Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal, The IRS Can’t Plead Incompetence, 6/6/13
Excerpts:
If the agency didn’t know what it was doing, it wouldn’t have done it so well.
In March 2012, the organization, which argues the case for traditional marriage, found out its confidential tax information had been obtained by the Human Rights Campaign, one of its primary opponents in the marriage debate. The HRC put the leaked information on its website—including the names of NOM donors. NOM not only has the legal right to keep its donors’ names private, it has to, because when contributors’ names have been revealed in the past they have been harassed, boycotted and threatened. This is a free speech right, one the Supreme Court upheld in 1958 after the state of Alabama tried to compel the NAACP to surrender its membership list.
Some have said the IRS didn’t have enough money to do its job well. But a lack of money isn’t what makes you target political groups—a directive is what makes you do that. In any case, this week’s bombshell makes it clear the IRS, from 2010 to 2012, the years of prime targeting, did have money to improve its processes. During those years they spent $49 million on themselve—on conferences and gatherings, on $1,500 hotel rooms and self-esteem presentations. “Maliciously self-indulgent,” said chairman Darrell Issa at Thursday’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings.
Finally, this week Russell George, the inspector general whose audit confirmed the targeting of conservative groups, mentioned, as we all do these days, Richard Nixon’s attempt to use the agency to target his enemies. But part of that Watergate story is that Nixon failed. Last week David Dykes of the Greenville (S.C.) News wrote of meeting with 93-year-old Johnnie Mac Walters, head of the IRS almost 40 years ago, in the Nixon era. Mr. Dykes quoted Tim Naftali, former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, who told him the IRS wouldn’t do what Nixon asked: “It didn’t happen, not because the White House didn’t want it to happen, but because people like Johnnie Walters said ‘no.'”
That was the IRS doing its job—attempting to be above politics, refusing to act as the muscle for a political agenda.
Man—those were the days.
HKO
When one partisan group tries to create power to abuse its opposition, they are very shortsighted not to realize that this power will likely one day be used against them. This power does not just go away when they leave office. The IRS scandal is not because of rogue agents but systemic corruption. To try and make this go away by throwing lower agents in remote locations under the bus is not only deceitful but cowardly.
Harry Truman was famous for his accountability statement, “The Buck Stops Here.” Such accountability is totally foreign to this administration.
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