“Investigate Darrell Issa”: Or How To Apply The Chairman’s Own Methods And Style To Him
Among the many reasons that Americans hold the House of Representatives in low repute – at historically abysmal levels, in fact – is the blatantly partisan and ideological misconduct of so many committee chairs. Without any evident embarrassment these mighty politicians deny science, defy mathematics, and dismiss every fact that contradicts their prejudices. But bad as these chairs tend to be, none is quite as flamboyantly awful as Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, a special investigative panel whose latest effort to conjure scandal from nothingness at the Internal Revenue Service would provoke his removal by a responsible leadership.
As we have pointed out repeatedly in these pages, and as testimony by the IRS inspector general has since confirmed, it is now clear that right-wing groups were not targeted for exceptional scrutiny. Moreover, there was no political motive in the agency’s treatment of the Tea Party and associated groups seeking tax exemption (in many cases illegitimately).
It is now equally obvious that the behavior of Issa himself, with his attempts to skew his committee’s investigation and conceal testimony that exonerated the agency, represents the most serious wrongdoing in the supposed “IRS scandal.” But this isn’t the first time that the California Republican, who happens to be the wealthiest man in Congress, has misused the broad powers of his chairmanship. Actually, that is all he does – as he demonstrated in equally opportunistic and amateurish examinations of both the Benghazi tragedy and the “Fast and Furious” affair.
Issa’s stewardship of the House Government Reform Committee has failed even by the standards of the Republican congressional leadership, which must have hoped that he would have collected some Obama administration scalps by now. He delayed the Fast and Furious probe solely to extend it into the election year, blustered against Attorney General Eric Holder, and accomplished…nothing.
There is little hope that Speaker John Boehner, who has enough problems maintaining a semblance of authority and dignity, will question Issa’s fitness to chair this important committee. But still we are left wondering: What would become of Issa if he were subjected to the Republican style of investigation? What if the presumption of guilt, the preference for insinuation over evidence, the omission of exculpatory facts, and the promulgation of conspiratorial speculations that feature in all of Issa’s theatrical probes were applied to him?
As the richest member of Congress, Issa seems to enjoy the same veneer of respectability that great wealth has provided to many dubious figures. But his past includes several troubling encounters with law enforcement, from alleged car thefts to weapons offenses. So what would the public learn from an Issa-style investigation of Darrell Issa?
First, the committee chair would reveal the troubling findings about Issa, namely that he was arrested not once but twice for illegal weapons offenses. Worse yet, he would explain, Issa had been convicted the second time. Then he would release slightly redacted copies of court records on file in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where Issa grew up, showing an arrest, charges of auto theft and carrying a concealed weapon only one month after his discharge from the Army in the winter of 1972. Those same records would also reveal that Issa and an older brother were both suspects in the theft of a “new red Maserati sports car” from an auto dealership, and that Issa was eventually indicted for larceny.
And then the committee might leak a second, even more damaging set of records showing that Issa had been picked up several months later on another weapons charge in Michigan, where he attended college. Police arrested him for possession of an unregistered handgun, leading ultimately to his conviction.
What we might not learn – at least not until the facts were excavated by less partisan probers – is that Issa was only 19 years old at the time; that the first set of charges in Ohio was eventually dropped by prosecutors; and that the Michigan charge was a misdemeanor, punishable by a $100 fine. Which young Issa paid.
Yet whatever Issa did as a foolish kid could be made to look quite sinister by a congressional committee chair like him, dedicated to trumping up minor irritations into major scandals. How fortunate he is that nobody in authority has ever misused the investigative power to smear him – and that those currently in authority over him have no appetite for reining in his abuses of that power.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 29, 2013
“John Boehner’s Dilemma”: Your Choice Mr. Speaker, Tea Party Uprising Or Latino Uprising
On immigration, Speaker John Boehner is caught between two unpleasant possibilities: A Tea Party uprising or a Latino uprising. Eventually, he’s going to have to choose which presents a bigger risk to his party.
