The Other IRS Scandal

Almost everyone in the country, except the usual 51% cadre of Low Information sometimeVoters (LIVS), are aware of the IRS scandal currently working it's way through the political system.  IRS workers clearly targeted Tea Party and similar conservative sounding groups for detailed scrutiny and delay when they applied for tax exempt "social information" type 501(c3) status, while similar liberal groups faced no scrutiny, and were, in some cases, specially walked through the system by high level IRS personnel.

Higher ups in the IRS have clearly blamed their underlings in the permanent bureaucracy for taking measures they did not intend, although they did little to rectify it once it was forced on their attentions.  On Friday, the White House dodged an opportunity to apologize for the IRS actions.

During Friday’s White House press conference, Special Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest declined to apologize for the Internal Revenue Service targeting President Barack Obama deemed “outrageous.”

The Republican National Committee highlighted the exchange between Earnest and The Daily Caller on their Youtube channel immediately as a part of its effort to place attention on the media scandal.

Really, the only question left regarding this scandal is how far up into the IRS staff directory any real blame will be assigned (we've already lost one head of the IRS, who played Sgt. Schultz and claimed not to know anything at all, and Lois Lane Lerner seems likely to fall too), and whether it will jump to the White House, where the former head of the IRS, Doug Shulman visited some 157 some times in since Obama was elected, compared to once for his immediate predecessor in the Bush era.  Iknew the Easter calendar was screwy, but that's a lots of Easter Egg rolls. Or how many visits does it take to make Obamacare work worse, and do they not have telephones in the Obama administration?

That's awful, and it needs to be investigated further, and run up the hierarchy until the origin is reached and eliminated.  However, there is another scandal brewing at the IRS, that involves similar partisan favoritism, but in a completely unrelated "service" of the IRS that seems to be getting little attention beyond the conservative media.  I'm talking about the release of confidential IRS documents (mostly tax returns) of conservative groups to liberal groups.

How did tax returns of a group opposed to gay marriage get leaked to political opponents?

In March of 2012 the Human Rights Campaign published a confidential tax return of the National Organization for Marriage, which was immediately republished byThe Huffington Post and other liberal news media outlets. The HRC and NOM are the leading national groups on opposing sides of the fight over gay marriage. HRC wants to redefine marriage to make it genderless, while NOM wishes to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

I don't have a dog in this fight. While I don't think gay marriages warrant legally forced acceptance and subsidies, I think the people have the right to decide that through the legislative  process, as Maryland did.  But the IRS shouldn't have it's fingers on the scale.

Our case was particularly egregious because the IRS leak of confidential information fed directly into an ongoing political battle. For months before March 2012, the pro-gay marriage HRC had been demanding that my group, NOM, publicly identify its major donors, something that NOM and many other non-profits refuse to do. The reason is simple. In the past, gay marriage advocates have used such information to launch campaigns of intimidation against traditional marriage supporters.

Just as gay marriage proponents were demanding the information, the IRS appears to have illegally given them exactly what they were looking for. The tax return released by the HRC contained the names and addresses of dozens of major donors to NOM. And there's little doubt where the documents came from. The tax returns contained internal coding added by the IRS after the returns were originally submitted.

I wonder if those codes can be used to determine who at the IRS had access to the returns. Again, like the 501 (c3) affair, we need to find out who at the IRS is leaking private, confidential documents to political opponents.  Liberals should want this as well and conservatives because someday, the shoe will be on the other foot, and conservatives will be in a position to leak information on liberals for purposes of intimidation.  Start at the bottom; work to the top, and $#!*can everyone along the way who fails to point to someone higher in the chain.

Perhaps even worse, and potentially reaching other agencies, are the, as of now, not terribly well substantiated reports that IRS scrutiny of 501 (c3) applications by conservative groups triggered scrutiny by other agencies, including OSHA, BATF and the FBI.

WDW: When did you first suspect you were being politically targeted for your beliefs and that it was transferring over to your personal life? How did you feel?

CE: Initially, I tried to rationalize what was happening. But when the various agencies kept calling, kept showing up unannounced, and looking for nothing specific – 18 different contacts in less than 3 years, it became undeniable that something was wrong. When Lois Lerner made her infamous public apology, things really began to fall into place for me. It became reasonable that grassroots targeting could be taken to greater extremes than just answering hundreds of prying questions from the IRS. Anything is possible, especially when my story was occurring in the same world where reporters’ phone records were being lifted by the Department of Justice.

The link will be difficult to prove but it's well worth the efforts to try.  Government drones need to be taught that scrutiny of one's motives goes two ways, and that casual attempts to screw with citizen's rights to express their political beliefs will be met with public humiliation and loss of position.

So, at this point, we seem to be in a state where the Obama administration is using the Henry II excuse, without the penance, that the bureaucracy, on it's own, beyond the reach of his control, decided to weight the scales of politics.  Perhaps we should heed the words of Mark Steyn:

So let’s take Obama at his word that he had no idea all this was going on. In that case, he might like to take the lead in calling for the abolition of a corrupt agency and its grotesque tax code, and their replacement by a bureaucracy with more limited powers commensurate with a free society and a simplified tax regime with lower rates and thus fewer bewildering, mercurial “exemptions” that make the citizenry dependent on the caprices of Ms. Lerner and her colleagues. That’s a prize worth fighting for. In the meantime, the next time the IRS call you up with demands for this and demands for that, simply tell them, “I am filing the Lois Lerner defense,” and then say as she did to Congress “I have not done anything wrong. And I will not answer any questions.” Every man his own Lois Lerner!

Read the whole thing.