It’s not possible to prevent people, particularly people whose goal is power, from abusing it
In the
wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq during the Bush administration,
the default assumption of the media was that it was a direct consequence of
White House policies. Those who were particularly Bush/Cheney deranged imagined
that the vice president himself probably spent his recreational time personally
torturing Iraqi prisoners. But even more thoughtful people [1] accused the administration of creating the
environment in which the abuse could occur:
Defenders
of the administration have argued, of course, that there is no “smoking gun”–no
chain of orders leading directly from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Pfc.
Lynndie England and her co-conspirators. But that reasoning–now largely
accepted within the Beltway–betrays a deliberate indifference to how large
organizations such as the military actually work. In any war, civilian leaders
set strategic aims, and it falls to commanders and planners at successively
lower levels of command to refine that guidance into executable orders which
can be handed down to subordinates. That process works whether the policy in
question is a good one or a bad one. President Bush didn’t order the April 2003
“thunder run” into Baghdad; he ordered Tommy Franks to win the war and the
Third Infantry Division’s leaders figured out how to make it happen. Likewise,
no order was given to shove light sticks into the rectums of Iraqi prisoners at
Abu Ghraib. Nevertheless, the road to the abuses began with flawed
administration policies that exalted expediency and necessity over the rule of
law, eviscerated the military’s institutional constraints on the treatment of
prisoners, commenced combat with insufficient planning, preparation and troop
strength, and thereby set the conditions for the abuses that would later take
place.
Similarly,
while we still don’t know what the White House knew and when it knew it (and
the president’s non-responsive answer to a question that wasn’t asked on Thursday [2] not only failed to clarify the issue, but
increased cause for suspicion), the administration certainly created an
environment in which IRS functionaries might have thought it was their job to
go after his political enemies. If they weren’t doing literally to them what
the Abu Ghraib rogue soldiers were doing to individual Iraqi’s fundaments, they
were certainly doing it figuratively. This is particularly true because by the
very nature of their job, and the ideology of the limited-government groups,
many of the IRS employees probably viewed them as their
own political
adversaries.
After
all, one of the political goals of the 501(c)4 groups whose names contained the
words “Patriot” or “Tea Party” was to simplify the tax code, if not to abolish
the income tax altogether, an outcome that threatened the size and power, if
not very existence of the “service” for which the IRS employees worked. It
would be natural (and even simply human) for them to be suspicious of the
motives of such groups, and to wish to thwart them.
Moreover,
while all employees except two are career civil service, and not appointed by
or directly accountable to the White House, that doesn’t mean that they are
apolitical. As Tim Carney points out [3]:
…being a “career civil servant” doesn’t mean you’re making a career out of the job, or that you’re not political.
In the
past three election cycles, the Center for Responsive Politics’ database shows
about $474,000 in political donations by individuals listing “IRS” or “Internal
Revenue Service” as their employer.
This
money heavily favors Democrats: $247,000 to $145,000, with the rest going to
political action committees. (Oddly, half of those GOP donations come from only
two IRS employees, one in Houston and one in Annandale, Va.)
IRS
employees also gave $67,000 to the PAC of the National Treasury Employees
Union, which in turn gave more than 96 percent of its contributions to
Democrats. Add the PAC cash to the individual donations and IRS employees favor
Democrats 2-to-1.
The
Cincinnati office where the political targeting took place is much
more partisan, judging by FEC filings. More than 75 percent of the
campaign contributions from that office in the past three elections went to
Democrats. In 2012, every donation traceable to employees at that office went
to either President Obama or liberal Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
(emphasis by author)
Add to
that the revolving door between top IRS officials and Democratic staff
positions that Carney also notes, and there will be a natural bias within the
bureaucracy against groups and individuals who appear to be opposed to
Democratic policies and goals. Now consider the multiplication effect of the
intense vilification and calumnies against the Tea Party as racist, bigoted,
homophobic John Birchers by much of the media over that time period. It would
make perfect sense for a typical IRS employee to view them as a threat not just
to their own job, but to the nation itself — they are enemies of the state [4]. So
when they claim that they’re not being political in giving more scrutiny to
such groups, they probably believe it, just as many in the media are blind to
their own partisan bias, because they are fish who don’t even see the water in
which they swim.