So far, all of his rhetoric and body language suggests he is trying to protect his House Republican caucus from a Tea Party uprising that would take out incumbents in Republican primaries, and perhaps himself from a challenge to his speakership.
Even though the Senate passed landmark immigration reform with a supermajority of 68 votes, Speaker Boehner is refusing to bring the Senate bill to the House floor. He is insisting the House pass its own legislation with “majority support of Republicans,” a needless standard designed to produce a far more right-wing bill than the Democratic-led Senate can tolerate, increasing the chances of a deadlocked House-Senate negotiation.
If it even gets that far. Considering how House Republicans recently failed to come together to pass a farm bill, it’s not a given the House can pass any immigration bill with Republican votes alone.
Failure to pass a final bill suits Tea Party Republicans just fine. But if Boehner buries a widely supported bipartisan Senate bill, the uprising he faces may be far worse.
On Sunday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told CNN, “This has the potential of becoming the next major civil rights movement. I could envision in the late summer or early fall if Boehner tries to bottle the bill up or put something in without a path to citizenship … I could see a million people on the Mall in Washington.”
This is not idle musing. This has already happened.
In December 2005, the House passed legislation that would turn undocumented workers into felons. A wave of mass protests by Latinos swept the country the following spring, lasting for three months. Half a million poured into the streets of Los Angeles, and 400,000 marched in downtown Chicago. Seeing the strength of the Latino vote, the Senate quickly backed off of the House approach and in May 2006 passed an immigration bill providing a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.
Neither the House nor Senate bills became law. But back in 2006, with conservative Republicans controlling both chambers, gridlock was a win for the protesters. Today, with immigration advocates so close to winning historic reform, gridlock would be a devastating blow.
And if the highest-ranking Republican in the country was the clear roadblock, the Republican Party in general would be on the receiving end of visceral hatred, most likely voiced once again in the streets.
A wave of protests targeting Republicans that matched or surpassed the level of street heat generated in 2006 would be devastating to the Republican Party’s attempts to win back the Latino votes that proved decisive to Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories. With the Latino share of the electorate continuing to rise — most ominously for Republicans, in their lone bastion of strength, the South — killing immigration reform could fast-track a demographic disaster that would condemn Republicans to minority status for a generation.
In the end, Boehner will have to decide which uprising he wants to face least: A Tea Party uprising that could spell personal defeats for himself and his friends, or a Latino uprising that could spell the end of the Republican Party.
If he takes the long view, he will recognize that his speakership won’t last for long if his party crumbles all around him.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, June 28, 2013
“Congress Reinterprets Jesus”: Serve Banksters Or Serve The Poor?
Thank God for Congress, right? When things get out of balance in America, we can always count on our legislative stalwarts to recalibrate the scales of justice.
Take greed, for example. The barons of Wall Street, whose raw greed and casino scams wrecked our real economy five years ago, are back to shoving great gobs of bonus pay into their pockets. Meanwhile, the middle class remains decimated, and millions of workaday Americans who were knocked all the way down into poverty are still stuck there. In this nation of fabulous wealth, our poverty numbers are shocking and scandalous: 50 million people are officially poor; another 51 million are “near poor.” A third of our country!
You’ll be pleased to know, then, that only last week, U.S. House members turned their legislative guns on the greed that’s sapping the moral vitality of our society. Unfortunately, their aim was a bit off. Instead of popping the privileged, they hit the most unprivileged: families who need food stamps to make ends meet.
The food stamp program is out of control, they shrieked, noting that it’s been expanding even as the unemployment rate has been coming down. Yoo-hoo, knuckleheads, the jobless rate has ticked down largely because job-seekers have become so discouraged by the absence of opportunities that they’ve quit looking. Plus, getting a job no longer gets you out of poverty — just ask the barista who’s making your next latte about the joys of working for poverty pay. Food stamp rolls have reached record numbers, because — guess what? — there are record numbers of Americans in poverty!
