Taxing Our Patience

As Francis Wilkinson over at Bloomberg notes, the IRS "scandal" over "targeting conservative groups" quietly died earlier this month with the on-schedule resignation of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, and the suddenly "tax-reform" minded GOP has let it die because suddenly under Trump, the IRS is working for "We The People" again.

Shortly before Koskinen left office, the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration released the (presumably) final report on the scandal. Like a previous Inspector General report, it tried to soothe Republican feelings – the IRS really, really should’ve handled things differently -- while utterly refuting Republican charges about what had transpired.

The story told by Republicans is so well known that it substitutes for fact. In the first years of the Obama administration, Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations rose up to defy the government. When the groups sought IRS approval for their designations as “social welfare” organizations under the tax code, the IRS targeted them with burdensome queries, harassing the groups while slow-walking reviews of their applications. In this telling, it was a political vendetta – carried out against conservatives by a government agency that many anti-government, anti-tax conservatives especially despised.

Republicans claimed the IRS served as an attack dog for the Obama White House. But inquiries by the House Ways and Means Committee, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the Justice Department all failed to produce evidence of political interference.

Perhaps it was because the premise of the scandal -- that Obama’s political team would want to destroy local Tea Party groups -- was absurd. For Democrats, local Tea Party groups were a political Giving Tree, bearing glorious, loopy fruit such as Christine O’Donnell and Todd Akin, Tea Party candidates who managed to lose crucial Senate campaigns that a competent Republican – perhaps anycompetent Republican -- would’ve won.

What’s more, none of the groups actually needed IRS approval to operate. “These organizations didn’t have to wait for the IRS to tell them anything to go into business,” Koskinen said in a telephone interview last week.

Yet the IRS clearly applied extra scrutiny to groups that it thought might be engaged in too much politics to warrant the preferential tax designation. One way IRS personnel did that was to look for key words, such as “Tea Party.” Other words that triggered IRS scrutiny included: “Occupy,” “green energy,” “medical marijuana” and “progressive.”

Contrary to the Republican story, the IRS never targeted conservatives. The IRS targeted politics, which was pretty much what it was supposed to do.

And frankly, they got away with it.  Now, the IRS is okay again because Trump has "drained the swamp" and your taxes will be "so easy you can do them on a postcard".  None of that is true of course, but the IRS is no longer a convenient target for the Party of Trump now that they're in charge of it.

Trump has appointed an interim IRS Commissioner, who for some weird reason is still holding his current post as Assistant Treasury Secretary because somebody told him it would be a good idea.  It's not. David Kautter is Treasury's point man on the Trump tax plan, and trying to both write tax reform and run the IRS at the same time is basically impossible.

But it's interesting to note that like Benghazi, this died as soon as attacking the government as incompetent and cruel meant attacking Trump.