XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.obama, alt.politics.usa
XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, us.taxes

Will federal employees who support President Obama ever be held
accountable for hijacking the Internal Revenue Service and using it
to assist Obama’s re-election bid? Thanks to a ruling yesterday from
the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of appeals, it’s possible the answer is
yes.

The Washington Times’s Stephen Dinan sums up the finding: “A federal
appeals court spanked the IRS Tuesday, saying it has taken laws
designed to protect taxpayers from the government and turned them on
their head, using them to try to protect the tax agency from the
very tea party groups it targeted.”

The ruling, in a case styled U.S. v. NorCal Tea Party Patriots, was
a response to an IRS petition for a writ of mandamus—a command to an
inferior court, in this case the Cincinnati-based district court of
Judge Susan Dlott—to shut off the plaintiffs’ discovery efforts.

Writing for the unanimous three-judge appellate panel, Judge Raymond
Kethledge observes that mandamus is “an extraordinary remedy
reserved to correct only the clearest abuses of power by a district
court.” The appeals judges not only found no such abuse; they
ordered the IRS to comply with Dlott’s orders. The ruling closes by
strongly suggesting that the Justice Department lawyers representing
the IRS have been acting in bad faith:

The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and
storied tradition of defending the nation’s interests and
enforcing its laws—all of them, not just selective ones—in
a manner worthy of the Department’s name. The conduct of
the IRS’s attorneys in the district court falls outside that
tradition. We expect that the IRS will do better going
forward. And we order that the IRS comply with the district
court’s discovery orders of April 1 and June 16, 2015—
without redactions, and without further delay.

The Colfax, Calif.-based NorCal Tea Party Patriots brought the
lawsuit in 2013, after an inspector general’s report revealed the
IRS’s improper targeting of groups opposed to Obama. (The case is
being heard in Cincinnati because that is the location of the IRS
office that did the work of suppression.)

NorCal and its fellow plaintiffs wanted to make it a class action,
and that was the basis of the discovery request. They asked Judge
Dlott to compel the release of “basic information relevant to class certification, including the names of IRS employees who reviewed the
groups’ applications for tax-exempt status and the number of
applications from similar groups that had been granted, denied,
withdrawn, or were still pending.”

“The IRS’s response has been one of continuous resistance,” Judge
Kethledge observes. “For example, the IRS asserted that the names of
IRS employees who worked on the groups’ applications were taxpayer
‘return information’ protected from disclosure by § 6103.” That is,
the IRS attempted to invoke a law designed to protect _taxpayers’_
privacy to shield the identities of agency employees, who are
supposed to work for the taxpayer.

Then there was this:

The IRS further objected—this, in a case where the IRS
forced the lead plaintiff to produce 3,000 pages of what
the Inspector General called “unnecessary information”—that
“it would be unduly burdensome” for the IRS to collect the
names of the employees who worked on the groups’
applications.

It reminds us of that joke about the definition of chutzpah: A guy
kills his parents, then pleads for mercy on the ground that the
inheritance tax is punishment enough.

The IRS cited the same taxpayer-privacy rationale in refusing to
turn over the specific document at issue in Tuesday’s ruling, namely
“any lists of organizations that the IRS flagged for special
attention using the ‘Be On the Lookout’ criteria, as well as two
spreadsheets that the IRS provided to the Inspector General in
connection with his report.”

The Sixth Circuit approvingly quotes Judge Dlott, summarizing last
October her frustration with the government’s stonewalling:

My impression is the government probably did something
wrong in this case. Whether there’s liability or not is a
legal question. However, I feel like the government is doing
everything it possibly can to make this as complicated as
it possibly can, to last as long as it possibly can, so that
by the time there is a result, nobody is going to care
except the plaintiffs. . . . I question whether or not the
Department of Justice is doing justice.

Among other things, this case is testimony to the importance of an
independent judiciary. Of the four judges involved, two were
nominated by George W. Bush (Kethledge and fellow panelist David
McKeague), but the other two were nominated by Democratic presidents
(Dlott by Bill Clinton, the Sixth Circuit’s Damon Keith by Jimmy
Carter).

Judge Kethledge opens the panel’s decision with this observation:

Among the most serious allegations a federal court can
address are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens
for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen
—Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian—should be
targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those
grounds.

Later he notes that the taxpayer-privacy law the IRS has been
seeking to employ to shield its own abuse of power was the product
of earlier abuses. In the 20th century, Treasury Department
regulations “made individual and corporate tax returns generally
available to federal agencies and committees of Congress, but
unavailable to the general public”:

The dangers of that regime became clear when Congress
investigated President Richard Nixon’s alleged abuses of
power in connection with his 1972 reelection campaign.
Congressional committees heard testimony that the White
House had obtained from the IRS sensitive tax information
on political opponents, and moreover had directed IRS
personnel to audit the returns of particular taxpayers. The
House Judiciary Committee thereafter approved an Article
of Impeachment alleging that President Nixon had, among
other things, “endeavored . . . to cause, in violation of
the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits o
r other income tax investigations to be initiated or
conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

In the wake of President Nixon’s resignation, Congress
enacted the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which overhauled the
rules governing disclosure of taxpayer information. No
longer would the Executive have free rein over the handling
of sensitive taxpayer records.

In 1972 the IRS itself had more integrity than the White House. As
we noted in 2014, then-Commissioner Johnnie Walters ignored an order
from White House aide John Dean to target 200 of Nixon’s political
enemies. “If I did what you asked, it’d make Watergate look like a
Sunday school picnic,” Walters told Dean.

Under Obama, the IRS itself appears to have taken the initiative to
target political opponents of the president—and not just powerful
enemies, but ordinary Americans seeking to organize lawfully to
further their views.

Yesterday White House aide Valerie Jarrett tweeted a quote from
President Obama praising a communist dictatorship: “Cuba has an
extraordinary resource—a system of education which values every boy
and every girl.” It is a despicable sentiment, worthy of the way his administration has conducted itself.

--
The Establishment GOP is in trouble for the same reason Chipotle is
in trouble. They were making their customers sick.

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