Yet, the House called for cutting some $2 billion a year (and 2 million Americans) out of the program. On June 20, however, the members balked — not because the cut was too severe, but because it was not enough for Tea Party Republicans, who have been demanding a total food stamp gut job, proposing to slash the program by $25 billion a year.
Also, the GOP majority lost the votes of nearly all Democrats by adding a couple of fiendish amendments to punish poor people for the crime of being poor. One was to put additional work requirements on families seeking the food benefit. “We cannot continue to deny able-bodied people the dignity of work,” blathered a worked-up know-nothing named Steve Southerland of Florida. Then, Rep. Michele Bachmann had a tempest in her teapot of a brain, offering her support of Southerland’s amendment in a sort of Biblical falsetto: “If anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”
Hello, Michele — that’s not exactly in keeping with the moral message of the Biblical Jesus. Nor is it in keeping with reality — today’s poverty does not stem from any unwillingness to work. Indeed, millions of food stamp recipients are working, but not being paid enough to put adequate groceries on the family table. And many more are in desperate search for jobs that aren’t there.
In fairness, though, let me note that House Republicans did try to give hard-hit families something extra in this legislation: drug testing. Following in lockstep with the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council — which has been peddling this vile, insulting slap at poor people all around the country — the House majority added a urine-test provision to its bill. That really puts the mean in “demeaning” — and this from small-government poseurs who piously decry government intrusion into people’s lives!
Once again, the Tea Party congresscritters should have used their ever-present Bibles for instruction, rather than just for thumping. They would’ve learned that Jesus, at the Sea of Galilee, distributed free fish and loaves to everyone there — with no pee-in-the-cup requirement. And if he had wanted to test whether anyone was on drugs, he would’ve passed cups to bankers first, then to lawmakers.
A society’s response to poverty is one measure that speaks directly to its essential character. In particular, a wealthy society’s nonchalant tolerance of poverty in its midst, the willingness of that society’s leaders to disregard the spread of poverty and the callous calculations by some that it is permissible and even profitable to denigrate those mired in poverty — these are three flashing indicators of a meltdown in our society’s moral core.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, June 26, 2013
“Targeting Conservative And Liberal Groups Alike”: The So-Called IRS Scandal Ends With a Whimper
With Edward Snowdon on his whirlwind tour of countries unfriendly to the United States and the Supreme Court handing down a bunch of important decisions, this is a good week for stories to get lost in the back pages. So you may not have noticed that late yesterday, the IRS scandal, supposedly Worse Than Watergate™, came to a sputtering halt with the release of new documents in the investigation. The whole scandal, you’ll recall, is about how conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) status were given extra scrutiny, while other kinds of groups just slid by. Well, it turns out, not so much:
The instructions that Internal Revenue Service officials used to look for applicants seeking tax-exempt status with “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their titles also included groups whose names included the words “Progressive” and “Occupy,” according to I.R.S. documents released Monday.
The documents appeared to back up contentions by I.R.S. officials and some Democrats that the agency did not intend to single out conservative groups for special scrutiny. Instead, the documents say, officials were trying to use “key word” shortcuts to find overtly political organizations — both liberal and conservative — that were after tax favors by saying they were social welfare organizations.
But the practice appeared to go much farther than that. One such “be on the lookout” list included medical marijuana groups, organizations that were promoting President Obama’s health care law, and applications that dealt “with disputed territories in the Middle East.”
Taken together, the documents seem to change the terms of a scandal that exploded over accusations that the I.R.S. had tried to stifle a nascent conservative political movement. Instead, the dispute now revolves around questionable sorting tactics used by I.R.S. application screeners.
Questionable sorting tactics! Not quite the scandal of the century. So why did the Inspector General’s report that started this whole thing characterize it only as the singling out of conservative groups, ignoring the fact that liberal groups got treated unfairly too, and with the same means, the BOLO (“be on the lookout” memo) that instructed agents to give special scrutiny to certain kinds of groups? Steve Benen points out that the Inspector General (IG) was responding to a request from Darrell Issa to investigate the treatment of conservative groups, so that’s the likely reason his inquiry was restricted in that way. So Issa first asked the IG for a restricted investigation, then he released excerpts of interviews with IRS officials cherry-picked to make things look worse than they actually were, and now this.
