“A Misleading Pretend Scandal”: It Turns Out IRS Commissioner Did Not Visit The White House 157 Times After All
One of the more enduring legends put forth by those working overtime to stoke the fires of scandal within the walls of the Obama Administration, is the often cited tale of how the now departed IRS Commissioner, Douglas Shulman, visited the White House 158 times during his years serving the Obama Administration.
Surely, as the logic goes, there could be but one credible explanation for an agency boss spending so much time within the epicenter of executive power. If Commissioner Shulman had pitched his tent and made the White House his second home, it could only mean that he was a co-conspirator in a well-coordinated effort on the part of the president and White House staff to influence the 2012 election by putting a beat down on conservative money groups looking to gain tax exempt status and the ability to hide the names of their contributors as they raised millions to defeat the Obama re-election effort.
So compelling is this argument that it has become a ‘go to’ bit of circumstantial evidence in the effort to take the IRS ‘scandal’ to the doorstep of the Oval Office and beyond.
And why not? The story does add up to a fairly decent piece of speculative evidence…or at least it would if the story were true.
Sadly (for the scandal mongers), it turns out that the entire meme falls dramatically short when someone actually takes the trouble to dig just a millimeter under the surface to discover what really happened here.
The ball on this enticing bit of scandal bait got rolling when The Daily Caller, the conservative hatchet rag operated by Tucker Carlson, reported in a May 29th piece that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had racked up more visits to the White House than “even the most trusted members of the president’s cabinet.” The article appeared to be carefully put together, so much so that it came complete with a chart revealing how the second most active visitor to the West Wing, Rebecca Blank, was a very distant second to the tally put up by Commissioner Shulman.
The problem is—in what is becoming something of a tradition for The Daily Caller—the website managed to sort of ‘semi-report’ the story without feeling much of a need or desire to gather or report all of the details and facts as, to do so, would have been highly inconvenient to the intent of the article.
Reacting to the Daily Caller story, Bill O’Reilly immediately demanded that Mr. Shulman “explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions.” Considering how odd such an extensive visitation history would be for the boss of a second level government agency, O’Reilly’s request was not an unreasonable one.
However, Mr. O’Reilly’s insistent demand turns out be unnecessary as readily available public records have already answered the questions he sought to have answered. All someone need to do is look at these records to know the reason for Shulman’s visits (which turn out to be far, far fewer than 157.)
As reported by Garance Franke-Ruta in The Atlantic —
“And yet the public meeting schedules available for review to any media outlet show that very thing:
Shulman was cleared primarily to meet with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill. He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama’s director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That’s 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.”
If you are wondering why the IRS Commissioner would be so actively involved in meetings involving the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, you will want to keep in mind that the Internal Revenue Service is at the center of the action when it comes to enforcing the mandate and penalty provisions of the law. As a result, any serious meeting regarding the execution of the Affordable Care Act would not make much sense without Shulman, or a high-ranking member of his staff attending in his place.
But even this does not tell the entire story.
You see, while the records reveal that Mr. Shulman was cleared for entry into the White House 157 times, these records speak only to the result of the clearance required by the Secret Service for someone seeking entry into the building and do not speak to whether or not Shulman actually attended the meetings for which he was cleared.
As someone who has, myself, been to the White House on a few occasions, I am keenly aware that nobody without a permanent entrance pass (given to those who have their office in the complex) gets in the door of the White House or the Executive Office Building unless specifically cleared for entry on a particular date and time by the Secret Service. Indeed, on one occasion, I had been cleared by the Secret Service to attend an event but, at the last minute, I had to pass on the White House visit when something came up. Yet, using the list relied upon by The Daily Caller, my skipped visit would be counted as an additional visit on my part if someone were counting.
What’s more, Franke-Ruta’s research reveals that the records tracking the time and date that a visitor signs in and out of a White House event suggests that Mr. Shulman signed in for just 11 events during the years 2009 through 2012 and signed out of 6 events during that same time frame.
Given the discrepancy between the ‘sign in’ and ‘sign out’ records noted above, it is certainly possible that Franke-Ruta may have actually been at the White House on additional occasions. However, there is absolutely no record—as claimed—that Mr. Shulman was at the White House 157 times. All we learn is that Shulman was cleared to come into the building for various meetings and events; meetings and events that made all the sense in the world given his key role in implementing Obamacare.
If you are wondering why Mr. Shulman would require Secret Service clearance so many more times than, say, cabinet members, it turns out that there is a very simple and clear explanation for this too—along with some understanding of Shulman’s testimony before Congress when he referenced going to the White House for an Easter Egg Roll.
