The GOP pivots on the IRS scandal

The scandal surrounding the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of applications for tax-exempt status by “tea party” groups and other right-leaning organizations took a sharp turn at the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday. In addition to decrying how those groups’ applications were flagged for extra scrutiny, Republicans on the panel -- especially Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) -- argued that the Obama administration had covered up the problem for more than a year.

“Listening to the nightly news, this appears to be just the latest example of a culture of cover-ups -- and political intimidation -- in this administration,” Camp said, according to my colleagues Melanie Mason and Jim Puzzanghera. “It seems like the truth is hidden from the American people just long enough to make it through an election.”

For those who’ve been blissfully ignorant of the goings-on in Washington over the last six months, Camp was alluding to l’affaire Benghazi. There too the criticism has shifted from the event itself to the way the administration talked about the event.

It’s a familiar tactic among prosecutors -- if you can’t prove that people violated the law, you may still be able to prove that they didn’t tell the truth about what they’d done. It also fits into a long-running GOP meme about President Obama and his administration, namely, that it abuses power and the public trust.

The attacks in Benghazi raised real issues around embassy security and the uneasy balance between trying to respect a fledgling government and maintaining safety for U.S. diplomats. But questions about the State Department’s use of Libyan security personnel have been lost amid the debate over whether the White House tried to deceive the public about Al Qaeda’s involvement in the attacks two months before the election.

The fact that we’re still talking about a possible cover-up more than eight months after the fatal attack, and more than seven months after the administration publicly acknowledged that it was, in fact, the work of terrorists, speaks to the staying power of such allegations. And for the GOP, they present a less nuanced, more easily digestible point of attack on Obama than questions about how best to secure a diplomatic mission in a potentially hostile country making the difficult transition to democracy. Oh, and by the way, any question about security invariably raises the issue of how much money Republicans have pushed Congress to cut from the administration’s budget for protecting diplomats.

The IRS scandal is still in its early days, with much yet to be learned. In particular, there’s a lot still to be explored about who came up with the techniques used to flag applicants for tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny, why they chose those techniques and the methods used to review the applicants who’d been flagged.

Even if the IRS was simply trying to focus its reviews on the applicants with the most obvious interest in political activity -- which 501(c)(3) groups were forbidden to engage in and 501(c)(4)s could do only in limited amounts -- the way it went about flagging groups seems ludicrously one-sided. Beyond that, it’s impossible to justify the intrusive requests for information that some of the flagged applicants received; they served little purpose other than to identify the political leanings of a group and its donors, not the activities the group was engaged in.

Nevertheless, a number of Republicans on Capitol Hill are steamed at the IRS for what its top officials told lawmakers -- or rather, what they didn’t tell them. Conservative groups have been complaining for a few years that their applications for tax-exempt status were being delayed, they were receiving inappropriate requests for information and, in some cases, that confidential information about their tax returns was being disclosed. Yet on multiple occasions over the last two years, IRS officials told Congress that conservatives weren’t being targeted.

(Yes, these officials were either civil servants or, in the case of former IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman, an appointee of President George W. Bush. But as the New York Times reported Friday, Obama administration appointees in the Treasury Department were told last year about the inspector general’s inquiry into the scrutiny of conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. So there’s at least that connection, as tenuous as it may be.)

At Friday’s hearing, acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller -- who was canned by Obama this week but is keeping the seat warm until his successor arrives -- defended the agency’s previous denials by saying, in effect, that lawmakers had asked the wrong question. According to Miller, members of Congress had asked whether the IRS had “targeted” conservatives. Even today, he said, he would answer that question in the negative because the agency’s efforts were not politically motivated. In other words, in Miller’s view, the IRS didn’t target conservatives, it was just trying to identify the applicants most likely to merit additional scrutiny. The problem (again in Miller’s view) is that the filter it used was flawed.

I don’t buy that argument. At the very least, IRS officials should have acknowledged the fact that every organization with “tea party” in its name had been flagged for review, then explained why that happened. Saying there was no targeting was, at the very least, an error of omission.

Even if you believe the IRS was dishonest with Congress, however, it’s a leap to blame the Obama administration for that. I haven’t seen any evidence -- yet -- that Obama’s political appointees stonewalled or misled lawmakers. Such evidence might eventually turn up, but it’s too early for Camp to be playing the cover-up card.

In the meantime, the scandal has shined a spotlight on a real problem at the IRS: 501(c)(4) groups have become a magnet for anonymous campaign donations, a place for special interests to launder their political spending. That’s an abuse of the system. And as the scandal has abundantly demonstrated, the IRS is ill-equipped to respond to the problem.

Congress put the agency in the position of having to make judgment calls about how 501(c)(4) groups spend their money, and those judgments invariably have political overtones. Lawmakers need either to bar 501(c)(4)s from engaging in campaigns or to set specific, objective limits on how much they can do, while also requiring them to disclose what they spend on election-related activity and where the money came from.

I’d vote for the former course because it’s a brighter line that’s easier to enforce. But I fear this crucial policy question will go unanswered as the GOP pivots from critiquing what the IRS did to blaming Obama for not revealing it sooner.

ALSO:

The Benghazi talking points

Daum: The gift of a great dog

For a dying patient, a prescription of silence

Follow Jon Healey on Twitter @jcahealey