Tips to GOP congressmen indicate IRS abuse is systematic

If you're not careful, you might almost mistake this for some sort of defense of the IRS. Hey, they weren't picking on the Tea Party! They treated everyone that way!

Not that this would make it better, but it still appears that the culture of the IRS was to pick and choose who got harassed based in large part on political leanings, which explains why it's Republican congressmen who are now coming forth with so many complaints from their constituents. It's entirely possible that Democrat congressmen are getting complaints too, but don't see the political value of making them public. But here's what we know, as reported by The Hill:

Lawmakers in the House and Senate say they’ve been told of other examples of bullying since the IRS apologized for targeting Tea Party groups. “Oh, there's a slew of them,” said Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio), a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. He said several lawmakers on the panel had been given tips about over-aggressive actions by the IRS.

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Tiberi is one of several lawmakers who went public this week with allegations of wider abuses by the IRS. He and the other officials acknowledged the complaints from their constituents could be true or false, and said that they intended to look into the matters. "I'm certainly going to spend a lot of time looking into it,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, who heard complaints from constituents who claimed they were audited by the IRS after making substantial donations to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.

There are a couple of ways you can look at this. It's entirely possible, of course, that all the bad publicity concerning the IRS and its treatment of the Tea Party is encouraging people whose complaints are really not that substantive to start grousing. Given the current environment, they may recognize they'll have a receptive audience they might not have had before the scandal broke. But the more likely explanation in my mind is that people who have been abused by the IRS always figured until now that they had no recourse but to just suck it up and take it, because the IRS could pretty much do whatever it wanted and no one would or could take action against it. Now that the IRS is actually under serious scrutiny, people who have had legitimate gripes all along are coming forward to tell their stories. And Republican members of Congress, who smell blood in the water, are circling for the kill. The kill, of course, is not going to be the end of the IRS. That would have to be the result of a comprehensive change in our tax laws that I personally am all for, but that will almost certainly not happen as long as Barack Obama is in the White House. What we might be able to kill, however, is a culture that accepts the IRS treats people like garbage because, hey, it can, and it's the IRS and this is what it does. I'll be watching closely to see who gets the benefit of the doubt from the media on this. You'd think people who proclaim themselves to be "watchdogs of the government" to ensure "accountability" or whatever would give the benefit of the doubt to the citizens complaining, and demand answers from the bureaucrats who are said to have abused them. Normally, of course, this is not what the media do in practice at all. They will tend to dismiss such complaints or at least demand "proof" before even paying attention to them, especially since they are being put forth by Republican members of Congress. The fact that these reports are getting play at all says something different is at work here, but the media can always fall back on the practice by which they act like a jury in a criminal trial, and unless someone offers "proof" of criminality (as opposed to mere bad government, which is already obvious), they won't do much with it. It's clear that the IRS sees its job not as serving the people, but as lording its power over them. That itself should be a major story regardless of what can be proven about who authorized what or sent an e-mail to whom. Let's hope the people who received this treatment keep up the pressure.