“But there is no record that Shulman attended a White House Easter Egg Roll under Obama, most likely because large events organized by the East Wing, like that one, don’t always show up in the visitor’s access records. Neither do visits by staffers, journalists covering large events, or people who enter the White House grounds in their pre-cleared cars, like Cabinet members, who do not wait for badge swipes at the gate with the policymaking hoi polloi.
So, how can there be so much confusion when it comes to White House records tracking who comes in and who comes out?
Prior to Obama’s arrival, there were no such records published for the public to review. The decision to do so was a part of Obama’s stated quest for transparency when he first took office. As Franke-Ruta adds, “The real problem with combing through the White House visitor logs is that they were a system designed for Secret Service clearance and White House security, not as comprehensive means of documenting every visitor to the White House, high to low. They miss the top end and some of the social end of people visiting the White House — people who are cleared through separate processes designed to protect presidential security other than getting swiped in at the front gate for an appointment.”
Clearly, there is nothing even close to evidence suggesting that Commissioner Shulman visited the White House anywhere near the number of times suggested by The Daily Caller and immediately seized upon as a juicy bit of supposed evidence of White House involvement in this juicy story perpetuated by Darrell Issa and friends.
The true bottom line, however, is that those trying—and failing miserably—to make these pretend scandals stick should themselves be investigated within an inch of their lives for failing to set forth the true facts and data when the same becomes readily available. Failure to do so—whether on the part of supposed journalists or supposedly concerned Congressional committee chairmen—is malpractice, pure and simple, and a purposeful, malevolent misleading of the American public who would actually like to know what really happened here.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, July 7, 2013
“Listening To The Radicals”: The GOP’s Future, Move Right And Move White
It’s an eternal verity of American politics: the Republicans are the party of big business. Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt have sneered it as a putdown, to which many Republicans respond with no shame, yes, we are, the business of America is business. And business, in Washington, means chiefly the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, the two beefiest business lobbies in the city. But funny thing—the chamber and NAM support the Senate immigration bill that the House Republicans are going to kill. In addition, some prominent evangelical groups are pro-reform, too. Which makes me wonder: if the Republicans are no longer listening to these people, then to whom precisely are they listening, and what does that tell us about what kind of party this is becoming?
The chamber, NAM, and the evangelical groups have been in on the immigration discussions from the start. A great deal of the hard work here was done by congressional negotiators in conjunction with the chamber and the AFL-CIO, working through different categories of workers (high-skill, low-skill, guest) and arriving at language and numbers that suited all the interests at the table. Each of these groups has done the kind of outreach to its members that is vital in the case of big and controversial legislation like this. The Evangelical Immigration Table, a project of World Relief (which is an arm of the National Association of Evangelicals), persuaded pastors across the country to support reform.
There was a time in this country when the linked arms of those three groups would unquestionably have been joined by most Republicans on Capitol Hill. But that was long ago. Now the GOP is a different animal altogether.
And so the Chamber of Commerce—the Chamber of Commerce!—is a bunch of sell-outs. This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the chamber and the GOP have been at odds. The chamber has long supported substantial public spending on infrastructure. You might have thought that the fact that the chamber was for it would bring Republicans along. But these Republicans don’t listen to the chamber.
Instead, they are listening to the Tea Party. Back in 2010, the press tried to tell you that Tea Party people just cared about economics, but that’s dead wrong. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson showed in their book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, immigration is a huge issue to Tea Partiers, and along precisely the immigrants-are-freeloaders lines you’d expect. Remember when Mitt Romney’s attack on Rick Perry over immigration worked so well? This is why.
And more disturbingly they’re listening to the likes of Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer, two crackpot haters of nonwhite immigrants who’ve been at it for a couple of decades now. Now I can’t say for sure of course how many Republicans are reading their unhinged website, where one contributor recently dismissed the Evangelical Immigration Table as “Soros-funded,” an imprecation that in right-wing circles is about as ominous as you get and is meant to be read as “can’t be trusted.” But I can say this: the defeat in the House of immigration reform, on the explicit political grounds that “we” (the GOP) don’t “need” Latinos and can win in the future by just riling up the white vote—which is in fact the argument now—represents a mainstreaming of Brimelow and Sailer that would have been totally unimaginable a decade ago.
Business groups, like everyone I talk to who is pro-reform, hold out hope. But it’s a shaky kind of hope, as evidenced by one conversation I had yesterday with a source close to business groups. This person thought the odds of success in the House were “about 30 to 70.” Later in the conversation, he termed himself “optimistic.” If that counts as optimism, that tells us something. The key thing, this person said of the House Republicans, is “just getting them in the room” with senators in a conference committee.
He did correctly identify the hard part. But getting to the conference stage means that the House has to have passed its own bill, and one containing a path to citizenship that isn’t strewn with poison pills that make it impossible for the other side to support. And that’s the huge if.