But this “scandal” was already dying. Despite the most fervent wishes of conservatives, there hasn’t been any actual evidence showing that orders to crush the Tea Party came right from the White House. So in the last few weeks they’ve been reduced to arguing that there was a conspiracy of winks and nods, whereby everybody just knew what to do, even if nobody actually told anybody what to do. President Obama gave a speech criticizing “dark money,” and IRS agents swung into action! Or maybe there was a real conspiracy, but we just haven’t found it yet despite all the looking (“Some person or persons made the decision to target, harass, delay and abuse,” wrote Peggy Noonan. “Some person or persons communicated the decision. Some persons executed them.”). You can sustain that for a while, but eventually, you have to produce something real. You can’t just speculate forever.
And frankly, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with these BOLO lists per se. If you have a situation where a bunch of similar groups are being created all at the same time and they all appear to be political groups masquerading as social welfare organizations, it’s perfectly reasonable to group them together and have the same agents develop an understanding of what they do and whether they deserve tax-exempt status. The problem isn’t that they got put into a pile, it’s what happens afterward. And what’s been really appalling from what we’ve learned is that the IRS agents seemed to have only the barest understanding of what the law was and how they were supposed to apply it. Maybe once this is all over, we can get around to fixing that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 25, 2013
“The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth”: Darrell Issa Should Be Answering Questions Instead Of Asking Questions
Yesterday, much to the chagrin of House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) decided it was time for some sunlight in the IRS investigation. Committee investigators conducted lengthy interviews with IRS officials in Ohio, and while Issa was content to release cherry-picked excerpts from those interviews, Cummings released all 205 pages, letting everyone — voters, reporters, and policymakers — get the full picture.
And while I’ll confess reading the transcripts last night was remarkably dull, I continue to believe they should effectively end the controversy.
Republican and Democratic committee staffers interviewed IRS official John Shafer on June 6 about the agency’s decision to scrutinize a tea party group’s application for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status. Shafer, who identified himself as “a conservative Republican” and said he’d worked for the IRS since 1992, said that he and a fellow screener initially flagged a tea party group and continued to do so with subsequent applications in order to maintain consistency in the process.
Throughout much of the interview, Shafer describes the mundane bureaucratic challenges of dealing with incoming applications for nonprofit status. He said his team flagged the first tea party application because it appeared to be a high-profile case, and he wanted to make sure all high-profile cases received similar attention.
Was the White House involved? “I have no reason to believe that,” Shafer said. Did he communicate to the then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman about the screening of Tea Party cases? “I have not,” Shafer added.
I imagine there will be additional hearings and debate, but I’m not altogether sure what more there is to talk about. Every claim Republicans have made, and every effort to create a conspiracy theory involving the White House, appears to have been completely discredited.
Indeed, at this point, I’d like to see Darrell Issa stop asking questions and start answering them.
For example, did Issa try to deliberately mislead news organizations and the public with selectively edited portions of information he knew to be incomplete?
Did Issa violate congressional ethics rules by using his chairmanship to cherry-pick misleading quotes from official transcripts?
Did Issa act alone or did he coordinate his activities with others?
How much public money has Issa spent as part of these endeavors? How much more does he intend to spend going forward?
Remember, we’ve seen controversies like this before. In 1998, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee shared misleading excerpts from official transcripts with reporters in the hopes of creating a political controversy. Indeed, this came directly from the office of the committee’s then-chairman, Dan Burton. When the deception came to light, Burton was forced to accept the resignation of one of his top investigators of suspected wrongdoing in the Clinton White House.
(The investigator’s name was David Bossie — who went on to form a little group known as Citizens United. You might have heard of it.)
At first blush, it looks like Issa pulled a very similar stunt. Will there be similar consequences?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 19, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 