Blumenthal And Lerner

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is not just your run of the mill senator. Mr. Blumenthal entered the U.S. Senate a little over three years ago after having spent twenty one years as Connecticut’s Attorney General.

The new Senator has had some difficulty shedding his attorney general’s skin.  Some critics in Connecticut – there are not many – occasionally refer to him teasingly as the nation’s first consumer protection congressman.

As Attorney General of Connecticut, Mr. Blumenthal often seemed to be a consumer protection firebrand armed with subpoena power. The statutory obligations of the Attorney General’s Office have little to do with suits brought on behalf of consumers such as Big Tobacco. The Connecticut Attorney General is charged principally with representing Connecticut in legal matters involving state agencies, duties and responsibilities of the office that are detailed in the Connecticut General Statutes, Section 3-125 as follows:

“The Attorney General shall have general supervision over all legal matters in which the state is an interested party, except those legal matters over which prosecuting officers have direction. He shall appear for the state, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary, the Treasurer and the Comptroller, and for all heads of departments and state boards, commissioners, agents, inspectors, committees, auditors, chemists, directors, harbor masters, and institutions and for the State Librarian in all suits and other civil proceedings, except upon criminal recognizances and bail bonds, in which the state is a party or is interested, or in which the official acts and doings of said officers are called in question, and for all members of the state House of Representatives and the state Senate in all suits and other civil proceedings brought against them involving their official acts and doings in the discharge of their duties.”

The transformation of the Attorney General’s office, engineered by Senators Lieberman and Blumenthal, from a sleepy constitutional operation representing state agencies in legal matters into a big-bite consumer protection watchdog, cast considerable glitter on both politicians. The lionization of the attorney general as the “people’s lawyer,” which began with Mr. Lieberman, became embarrassingly cloying during Mr. Blumenthal’s long and much publicized reign; so much so that it was often said of the ambitious Blumenthal that the most dangerous spot in Connecticut was between the attorney general and a television camera. Both former Attorneys General successfully launched their senate careers from their publicity rich springboard.

When Mr. Blumenthal joined the U.S. Congress as Connecticut’s “senior senator,” the tug of his former shtick proved irresistible. Most recently, Mr. Blumenthal has turned his efforts toward the regulation of electronic cigarettes. E-Cigs, as they are sometimes called, are non-carcinogenic, nicotine injection systems. Unlike real cigarettes, they are neither heavily taxed nor heavily regulated, and the electronic variant has moved many cigarette smokers away from a medically costly, often demonized product. To the extent that E-Cigs have weaned cigarette smokers off the weed, the unregulated product also has reduced federal and state revenue. Mr. Blumenthal’s intervention will for this reason be welcomed by tax gobbling legislators. Revenues lost from a product widely denounced as cancer causing must be replaced somehow: Why not tax E-Cigs as if they were coffin nails – even if they are not?

Ideally, one wants an official moving from the Attorney General’s office into the U.S. Senate to carry with him into his new position all his previous virtues, while leaving behind his grosser vices.

As a U.S. Senator with more than twenty years investigatory and prosecutorial experience, Mr. Blumenthal certainly is better able than other senators to defend the honor of the Congress when persons summoned by the U.S. House to offer testimony either mislead or deny to investigation committees the data congressmen need to discharge their responsibilities.

Which brings us to Lois Lerner, the head honcho of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) at a time when the IRS was effectively preventing conservative groups from exercising their constitutional rights to assemble for the purpose of engaging in political activity by subjecting such groups to extraordinary scrutiny.

Called upon by a congressional committee to give needed testimony, Ms. Lerner pronounced herself innocent of any wrongdoing and then, on the advice of counsel, proceeded to take the 5^th, thus denying Congress the data it needed to accomplish the committee’s purposes and violating both the spirit and the letter of the 5^th amendment, which does not allow testifiers to both proclaim their innocence and refuse to disgorge testimony on the grounds that doing so would tend to incriminate them.

After the IRS Inspector General reported that the once impartial Internal Revenue Service had targeted 248 conservative Tea Party organizations for extra scrutiny, Mr. Blumenthal issued a ritualistic denunciation of the agency, but he has been mum ever since, an unusual posture for the media-seeking Blumenthal. One can only imagine the rhetoric that would have flowed from Attorney General Blumenthal had any witness he summoned for interrogation publically announced their innocence of wrongdoing and then retreated behind the 5^th amendment.

