No one can doubt it any longer. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the White House worked together to steal the Election of 2012 and try to destroy the Tea Party. They succeeded at the first, but failed at the second. The Tea Party won by enduring. They must follow this up with a push to abolish the IRS and change the tax code.

IRS and White House: dead-to-rights

Dick Morris, who once worked for President Bill Clinton, lays out the case against the IRS. The strongest evidence: Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times while the IRS had an active campaign against the Tea Party and groups that bore its name.  To put that into perspective:

• Mark Everson, who served as Commissioner of Internal Revenue before Shulman, visited the White House once on official business in all the time he so served. He had to discuss the tax treatment of immigrants. (Once, in fact, he turned down an invitation to the White House Christmas Party.)
• Commissioner Shulman was the most frequent visitor, according to visitor logs. (See here and here.)

Number of visits by various officials to the White House. Graphic: The Daily Caller; data from whitehouse.gov.

The Daily Caller ranked and graphed all visits by senior officials during this time. Attorney General Holder ranks fifth on this list; Kathleen Sebelius seventh.
And very distant fifth and seventh, at that.

Bear this in mind in considering every possible reason for IRS Commissioner Shulman to visit the White House this often. Hint: it couldn’t be merely to take in the White House Easter Egg Roll. That happens only once a year. IRS Commissioner Shulman visited almost once a week.

Why so many IRS visits?

Dick Morris considers the first policies Shulman might have to discuss with de facto President Obama, and rejects them all. Why? Because other members of the Cabinet did not visit often enough to attend the same meetings.

Not ObamaCare. Not without having HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in attendance, you wouldn’t. About Treasury issues? Deficit reduction? Not without Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

The point is: neither of those two Cabinet officers (one of whom was his boss) visited the White House nearly often enough  even for him to have meetings with one or the other.

So why is the head of the IRS coming to the White House so often?

Andrew Martin (National Conservative Examiner) suggests this shows only that Obama was using him, and other Cabinet officials, to get re-elected. But Dick Morris speaks more bluntly. This was about more than Obama’s own re-election. This was about personal revenge.

The decision in Citizens United v. FEC did it. They threw him into an emotional tailspin. He blurted out his pique, of course, in the 2010 State of the Union address. He said the Supreme Court had destroyed a century of jurisprudence. (That prompted Supreme Court Justice Samuel J. Alito to say, silently, “That’s not true.”)

So now Obama would “[castrate] the wealthy people and groups” who now could use the political system at least as effectively as can the labor unions. (The labor union were his natural allies. They aren’t anymore. But that’s another story.)

Will Obama get away with it?

Dick Morris says no. And he quotes this Latin proverb:

Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.

Whom God wants to “waste,” He first drives insane. And Barack Obama, Morris suggests, is insane with the power he thinks he has. Actually he must be insane to think the IRS could keep a secret like that forever.

There’s more reason than Obama’s madness. The press are no longer his friends either. In fact he is running out of friends, after they’ve heard the hollow crack of broken promises.

What should the Tea Party do?

But destroying an enemy in war is never enough. One must follow up on victory properly.

The Tea Party must never let the IRS stay in business. As serious as a vindictive President (or de facto President) can be, an IRS commissioner who lets such a President use him as his special bludgeon is worse. Mark Everson has said so many times since Fox News started asking him about this sordid affair.

Mark Everson is a rarity: a conscientious civil servant. Douglas Shulman was a hatchet man. Steven Miller, his successor, is a hatchet man. The IRS is a gang of hatchet wielders. That is the nature of their mission, as Paul N. Strassels (All You Need to Know About the IRS) made plain.

The problem is the kind of tax code that makes an IRS necessary. Thomas Jefferson once said,

A prince whose character is thus marked by every act that may define a tyrant is unfit to be the leader of a free people.

And a body of laws that needs an IRS, or any other hatchet gang, to enforce it, is not a fit body of laws for a free people, either.

The head of the Richmond (Virginia) Tea Party is saying it already: time to scrap the US Tax Code. He specifically mentioned the FairTax by Americans for Fair Taxation. And by no coincidence, the people at AFT understand the problem at least as well as does the Richmond Tea Party:

The income tax and the IRS have been given 100 years to demonstrate to the American people that they are worthy financial stewards. They have failed. It’s time for Congress to get the IRS out of politics.

By abolishing the IRS and making hatchet wielders obsolete. Permanently.

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