The Law: Two months ago, it looked as if the IRS scandal over targeting conservative groups had reached a legal dead end. But an appeals court, in a stunning reversal, revived it this week. Will justice finally be done?
We hope so.
The Washington, D.C., Circuit Court, overturning a June lower-court decision, let the suit go forward because, as LSU law professor Philip Hackney noted in the Surly Subgroup blog, "it found that the IRS had not voluntarily ceased its unlawful actions."
In other words, the IRS is still doing what it was accused of in the first place and was supposed to halt.
In particular, the court reinstated two specific complaints made by True The Vote and other Tea Party groups that claimed the IRS had acted in a biased way toward conservative organizations that applied for tax-exempt status.
The two complaints were that the IRS had violated the group's First Amendment rights, and that it had also violated the Administrative Procedures Act — both serious complaints that could land people in jail.
Senior Judge David B. Sentelle was particularly scathing in writing the unanimous decision by a three-judge panel, calling the IRS' contention that it was no longer violating the conservative groups' rights "absurd."
In his opinion released last Friday, Sentelle argued that the IRS "is free to return to (its) old ways — thereby subjecting the plaintiff to the same harm, but, at the same time, avoiding judicial review."
Starting in 2010, IRS officials began screening groups that had words such as "Tea Party," "patriot," and "government spending" in their names, part of an effort to intimidate and marginalize conservative groups.
When this story first broke in 2013, the IRS claimed it was a "rogue" operation run out of its Cincinnati office. That was later proved utterly false. We suggested that IRS heads should roll. It never happened.
Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS' Exempt Organization Unit and knew about the illegal behavior, quit in September 2013. Subsequently, in May 2014 the House voted to hold her in contempt for her refusal to testify before Congress.
But she was a high-level scapegoat, really, and nothing much else has happened.
And, despite overwhelming and growing evidence of misconduct, President Obama in 2014 told Fox News there was "not even a smidgen of corruption" at the agency. So when in June a lower court dismissed the case, it looked done.
The D.C. court's decision revives the case and suggests, at minimum, that there's more than a "smidgen" of corruption.
There will be more revelations to come. As the case goes forward, attorneys for the plaintiffs will use the process of legal discovery to dredge up memos, emails and other documents. You can bet that many of them will be damning — as they already have been.
Speaking to the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal, former Chapman University School of Law Dean John Eastman — who represents True The Vote — said further legal discovery in the case will likely uncover facts about the IRS' bad behavior that will be "even more explosive than anything we've seen so far."
We hope the court gets it right, whatever its decision.
The egregious use of a powerful arm of the federal government for explicitly political purposes should never be tolerated. It's the stuff of petty dictatorships, more suitable to a government run by Turkey's Erdogan or Venezuela's Maduro than to a great republic such as the U.S.