Lois Lerner and why there is a Hatch Act.

Lois Lerner: A Partisan Hack, Not A Public Servant

Scandal: A congressional panel has released new emails from top IRS official Lois Lerner, revealing a boiling hatred for the conservatives she illegally targeted. So much for claims that she was just a disinterested bureaucrat.

The latest batch of emails released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee contained more than a "smidgeon" of hatred and intolerance from the IRS chief of tax-exempt organizations already famous for singling out conservative Tea Party groups for enforcement scrutiny.

"Great," Lerner wrote to an IRS colleague who complained about conservative radio at work. "Maybe we are through if there are that many assholes."

After that, sounding more like a far-left ranter, Lerner likened Republicans to "teRrorists" (sic), while her colleague railed about "the whacko wing of the GOP."

The House committee said that the IRS tried to redact these comments but failed. But it's what you'd expect to find, given the IRS' effort to obstruct Congress by destroying the hard drives of officials under inquiry.

"This email shows that Ms. Lerner's mistreatment of conservative groups was driven by her personal hostility toward conservatives," wrote Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp to Attorney General Eric Holder.

It also gives the lie to early administration claims that the IRS' targeting of political dissidents was nothing but bumbling bureaucrats in Cincinnati, and later, merely the "management problems" of a large agency.

President Obama finally dismissed the issue as a brouhaha with "not a smidgeon of corruption." The hard drives of the bureaucrats were mysteriously destroyed.

In fact these emails, small and trivial as they are in chattering content, are indicative of the politicization of government under the Obama administration, the morphing of supposedly impartial executive-branch agencies with all their powers into the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party and its agenda.

Nasty in content, they effectively end the long-standing credibility of government agencies as institutions of probity run by impartial civil servants, in place since the 1883 civil service reforms that ended the spoils system.

"Lois Lerner's exposed emails show the world she was and is a political hack driven by her own partisan agenda rather than a neutral public servant," said Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist.

In light of these emails, it's impossible that any taxpayer can trust our government's claims that it's merely impartially enforcing the law. Not only is it not enforcing the law, it's also breaking it.