The IRS Scandal Summarized

This came via the usual route, Tax Prof Blog by way of Instapundit. It is the most concise and trenchant version I have seen yet.

New York Sun: Department of Injustice, by Conrad Black:

This brings us to the excruciating and horrifying saga of the Internal Revenue Service. It is clear, despite an administration effort to muddy the waters and strangle the congressional investigation, that the president and his party’s leaders in Congress launched a Herculean effort to bully the IRS to silence conservative organizations critical of the administration, and that the IRS, led by the head of the tax-exempt-organizations section, Lois Lerner, did its best to comply with this request. The extent of the collusion has been made difficult to fix with precision because Ms. Lerner’s hard drive disappeared and she has declined to answer congressional questions, exercising her right to avoid self-incrimination.

Except that I don't think the IRS needed to be bullied. As an about 95% democratic leaning organization, they were more than ready to leap on board given promises of political cover.

No one believes that her e-mails vanished accidentally, but let us note the contrast between the complacency with which the Democratic national media have assimilated this news with the hysteria that followed the revelation that Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s assistant, had lost only 18 minutes of a Watergate tape. Because of synchronized IRS non-cooperation and the likely destruction of evidence, it is hard to be sure of the extent of the contact between Democratic eminences and the national tax collector, but the existence of many meetings and e-mail exchanges has been established. (Senator Schumer had publicly urged the IRS to crack down on the “extraordinary influence” of the Tea Party and other Republican groups.) Ms. Lerner eventually took leave from her position and was accused of contempt of Congress. It is hard not to be contemptuous of the Congress, but that does not excuse refusal to answer amid the heavy suspicion of destruction of evidence.

President Obama installed John Koskinen, a “turn-around” expert from Fannie Mae, to clean up the IRS. But he has construed his role to be the obstruction of the congressional investigation, in appearances that were sanctimonious filibusters to explain the IRS’s conduct by standing on what he fancies to be his dignity and fuming with righteousness when the committee members suggested that he is not cooperating (which, of course, he isn’t). The administration’s own investigation has been a slapstick farce, largely led by Ms. Lerner’s chief associate in persecuting Republican political organizations, Jack Smith, now head of the public-integrity unit of the Justice Department. The administration is determined to kill the whole investigation, and there is little doubt that a thorough airing of the matter would show the conduct of much of the senior levels of the administration to be, to say the least, discreditable.

It is long past time to destroy the political power of the IRS, either with a flat tax which cannot be gamed, or my "Modest Proposal" for affirmative action by by political party in the federal bureaucracy.