Now,
even with all of this natural tendency to do exactly what they did, a
responsible administration would take care to set a tone from the top that such
behavior was unacceptable. But “responsible,” at least in that sense of the
word, has never been an accurate adjective for the Obama White House, and in
fact its tone has exacerbated the situation, from the very beginning. Four
years ago (almost to the day), the president made an unfunny joke about auditing people [5] who merited his displeasure. A year or so
later, in a similar “Ha ha” moment, he joked about sending predator drones [6] after a pop music group. These sorts of
things were occurring about the same time as he was exhorting Latinos to “go out and punish [7]” their
mutual enemies, and making it clear to Republicans that he was “keeping score [8].”
After
the Supreme Court ruled against the administration in Citizens
United (the case that
some defending the IRS are claiming was the cause of the new scrutiny, despite
the fact that it started before the caseloads began
to increase[9]),
President Civility lectured them [10], a
captive audience at the State of the Union speech, lying about the ruling to
their faces (well, all right, to be fair, he may not have been lying —
President Constitutional Scholar may have just been ignorant on the nature of
the ruling). This undoubtedly made many in his government think that it gave
them license to fight the ruling in the trenches against the sudden growth in
enemies of the state it had spurred, since their president had said it was
wrong.
Let me
(as the president would say) be clear. I will be in no way shocked if emails
are discovered showing that the White House actively ordered IRS officials to
go after Tea Party groups, while green lighting his political allies. My only
point is that, sadly, it wouldn’t have been necessary for them to do so.
When
the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170, it wasn’t done
at the direct order of King Henry II. It didn’t have to be. All it required was
for the monarch to muse, aloud, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
But
sadly, while we have badly needed a better president for over four years, the
real problem isn’t the men and women running the system, and it wasn’t a
failure of the system — it is the system itself [11].
The
Founders, in their wisdom, understood that the key to good government lay not
in hoping that the governors would be angels, but to restrict its power,
knowing that they would never be. We can fire employees, we can even jail them,
but the problem won’t be solved until the power of the “service” is reined in
vastly. Step one might be to re-ban government employee unions [12],
including that of the IRS, because that’s part of the system we can fix, and
this deserves that death penalty.
Ideally,
of course, the income tax would be abolished entirely, but perhaps a simpler
and (perhaps) more politically feasible solution would be to at least eliminate
the corporate income tax, so that no one would have to justify their tax status
to the bureaucrats. It’s not possible to prevent people, particularly people
whose goal is power, from abusing it. All we can do is deprive them of it. Newtown
didn’t justify any of the legislative attempts to disarm us that followed it,
and even some who jumped on that bandwagon are now recognizing that we need
control of government more than control of guns. But if this travesty of
tyranny doesn’t lead to serious tax reform, and government reform, we will have
missed a true opportunity.
[1] more thoughtful people: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.carter.html
[2] asked on Thursday: http://pjmedia.com/blog/what-did-the-president-know-about-the-irs-scandal-and-when-did-he-know-it
[3] points out: http://washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-the-irs-is-deeply-political-and-very-democratic/article/2529758
[4] enemies of the state: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/05/15/why-the-irs-targets-conservatives-the-apparent-reasoning-behind-their-actions/
[5] auditing people: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260113149028331.html
[6] joked about sending predator drones: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/obama-jokingly-threatens-jonas-brothers-with-predator-drones-201025
[7] go out and punish: http://hotair.com/archives/2010/10/25/obamas-turnout-pitch-to-latinos-get-out-there-and-punish-your-enemies/
[8] keeping score: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123862834153780427.html
[9] started before the caseloads began to increase: http://reason.com/24-7/2013/05/15/data-doesnt-support-irs-explanation-for
[10] lectured them: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/01/obamas-state-of-the-union-address-criticism-of-the-supreme-court-campaign-finance-ruling.html
[11] it is the system itself: https://twitter.com/moelane/status/335171315512266752
[12] re-ban government employee unions: http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/23/time-to-abolish-public-employee-unions/
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