The IRS scandal: Oh, what Congress begat (and keeps on begetting)
The Government’s Worst Face
By SAM TANENHAUS, NYT
THE reported targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of opponents of conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status has led some to revisit the long history of presidents, or their administrations, using tax regulations to punish enemies. Some have drawn comparisons with the crimes of Watergate, when President Richard M. Nixon loosed the I.R.S. on an array of Democrats (including potential challengers to his re-election in 1972). Another example, parallel to the current episode, came in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, alarmed by the growing strength of right-wing groups, “asked the director of audits at the I.R.S. to gather intelligence on organizations receiving tax exemptions,” as Rick Perlstein wrote in “Before the Storm,” his 2001 history of Barry M. Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
There is no evidence as yet that President Obama ordered ideological targeting of this kind, and in his news conference last week he called the abuses, if real, “contrary to our traditions.”
In any event, the impulse to uncover a top-down operation misses a larger point. The conspiracy talk of the moment reflects the broader unease many Americans, left and right, feel not just toward the I.R.S. but toward the federal government and the outsize part it plays in our daily lives. At times it can seem an abstract, distant force, bent on its own aggrandizement, often at the expense of individual citizens.
It is in this light that the report released last week by the Treasury Department’s inspector general is best understood. As deplorable as the steps taken by I.R.S. officers seem to have been — involving, as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it, “aggressive and burdensome questionnaires as part of the process of applying for tax-exempt status” — the report indicates that, whatever motives may have driven the wrongdoers, their modus operandi was not to violate established procedures but to execute them with excessive zeal. Rather than secretly sabotaging the targeted groups, they seem to have ensnared them in dense thickets of red tape. It is a frustration many of us have experienced when dealing with government agencies, above all the I.R.S., which not only takes our money but then also makes us mail the check to an address we need a map to locate.
(More here.)
THE reported targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of opponents of conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status has led some to revisit the long history of presidents, or their administrations, using tax regulations to punish enemies. Some have drawn comparisons with the crimes of Watergate, when President Richard M. Nixon loosed the I.R.S. on an array of Democrats (including potential challengers to his re-election in 1972). Another example, parallel to the current episode, came in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, alarmed by the growing strength of right-wing groups, “asked the director of audits at the I.R.S. to gather intelligence on organizations receiving tax exemptions,” as Rick Perlstein wrote in “Before the Storm,” his 2001 history of Barry M. Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
There is no evidence as yet that President Obama ordered ideological targeting of this kind, and in his news conference last week he called the abuses, if real, “contrary to our traditions.”
In any event, the impulse to uncover a top-down operation misses a larger point. The conspiracy talk of the moment reflects the broader unease many Americans, left and right, feel not just toward the I.R.S. but toward the federal government and the outsize part it plays in our daily lives. At times it can seem an abstract, distant force, bent on its own aggrandizement, often at the expense of individual citizens.
It is in this light that the report released last week by the Treasury Department’s inspector general is best understood. As deplorable as the steps taken by I.R.S. officers seem to have been — involving, as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it, “aggressive and burdensome questionnaires as part of the process of applying for tax-exempt status” — the report indicates that, whatever motives may have driven the wrongdoers, their modus operandi was not to violate established procedures but to execute them with excessive zeal. Rather than secretly sabotaging the targeted groups, they seem to have ensnared them in dense thickets of red tape. It is a frustration many of us have experienced when dealing with government agencies, above all the I.R.S., which not only takes our money but then also makes us mail the check to an address we need a map to locate.
(More here.)
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