When Mr. Blumenthal was given an opportunity to vote in favor of an amendment that would have declared it “unlawful for any officer of the Internal Revenue Service to, regardless of whether the officer or employee is acting under the color of law, willfully act with the intent to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate or single out and subject to undue scrutiny for purposes of harassment any person or organization of any state – (1) based solely or primarily on the political, economic or social positions held or expressed by the person or organization; or 2) because the person or organization has expressed a particular political, economic, or social position using any words of writing allowed by law” the senator’s starched scruples gave way, and he voted, along with eight other Democratic Senators, none of whom were up for election in 2014, to kill the amendment.

In any contest between scruples and party loyalty, the usual congressman would not hesitate to bury his scruples. Mr. Blumenthal, it was sometimes thought, was above party flackdom.

Not anymore.

Obama Administration Hit With A Triple Whammy

While President Barack Obama was doubling down on his discredited narrative concerning the attack by terrorists on the Benghazi consulate, in the course of which Mr. Obama’s personal minister – that is what an ambassador is; the personal minister of the president – was murdered, it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had targeted Tea Party groups for what may turn out to be punitive audits.

National Public Radio briefly reported that when the president was asked a question concerning “reports that the IRS targeted organizations that identified themselves as ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot groups and gave their applications for tax-exempt status extra reviews, Obama said:

"’This is pretty straightforward. ... If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported ... and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous and there's no place for it.’ Those responsible, he said, will ‘be held fully accountable.’”

Mr. Obama was asked about the audits during a press conference that featured British Prime Minister David Cameron. The president’s initial response, the promise of a severe dressing down of the IRS, passed muster with the increasing band of journalists who thought Mr. Obama’s handing of the Benghazi assault was seriously deficient. Even Fox News, unrelenting on Benghazi, slathered the president with commendations. Brit Hume of Fox News generously allowed the president’s initial response was the right one.

An explanation offered by IRS tax-exempt chief Lois Lerner quickly came under fire. Ms. Lerner attributed the possible “outrageous” conduct to “line people” in Cincinnati, Ohio who had “used names like Tea Party or Patriots” as criteria for selecting tax-exempt applications for further scrutiny.

Chairman of Americans for Limited Government Howard Rich noted in a piece written for Forbes Magazine that Ms. Lerner pointedly did not mention that “the IRS’ Cincinnati office is the central location for all tax-exempt application evaluations – meaning the discrimination that took place there “wasn’t an isolated, dumb incident by some random field office,” as The Washington Post concisely noted. In other words this was no error: It was official policy – which directly contradicts testimony previously provided by the agency’s leadership to Congressional investigators.”

A Reuters report noted, “When tax agents started singling out non-profit groups for extra scrutiny in 2010, they looked at first only for key words such as 'Tea Party,' but later they focused on criticisms by groups of ‘how the country is being run’ …  At one point, the agents chose to screen applications from groups focused on making ‘America a better place to live.”  Other IRS search terms included: “Government spending”, “Government debt, or taxes.” On Jan, 25, 2012, the criteria for flagging suspect groups was changed to "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement,’ according to an advance copy of a report done by Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which notes that agency leadership was made aware of the discrimination nearly two years ago, who said nothing – and clearly had no plans to alert the public to what had happened.

On ABC This Week, columnist George Will remarked that the country had just celebrated – if that is the proper word – the 40^th anniversary of the Watergate summer and read from then President Richard Nixon impeachment records: “He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

Finally, shortly after the possible “outrageous” conduct of the IRS towards the much maligned Tea Party groups knocked the Obama administration on its noggin, a third shoe fell. The Justice Department, led by Fast and Furious Eric Holder, had wiretapped the phone lines of more than a hundred Associated Press reporters in an attempt to uncover the source of a leak of top secret information. Mr. Holder, who had recused himself from investigating the event, explained in a press conference that the taps were justified because of the nature of the leak.

This is not theway to gain friends and influence reporters among the national media. To judge from subsequent media availabilities in which presidential spokesman Jay Carney was relentlessly grilled, some worm had turned in the breast of reporters, and the Obama administration, which tends to treat words as incantations that magically alter objective reality, was playing hardball defense.