Breaking: Acting IRS Head Commits Seppuku…

Morat20 says:

Well, if I understand the timeline correctly, the actual head of the IRS during the events in question was a Bush appointee and his term ended sometime after.

Which means this is a more symbolic head than normal, since this guy’s apparent fault was not being able to time travel.

Really, Citizens United opened up this entire can of worms and nobody has really seen fit to define anything in any rigorous way. The FEC is absolutely hamstrung, the IRS has nothing but internal direction based on vague statutes and Supreme Court cases and guesswork.

I mean, it’s their job, isn’t it? Making sure no-one is skipping out on taxes by fraudulently filing as a charity or non-profit or LLC or whatever when they’re not?

So what’s the real complaint? It’s “when you did your job with insufficient resources and no real direction from Congress, you chose the wrong ways to prioritize”. Heck, like that’s new. The IRS cheerfully goes after small-fry tax fraud and mistakes for audits, because it’s more successful and cheaper than going after the big fish (who have lawyers and happily drag it out for years, even when ridiculously guilty). They’re notoriously understaffed (I’ve read, in more than one place, that IRS auditors more than pay for themselves).

So it seems politically aimed. *shrug*. Imagine, for a moment, that nobody thought about politics. It was all numbers by a machine. In the wake of Citizens United, in 2010 — the vast bulk of new formations under this paradigm were right-wing groups. It was a big year for them. They did darn well in the elections, had lots of excitement. Mathematically, most of them SHOULD have been conservative groups.

So our smart, apolitical, machine choices would have been to focus on all the new groups, under the new and barely understood laws, that were coming out of what was an ideological and political wave.

Which is what our non-machine IRS did, under a Bush appointee, and apparently entirely locally. Which is bad, because you know…partisan.

And I get that. I really do. It’s like they teach in every single one of those bloody ethics classes my work does — it’s not enough to avoid impropriety — you have to avoid even the appearance of it. And the IRS didn’t, although apparently not at the nefarious bidding of Darth Obama.

Then again — can the IRS and the FEC, given limited resources, actually ever really avoid such an appearance? Should they go with the media method, and for every group they investigate based on math models or intensity or gut feelings or suspicious emails or whistleblowers, investigate one on the other side of the partisan divide — just to keep it even? To keep up appearances?

And what’s it say about this scandal that some pundits and reporters cheerfully whipped out identical, apparently far more top-down, versions from Bush that weren’t scandals? (Same with the AP thing, too). Maybe Presidencies have to be bipartisan too, and it’s just not fair if they don’t all take it in the chops — and if they can’t take it for what they actually deserve, well, take it wherever you can.

Gotta keep up those appearances.

And hey, maybe this will turn out to be the smoking gun. Maybe Obama did order a Tea Party hit. Pretty sad that his best turned out to be a bit of extra paperwork, but you know — nobody said he was good at it.Report