The I.R.S. and the Tea Party: Where Is the Scandal?

Five days into the I.R.S. brouhaha, and things are proceeding on two distinct tracks. On the political track, hysteria has taken hold, as evidenced by President Obama’s decision to force the tax agency’s acting head, Steven Miller, to resign. On the substantive front, we now have preliminary answers to two key questions: What did the agency do wrong? And who ordered it to target conservative groups? Notwithstanding Miller’s resignation, which the President himself announced on Tuesday evening, the answers appear to be: not nearly as much as recent headlines suggest; and, nobody in the Obama Administration.

On Monday afternoon, the office of the Inspector General for Tax Administration, which spent months interviewing employees of the I.R.S. department that deals with tax-exempt organizations, and going through its records, released a fifty-four-page report. With President Obama denouncing the tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups as “outrageous” in advance of the report’s publication, and with Republicans trying to cast this as the new Watergate—“My question is, Who’s going to jail?” John Boehner said—it seemed reasonable to expect that there would be one or two bombshells. And there were. They just weren’t of the type that George Will and Mitch McConnell had been hoping for.

...read more