The IRS: End of a scandal?

“Remember the IRS scandal?” said Alex Seitz-Wald in Salon.com. For more than a month, Republicans have been insisting that the agency deliberately targeted Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status for special harassment, openly suggesting it was acting on White House orders. Turns out “that whole scandal is entirely bogus. False. A fiction.” Newly released transcripts of testimony from an IRS official in Cincinnati show that the decision to target groups was made locally—not by IRS officials in Washington. But the final nail in the coffin was this week’s news that liberal groups with keywords like “Progressive” and “Occupy” in their names were also targeted for special review. So no Nixonian political vendetta—just the IRS trying to cope with an avalanche of 40,000 applications by partisan organizations seeking tax-exempt status. “This should put the matter to bed forever.”

The IRS scandal is very much alive, said Eliana Johnson in NationalReview.com. While the tax agency’s infamous “Be on the Lookout” list is broader than previously thought, most of the groups targeted were affiliated with the Tea Party. The testimony also indicates that “higher-ups” in Washington did get involved in the reviews to an extent that remains unknown. More importantly, the IRS’s campaign against Tea Party groups may have changed the outcome of the presidential election, said Peggy Noonan in the WSJ.com. The Tea Party was a “fierce force” in the 2010 midterms, when Republicans took back the House. The American Enterprise Institute estimates that if new Tea Party groups hadn’t been hampered, they would have generated as many as 8.5 million Republican votes in the presidential election—enough for Mitt Romney to beat Obama.

That’s laughable, said Dave Weigel in Slate.com. The Tea Party was extremely active in the 2012 elections, organized by groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, which had charitable tax status for years. Ah, but we are now officially in the “post-fact phase” of this scandal, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. Republicans have retreated to insisting that Obama has to prove he was not involved, or they can assume he was. Most Americans will see through this, but in their fever swamps, conservatives will continue to whisper “IRS” to “other members of the tribe, the way liberals liked to say ‘Halliburton’ during the Bush years, to signal some dark beliefs they don’t need to back up.”

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