9:04 pm Friday, August 9, 2013

The IRS scandal must not be dismissed as either “phony” or resolved — the underlying beliefs and prejudices that led to it remain a threat to our fundamental principles.

What’s become clear ever since it was revealed the IRS has been obstructing the activity of conservative groups by not granting them tax-exempt status in a timely manner is that many in the federal government didn’t like what they have to say.

And when the power of the government is used to silence people because some don’t like what they say, we’re in real trouble.

The scandal is not “old news,” as Congressmen Darrel Issa and David Camp write in a recent piece in the Washington Post.

“Just three months ago, Lois G. Lerner, a senior official in the IRS’s tax-exempt organizations division, publicly admitted that the agency targeted taxpayers because of their political beliefs,” they write. “Until that point, despite years of inquiries from Congress, the IRS had continued to deny that it was targeting taxpayers, even though officials had long known about the conduct.”

Once it was no longer deniable, the White House pledged to investigate.

“When the scandal was first revealed, the president promised the American people that the administration would ‘hold the responsible parties accountable,’” the congressmen write. “Yet upon the direction of the president, new IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel ordered a 30-day review, upon which Werfel claimed the agency found no ‘evidence of intentional wrongdoing by anyone in the IRS.’”

But you never ask an agency to investigate itself.

Congressmen Issa and Camp — chairs of the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees, respectively — say they’re committed to a full investigation.

“The American people demand and deserve accountability from their government, not to live in fear of being subject to an audit or other extra scrutiny for reasons unrelated to the content of their filing,” they write. “So far, the IRS and this administration have provided no assurances that oversight and accountability is in place to prevent such abuses from happening again. The administration’s own partisan anti-tea party rhetoric, its evolving and inconsistent explanations and the IRS’s own unwillingness to fulfill the president’s promises of cooperation with our investigation have fueled skepticism about how dedicated they are to holding the responsible parties accountable.”

But perhaps there’s no real mystery here.

President Barack Obama and his administration strongly disagree with the 2010 Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which gave rise to the kinds of political groups targeted by the IRS.

So while the administration couldn’t silence them overtly, it could bring about much the same result by impeding their operations.

Former Federal Elections Commissioner Bradley Smith, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says “the IRS scandal is part of a long-term assault on First Amendment rights… Thanks to ‘campaign finance reform,’ citizen groups must navigate a maze of government paperwork and apply to the IRS for a tax license to speak on politics.”

Groups the current administration agreed with weren’t subjected to the same treatment. That’s wrong, and dangerous.