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.

Congressional Hearings on IRS to Begin Tomorrow

Get ready for non-stop hearings on the IRS using selective search criteria to single out Tea Party groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status. It starts tomorrow when the House Ways and Means Committee hears testimony from freshly-ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller. Then on Tuesday the Senate Finance Committee will hold its first hearing. The next day, according to Jonathan Weisman's story, "I.R.S. Chief Out After Protest Over Scrutiny of Groups," 

the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hear the testimony of Lois Lerner, who heads the I.R.S.'s division on tax-exempt organizations and was aware of the issue nearly from the beginning, in 2010, yet told reporters on Friday that she had learned of it from news reports in 2012. 

“Lois Lerner lied to me,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who helped initiate the Congressional investigation of the I.R.S.

Republicans are going to turn this into a search for false statements; they'll construct timelines and talk of smoking guns and grand conspiracies. Democrats, if they're smart, will bring it back to the elephant in the room -- abuse of the tax code. The 501(c)(4) classification is sought after because it doesn't require disclosure of donors. Many well-heeled political money-men like to remain in the shadows. The whole thing could be cleared up by Congress requiring any organization engaged in political spending (which would have to be defined legislatively) to file as a 527 group; 527 status is tax exempt but it requires disclosure of contributions.

And possibly, the hope here is with the Senate since this is where Democrats maintain control, the role of the nefarious Koch brothers can be revealed. Check out the last paragraph from Weisman's story:

The I.R.S. released a list of 176 groups that have been granted tax-exempt status through the review process, which centralized operations in Cincinnati in order to deal with a crush of applications that began in 2010 with the Tea Party movement. That list included organizations with names like American Patriots Against Government Excess; Rebellious Truths; the Coalition for a Conservative Majority; and Friends of the Constitution; as well as dozens of Tea Party chapters.

I know from having been a treasurer for a local chapter of a political party in a state and a city with strict disclosure laws that IRS filings can be the trickiest and most confusing. For there to have been a sudden "crush" of groups applying for social welfare tax exemptions as opposed to exemptions as political organizations tells me that some sort of central counsel was being provided. Who was supplying that counsel? This is where Democrats should push back.

Obama Hamstrung

There is a tendency to overreact to the daily news, to presume that things will turn out worse than they actually do. But today I think it is a fair assessment to say that Obama, from this point forward for the remainder of his presidency, is hamstrung. Republican slaps and scratches will continue with regards to last year's Benghazi attacks; a series of news-hogging investigations on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party organizations will commence, with a possible silver lining being that light will be shed on the abuse of 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status by overtly partisan, political groups; and as Michael Shear and Jonathan Weisman report today,

Four months into his second term, the president was under increasing assault from Republicans who accused the administration of political bullying and a lack of transparency. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr. Obama’s secretary of health and human services, has drawn criticism in recent days for soliciting corporate donations to pay for the rollout next year of the new health care law.

And on Monday evening, The Associated Press reported that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months of telephone records of its reporters. The company’s editors called it a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering, and Republicans quickly seized on the report.

What has the potential to be the most damaging for Obama is the DOJ investigation of AP. It was paranoia over leaks that brought Nixon down. And what seems to be the case based on a reading of "Phone Records of Journalists Seized by U.S.," by Charlie Savage and Leslie Kaufman, is that Attorney General Eric Holder was goaded into action by Congressional complaints about national security leaks:

Mr. Holder announced the two special leak investigations in June amid calls in Congress for a crackdown on leaks after a spate of disclosures about the bomb plot, cyberwarfare against Iran, Mr. Obama’s procedures for putting terrorism suspects on a “kill list,” and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The revelations had been published by The New York Times, The A.P. and in several books. 

Republicans accused the administration of deliberately leaking classified information, jeopardizing national security in an effort to make Mr. Obama look tough in an election year — a charge the White House rejected. But some Democrats, too, said the leaking of sensitive information had gotten out of control. 

Mr. Holder’s move at the time was sharply criticized by Republicans as not going far enough. They wanted him to appoint an outside special counsel, and a Senate resolution calling for a special counsel was co-sponsored by 29 Republican senators. 

On Monday, however, after The A.P. disclosed the seizure of the records, some Republican leaders criticized the administration as going too far. Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner, said: “The First Amendment is first for a reason. If the Obama Administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation.”And Doug Heye, a spokesman for Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, linked the revelation to a brewing controversy over the targeting of Tea Party groups for greater scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service, saying “these new revelations suggest a pattern of intimidation by the Obama administration.” 

The A.P. said Monday that it first learned of the seizure of the records last Friday afternoon when its general counsel, Laura Malone, received a letter from Mr. Machen, the United States attorney. The letter to Mr. Holder said the seizure included “all such records for, among other phone lines, an A.P. general phone number in New York City as well as A.P. bureaus in New York City, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut, and at the House of Representatives.” 

The Associated Press is a nonprofit global news cooperative owned by its American newspaper and broadcast members.

A legitimate worry about a hamstrung president, based on recent history -- think post-impeachment Clinton and Kosovo, is he tends to indulge in war-making powers (powers Constitutionally residing with Congress but since the creation of the national security state a de facto part of the executive branch). We'll see what Obama is made of. Many a politician in his position would counter the sudden surge of opposition by whipping up a war scare. Syria is ready at hand, even if Libya is proving more failure than success at this point. All in all things are not looking good.

Terror Bombing of Turkish Border Town + IRS Audits Tea Party 501(c)(4)'s

Last week began with Israel's bombing of a Syrian military installation outside Damascus; it ended with a terror bombing in the Turkish town of Reyhanli on Saturday. Forty-six people were killed and over 100 were injured. Kareem Fahim and Sebnem Arsu report today in "Arrests and Calls for Calm in Turkey" that the Turkish government arrested nine people who are part of a Marxist group with links to Syrian intelligence. Syria denied any involvement. Turkey is currently in peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers Party. It is unclear who is really to blame. But what is clear is that chaos in Syria is destabilizing the Middle East. Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey -- all were in the news last week in relation to the Syrian civil war. The refugee crisis will only grow worse as the savage fighting continues; hopefully, meaningful U.S.-Russian brokered peace talks will begin soon.

Another story that developed over the weekend is the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status. Jonathan Weisman and Matthew Wald have an informative story, "I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize On," this morning. And while it is unfortunate that this will surely lead to a lot of column inches and television time being blotted out by conservatives doing what they love so much to do -- feigning outrage and playing the victim -- I don't think it aids the GOP in the long run. Reading the blog that Thomas Edsall writes for the New York Times, one knows that there is a serious struggle underway within Republican Party. It's the Establishment, embodied by Karl Rove, versus the Tea Party. Recently Rove has had momentum going his way; a group he is linked with secured the contract to manage the GOP voter list. But now the Tea Party will enjoy a boost. And the battle for the Republican Party will rage on. The problem for liberals is that they have nothing -- other than Obama, and his political force is rapidly evaporating. There is a progressive majority in this country that has no party.

Here is a reader, RQH of Wheat Ridge, Colorado, commenting on the Weisman and Wald story (I think it's on the mark):

The Tea Party is depicted by its followers as a spontaneous gathering of like-minded citizens who want to reduce the size of the federal government and drastically cut taxes for all, especially the super-wealthy. At the Tea Party core are the Koch brothers whose father organized the John Birch Society. Knowing that, , it should be evident why the IRS would question the validity of their tax-exemption claim. Remember the recommendation of the Watergate source: "Follow the money!"