The IRS ’s apparent efforts to target for intense scrutiny conservative groups’ applications for 501(c)(4) status, which the IRS refers to as merely “absolutely inappropriate” and for which the White House disavows either knowledge or responsibility, are indeed troubling for the citizenry. They also ought to be troubling for the Obama Administration if it has any historical perspective.
Let me start by perhaps belaboring the obvious. No one should be, and certainly yours truly is not, criticizing the IRS for going over 501(c)(4) applications with the proverbial fine toothed comb. There have been a lot of games played with the tax exempt 501(c)(4) designation, and the taxpayers have no business subsidizing the political efforts of anybody. Neither you nor I should be forced to subsidize someone else’s political efforts. In fact, it would be great if the prohibition on use of taxpayer funds to advance political causes were expanded and more rigorously enforced. The problem in this instance arises because it appears and, indeed, the IRS has admitted, that it has not been even-handed in its scrutiny of 501(c)(4) applicants; it has singled out conservative groups for outright harassment while at least apparently giving more liberal groups something of a pass, at least on a relative basis.
The White House denies any knowledge of the IRS ’s lack of even-handedness in this affair. It claims that neither it, nor the IRS ’s most senior leadership, knew about these shenanigans. This essentially boils down to a Clintonesque “It’s a matter of what ‘senior leadership’ means,” but I digress. Since it has become, at least in recent decades and probably long before then, a part of the politician’s job description to lie at least as easily as s/he tells the truth, one can be excused for not believing the Obama Administration in this instance, among others.
Whether the Obama Administration knew of, or was behind, the IRS ’s seeming jihad against the right, the Administration is clearly aware of appearances here (not good) and should have some historical perspective.
Those of us who are old enough to remember Watergate will recall that, almost until the very end, neither the break-in nor the cover-up was a subject of great interest to the average American; note that President Nixon was reelected in an unprecedented landslide in the very thick of at least the early stages of the scandal. Of course, those who hated Nixon (Some people just couldn’t get over Helen Gahagan Douglas, others couldn’t get around Nixon’s ostentatious ersatz anti-Communism, still others just didn’t like the man, and often for good reason, but I digress.) thought Watergate was a very big deal, even in its incipient stages. Those who loved Nixon (Some actually believed the man was a conservative, others admired Nixon’s formidable intellect, but few simply loved the man, but, again, I digress.) thought Watergate was a big deal because they saw the dust-up over Watergate as an assault on the foundations of American conservatism and/or American life. But most people thought that the Watergate affair and the often hysterical reactions it elicited were just part of the games politician play. People had other things to worry about, like the economy and Vietnam
All that changed when, in the process of the Watergate investigations, we heard Nixon on the tapes say that he wanted to “use the IRS to get back on our enemies.” Then Watergate hit home for every American. Since every American feared, and still fears, largely unjustifiably, the IRS (The IRS doesn’t make the tax laws; the people we elect make the tax laws. The IRS simply enforces the tax laws and is usually not as unreasonable and unyielding as some would have you believe, but that is grist for another mill.), the fear that the dreaded letter from the IRS could arrive in the mail should s/he run afoul of the Administration in power sent chills up spines across the country. Simply put, Watergate hit home when it became clear, in Nixon’s own voice, that the president was willing to use the seemingly omnipresent IRS to torment his enemies. The rest is history.
If the Obama Administration is behind the IRS efforts to target conservative groups, Mr. Obama is in big trouble. If the Obama Administration was, as it contends, ignorant of the IRS ’s machinations and finds them reprehensible, it better make that clear…and quickly. The IRS remains, rightly or wrongly, many people’s bogeyman, the closest thing we have in our country to the knock on the door on the middle of the night that occupies the nightmares of residents of totalitarian countries.
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