I.R.S. Inquiries Begin This Morning in House Way and Means

The circus is set to begin in less than one half hour when hearings kick off in the House Ways and Means Committee. According to C-SPAN, where video of the hearings can be streamed live, "Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller who resigned on Wednesday and the Treasury Department’s Inspector General Russell George for Tax Administration" will testify.

A good overview of what's going on with the myriad investigations underway in Washington D.C. can be found in today's lead unsigned editorial, "Scandal Machine," on the New York Times Opinion page:

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines. The tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, never a scandal to begin with, has devolved into a turf-protection spat between government agencies, and the e-mail messages Republicans long demanded made clear that there was no White House cover-up.

The only example of true government overreach was the seizure of The Associated Press’s telephone records, the latest episode in the Obama administration’s Javert-like obsession with leakers in its midst.

Many of the Republicans who have added this action to their metaphor blender were also the ones clamoring the loudest for vigorous investigations of national security leaks. But reality simply isn’t solid enough to hold back the vast Republican opportunism on display this week. Whatever cranky point Republicans had been making against President Obama for the last five years — dishonesty, socialism, jackbooted tyranny — they somehow found that these incidents were exactly the proof they had been seeking, no matter how inflated or distorted.

Jonathan Weisman reports from the frontpage today in "G.O.P., Energized, Weighs How Far to Take Inquiries," about a Republican Party giddy with excitement over its good fortune. But the gist of Weisman's story is a recent history of Congressional overreach by the GOP. Following the 1994 "Contract with America" election victory, all the penny-ante investigations Republicans launched against the Clinton administration whittled away at the GOP majority.

Nationwide the Tea Party remains unpopular. If low-level IRS employees are called as witnesses they might prove embarrassing to conservative ideologues. No doubt a cogent explanation exists as to why "Tea Party" and "Patriot" were used as search terms. Democrats will be foolish if they don't use these hearings to illuminate the coordinated nature and top-down funding of these Tea Party groups.