What we are watching here is absolutely historic. The process by which the GOP has gone from “we must get right with Latinos” to “who needs ’em” has been … well, not quite astonishing. Depressingly unsurprising, actually. But amazing all the same. If immigration is killed for the reasons stated, then the Republican Party has consciously made the decision to become a quasi-nationalist party. They’ll probably never sink to the level of a Le Pen or a Haider (I added that “probably” upon re-reading; you never quite know with these people). But they will have killed immigration reform twice in six years, opposing not just the usual suspects like La Raza but America’s top corporate interest groups. And they will have staked out their bet for their future: move right and move white. And this will be the year it all took hold.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 3, 2013
“White Sale”: The “Missing White Voter”
I’ve been writing about this for the last week in the context of Sean Trende’s analysis of ethnic and racial voting data. But MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin has an excellent summary of the gradual but steady conversion of conservative gabbers from the belief that securing a higher share of the Latino vote is an ontological necessity for the GOP to the very, very different conviction that the GOP’s salvation lies in an enhanced appeal to the same white voters that already compose nearly all of its “base.”
After November’s stunning loss, an array of influential Republicans argued that immigration reform was the party’s best chance to claim Latino voters before they become permanent Democrats. But in a mere eight months, a counter-narrative has taken hold in conservative circles, nurtured by a shrewd group of anti-immigration lobbyists and Tea Party enthusiasts. The new argument sees immigration reform at best as a divisive distraction from the GOP’s real problem of countering “white flight” from the polls. At worst, they view it as an electoral apocalypse, a seventh seal behind which lies an unbroken line of future Democratic presidents.
Sarlin sees this “counter-narrative” largely as a backlash against “Republican establishment” voices telling conservatives something they really, really didn’t want to hear (it’s no accident that Rush Limbaugh was among the first and most consistent in rejecting the Latino Imperative proposition). But he notes that some influential figures, particularly on Fox News, have switched from one theory to another as conservative opposition to immigration reform has intensified:
[T]he anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”
Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced the day after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill. “Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.”
Hannity and Hume didn’t arrive at their latest destination by accident. They’re just the latest figures on the right to embrace the compelling new message that’s whipping Republicans against immigration reform while still promising a better tomorrow for the GOP’s presidential candidates.
Sarlin notes the particular role played by the highly-reputed number-cruncher Sean Trende and the influential conservative journalist Byron York (who unlike Trende has been crusading against the Gang of Eight immigration bill) in making this inherently attractive-to-conservatives argument (I’ve called it a bottomless crack pipe for the Right) respectable. Their work is particularly popular, unfortunately, among those who deliberately ignore what Trende and York say about the kind of white voters who “went missing” in 2012 and the unconventional things Republicans need to do to appeal to them:
York and Trende have some nuanced ideas about how the GOP can accomplish what Romney failed to do, many of which involve tacking left on the economy. But to the talk radio right, the main takeaway is that there are several million angry white votes ripe for the taking if the party can swing even more to the right.
White voters stayed home, Limbaugh said in May, because “they didn’t think the Republican Party was conservative enough….”
“Their idea seems to be gaining currency,” Frank Sharry, executive director of immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, told MSNBC. “Right after the election most of the conservative commentariat said they had to do something to get right with Latino voters. Now there seems to be this bizarre conversation that could only happen in the conservative bubble about how Romney didn’t win because he didn’t mobilize enough white voters.”
Underlying these claims is a belief that Romney lost because he was a blue-blooded moderate who failed to connect to conservative white voters on a visceral level. Nominate an American bad-ass in 2016 and those missing whites will reappear in a hurry.
Bingo. It’s more or less the same rationalization conservatives offered for losing in 2008, as well: a nominee too moderate for the “conservative majority” who was laboring under the false premise that his past support for comprehensive immigration reform would win him Latino support.
The bottom line here is that selling conservatives on a particularly self-serving version of the “missing white voter” theory is the easiest sale imaginable, and they are accordingly buying it like hot cakes. That’s bad news for those who favor immigration reform, and even worse news for those who dream of a political environment in which racial and ethnic conflict is not constantly lurking in the background.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 2, 2013
“A Congress Divided”: Overcoming The Rigid And Obstructionist Partisanship Of House Republicans
The Senate provided the country a rare and modest glimpse of bipartisanship in its 68-32 passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill laboriously accomplished by the Gang of Eight — four Democrats and four Republicans. But overcoming the rigid and obstructionist partisanship of the House Republicans will be another matter.
House Speaker John Boehner, like a chief lemming leading his followers over a cliff, warned in advance of that Senate vote, in which 14 Republicans broke party ranks, that his flock would continue its obdurate ways on the politically explosive immigration issue.
