Dear America,
IR$ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I found myself riveted by the IRS hearings last Friday. The former interim Commissioner of the IRS was testifying along with the IRS Inspector General who was responsible for the recent report on the "targeting" of conservative putative "social welfare organizations" in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. The acting IRS Commissioner, Steven Miller, was the sacrificial lamb in all this and the grand standing by Republican congressmen, as well as the ass covering by some of the Democrats anxious to protect themselves from public sentiment being stoked by Republican righteous indignation, was shameless...or it would have been if any of those people had any shame. Of course, this is an easy one for the Republicans; everyone hates the IRS, although I must say that I have always been treated fairly by them. Of course, I am overly careful about what I claim and in my obsessive way, never take a deduction that I cannot document, but that's not a popular way to go today. In modern America, the mantra is take what you can get away with. That's capitalism in its current iteration. And in reality, that's what this whole "scandal" is about. The most open and contemptible abuse of section 501(c)(4) of the IRS code was by conservative organizations, and some of them were so openly contemptuous of the rule of law that many of us wondered how they could get away with it. For example, the focus on cuts to Medicare in the Affordable Care Act--first decrying them during the 2010 election and then in support of them to justify the Ryan budget during the 2012 election--demonstrates the disingenuousness of those organizations that are flagships of the conservative movement, like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS for example. But when the IRS began to vigorously scrutinize new applications for that status when the organizations' names contained certain conservative catchwords and phrases, the Republicans got upset because finally, their ox was being gored. And now, when you listen to the hearings, especially if you can stomach watching these guys as you listen, the feigned innocence is nauseating. A Republican Pennsylvania congressman, Mike Kelly, ripped into Miller with the most patently self-serving diatribe about American rights and liberty, including the right to equal treatment under the law...unless you are a homosexual or don't believe in God (he didn't say that, but I'll bet it's what he thinks in the privacy of his little mind)...which made him the newest poster child for conservative hypocrisy since...oh...the beginning of last week. That was when, at the Benghazi hearings, a silver haired congressman from the south reiterated Matt Drudge's fixation on the fact that Susan Rice said not once but five times that the murders in Benghazi derived from an anti-Muslim video that had first precipitated protest in Cairo. With drama in his voice, he said, "not just once, but f-i-i-i-ve times" as if her reading from a script given her by superiors was not just sinful but five times sinful because she read it that many times. And the idiotic beat goes on in the IRS hearings as the Rcc (Republican conservative complex) berate the current victim of political expediency the way they did when they ended the professional ascent of Susan Rice by publicly pillorying her for partisan purposes.
But the aspect of this thing that has the greatest magnitude...for everyone except Rice and Miller...is that there is a popular analogue to the Rcc presence in congress and you can see it if you look on the internet. If you pick an issue of interest from those covered at the hearings and "Google it," the results that rise to the top of the search are conservative rants about a cover up and the supposed standing ovation Congressman Kelly got when he reiterated the same bluster that Republican congressmen had been uttering all day as if he were the first. The conservative drummers keep pounding their drums, probably more out of failure to understand than cunning. But all that aside, there is justified concern over the high-handedness that may have been behind the decision to give extra scrutiny to applications for tax exempt status to those of organizations whose names suggested conservative leanings. To my way of thinking, that is the real issue. This wasn't criminal, nor was it really political, I'm guessing. It was one of two things. Either a group of low level decision makers in the unit that evaluates these applications--and there have been tens of thousands of them since the Citizens United case with only a hundred and fifty employees to review them--decided to take an arguably inappropriate shortcut in identifying the ones that needed the most attention, or a few arrogant rogues decided to harass some people just because they could. The former is a function of statutory language that says that social welfare agencies must be that exclusively, which the IRS has interpreted that to mean only primarily non-political for some reason, and as I said in my last letter, what's a poor IRS agent to do with such vagaries. The latter is a matter of agency attitude, which ironically is somewhat like the attitude demonstrated by some of the congressmen investigating all this and the organizations whose abuses of the system precipitating the investigation: that prosecutorial venomousness that has nothing to do with truth seeking but rather has to do with wreaking havoc on adversaries as if that is a legitimate purpose toward which to direct authority and political power. It was obvious in the procrustean styles in which some of the congressional interrogators framed their questions...that demand for a yes or no answer when there is none possible. One of them asked Miller if he had spoken to anyone about what they are calling "targeting." Miller tried to find out whether the congressman was talking about the topic as a generality or about this particular instance of targeting, but all the congressman did to make his question intelligible was to reiterate it and demand a yes or no answer. And he persisted in his vain attempt to box Miller into a trap, which would have ensnared him no matter whether he said yes or no in the absence of an explanation, until the exchange ended when the congressman's time elapsed. Foiled by the clock, the congressman limped back into obscurity in an instant, and Miller gave his explanatory answer, which was a sort of coup de gräce for the bull-headed politician in the final analysis.
But for all the jousting that occurred on C-Span over the past week or two on the two subjects of Benghazi and IRS abuses--and there's more to come once they get rolling on the subpoenaed telephone records of the Associated Press--what has been gained? Not a thing. The Republicans are still doing what they do, and the Democrats are still trying to stand above the despicable fray with politics-minded Americans just as entrenched in their dogmatic loyalties as ever. That is the form that modern American politics takes these days. Nothing is happening in the way of legislating, which after all is what we sent "dem birds," as Will Rogers called them, to Washington for. And the accretion of a critical mass of ego in congress is rapidly approaching. Soon, the debt ceiling will be an issue again, and despite the bellowing of the Republican congress about The Senate failing to pass a budget for three years, when they did do so, congressional Republicans refused to bring their Ryan budget to conference with The Senate for reconciliation...the usual next step. Once again, the Republicans are abusing the privilege of serving their constituents, and the Democrats seem to be saying next to nothing about it. When will they ever learn...all of them.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment