“He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to . . .
cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income
tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or
conducted in a discriminatory manner.”
— Article II, Section 1, Articles of Impeachment against
Richard M. Nixon, adopted by the House Judiciary Committee, 29 July 1974
By
The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but 40 years ago this week
— May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the
nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack
Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS
targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.
This
administration aggressively hawked the fiction that the Benghazi attack
was just an excessively boisterous movie review. Now we are told that a
few wayward souls in Cincinnati, with nary a trace of political
purpose, targeted for harassment political groups with “tea party” and
“patriot” in their titles. The Post reported
Monday that the IRS also targeted groups that “criticized the
government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution.”
Credit the IRS’s operatives with understanding who and what threatens
the current regime.
Jay Carney,
whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his
employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the
salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue
Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.
It remains
to be discovered whether the chief executive is guilty of more than an
amazingly convenient failure to superintend the excesses of some
executive-branch employees beyond the Allegheny Mountains. Meanwhile,
file this under “What a tangled web we weave”:
The IRS official
in charge of the division that makes politically sensitive allocations
of tax-exempt status said Friday that she learned from news reports of
the targeting of conservatives. But a draft report by the IRS inspector general says this official was briefed on the matter two years ago.
An emerging liberal narrative is that this tempest is all the Supreme Court’s fault: The Citizens United
decision — that corporations, particularly nonprofit advocacy groups,
have First Amendment rights — so burdened the IRS with making
determinations about who deserves tax-exempt status that some political
innocents in Cincinnati inexplicably decided to begin by rummaging
through the affairs of conservatives. Ere long, presumably, they would
have gotten around to groups with “progressive” in their titles.
Remember, all campaign “reform” proposals regulate political speech. And all involve the IRS in allocating speech rights.
Liberals, whose unvarying agenda is
enlargement of government, suggest, with no sense of cognitive
dissonance, that this IRS scandal is nothing more sinister than typical
government incompetence. Five days before the IRS story broke, Obama, sermonizing 109 miles northeast of Cincinnati, warned Ohio State graduates about “creeping cynicism” and “voices” that “warn that tyranny is . . . around the corner.” Well.
He
stigmatizes as the vice of cynicism what actually is the virtue of
skepticism about the myth that the tentacles of the regulatory state are
administered by disinterested operatives. And the voices that annoy him
are those of the Founders.
Time was, progressives like the
president 100 years ago, Woodrow Wilson, had the virtue of candor: He
explicitly rejected the Founders’ fears of government. Modern
enlightenment, he said, made it safe to concentrate power in Washington,
and especially in disinterested executive-branch agencies run by
autonomous, high-minded experts. Today, however, progressivism’s
insinuation is that Americans must be minutely regulated because they
are so dimwitted they will swallow nonsense. Such as: There was no
political motive in the IRS targeting political conservatives.
Episodes
like this separate the meritorious liberals from the meretricious. The
day after the IRS story broke, The Post led the paper with it, and, with
an institutional memory of Watergate, published a blistering editorial
demanding an Obama apology. The New York Times consigned the story to
page 10 (its front-page lead was the umpteenth story about the end of
the world being nigh because of global warming). Through Monday, the
Times had expressed no editorial thoughts about the IRS. The Times’s
Monday headline on the matter was: “IRS Focus on Conservatives Gives GOP
an Issue to Seize On.” So that is the danger.
If
Republicans had controlled both houses of Congress in 1973, Nixon would
have completed his term. If Democrats controlled both today, the Obama
administration’s lawlessness would go uninvestigated. Not even divided
government is safe government, but it beats the alternative.
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