http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/irs-tea-party_b_3280063.html
Lost in the latest political scandal is a simple fact: The Internal
Revenue Service was acting in the public interest when it opted to
train its auditing power on the Tea Party and affiliated groups.
In castigating government as the root of all evil while portraying
taxation as a form of tyranny, the Tea Party is no less than a mass
celebration of the evasion of the basic responsibilities of American
citizenship. Common sense alone tells you that people drawn to its
ranks may feel extra temptation to find ways to limit what they
surrender to the rogue federal bureaucrats who have supposedly seized
the nation.
The cover-up is the bad part here, as in nearly all Washington
scandals. It's not the act itself that delivered the real trouble --
in this case, a campaign unleashed in the Cincinnati offices of the
IRS to scrutinize with particular rigor the applications for
tax-exempt status submitted by Tea Party-affiliated groups. Rather, it
was what happened afterwards that poses the problem: Officials at the
IRS lied to members of Congress about what was actually going on.
That's how we got here, to this full-blown scandal with all the usual
rituals -- an event that lends validation to seemingly every crackpot
idea a conservative group has ever leveled at the Obama
administration. (The fact that the Justice Department simultaneously
got caught on an overreach of its own, seizing a trove of
correspondence from journalists, hardly helps the administration
deflect the well-earned wrath of critics.)
But let's get back to the primary act at issue here: The IRS -- an
agency loved by no one and responsible for stocking the Treasury with
federal tax proceeds, due under the law -- appears to have devoted
unique effort to making sure that Tea Party organizations were not
fudging the paperwork in their bids to secure tax exemption.
Good for the IRS.