“For any legislation, including a conference report, to pass the House,” Boehner proclaimed, “it’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members.” He obviously was referring to the GOP side alone, as if the House Democrats weren’t members of what senators call “the other body.”
It’s a party position that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert often insisted upon in his abbreviated tenure. It was designed to assure that the House Republicans would work their will on the full House in an our-way-or-the-highway invitation to stalemate.
Boehner in adhering to this posture endangers not only the prospect for meaningful immigration reform. He also jeopardizes his party’s political outlook in 2014 and 2016 and his own speakership. He continues to genuflect before the most conservative House Republicans, driven by Tea-Party recalcitrance, who nevertheless increasingly favor his disposal.
The 14 Senate Republicans apparently hope their support of the bipartisan compromise will ameliorate their party’s problem with Hispanic voters, so graphically demonstrated by their 70 percent vote against GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney in 2012. But the Senate version, heavy on fattened border security but allowing a path to American citizenship for undocumented aliens, will mean little politically if their House brethren refuse to buy into key elements of it.
President Obama did not hesitate to goad the House Republicans to follow the lead of the small band of Senate Republicans who followed GOP Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida in getting off the naysay trail for once.
In all the Republican post-mortems after the Romney defeat, a deafening chorus was heard arguing that the party should address the wide loss of Hispanic, Asian and African-American voters in the 2012 election. Boehner, an astute and practical politician, surely got the message, but appears throttled by the Tea-Party constituency that now dominates his flock.
Until the 14 Senate Republicans cast their votes for the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform package, conservatives in both houses had at least the comfort of knowing they were all in the same boat. The challenge for Boehner, after one-third of the Senate Republican membership voted with the Democrats, is to prevent further leakage in his foundering House craft.
Obama and fellow Democrats, frustrated throughout the president’s first term by Republican congressional roadblocks, are looking to next year’s midterm elections to break the jam, expecting enhanced support from minority voters. The same elections could likewise determine Boehner’s political future if he continues to allow the most extreme elements of his constituency of the right to set a stubborn and resistant course to genuine immigration reform.
At a minimum, Boehner needs to get off his insistence that the House must and will go its own way on the issue, writing a package that can capture “a majority of the majority” membership. Such an outcome will only end in negating a rare example of Senate bipartisanship achieved in a Congress that once marked its most productive and laudatory days under both Democratic and Republican presidents.,
Last November, the Republican brand suffered a body blow with a presidential campaign that only reinforced its image as the party of the white and the well-off. The continuing fight over immigration reform can be a GOP opportunity to combat that view, but not unless Boehner and Co. seize it as their 14 Senate brethren have done.
By: Jules Witcover, The National Memo, July 2, 2013
“All Rifles Welcome, Especially The Evil Black Ones”: Just A Small Reminder Of The Revolution To Come
While Adam Kokesh’s much-discussed July 4 march on Washington by gun-toting sons of liberty got called off (perhaps because of Kokesh’s frequent incarcerations), the spirit lives on in Colorado, as reported by TPM’s Tony Kludt:
A tea party group’s vow to march with guns in a Fourth of July parade has caused panic in a small Colorado town.
The Southern Colorado Patriots Club announced that its members would march with guns in the annual Independence Day parade in Westcliffe, Colo. to “make a statement that we still believe in our Constitution” to protest new gun control laws in the state, the Denver Post reported. A flier distributed by the group urged members to come to the parade with unarmed rifles.
“All rifles welcome especially the evil black ones,” the flier read.
The announcement prompted the Custer County Chamber of Commerce, the event’s sponsor, to cancel the parade as nervous citizens circulated a petition to stop the club. Donna Hood, president of the chamber, abstained from the vote to cancel the parade but told the Post that the matter has “polarized this community in a week.” The parade was ultimately saved when the Town of Westcliffe agreed to pick up the sponsorship tab.
And get this:
Although the group has marched with guns in the past, the passage of new statewide gun measures has heightened public sensitivity to the action. The state’s new 15-round limit on gun magazines is slated to take effect next week.
I’m guessing the “sensitivity” was mostly raised among second amendment absolutists, who want to remind their fellow citizens that if their “liberties” are further trifled with, they’ll feel free to respond with revolutionary violence, though they tend to call it “resistance to tyranny” or even “self-defense.”
At some point, it would be nice if regular old conservatives would denounce this sort of nonsense, not because it’s embarrassing, but because it reflects the “constitutional conservative” belief that the public policy preferences of self-styled right-wing “patriots” cannot be overridden by democratic majorities operating according to the rule of law. The thinly-disguised motive for these armed demonstrations is to remind the rest of us that we can have our Obamacare or our legalized abortion or our gun safety regulations only so long as the real Americans choose to let us by leaving the ammo at home.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 28, 2013
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