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.

Democrats Demagogue Boughton

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning”-- Adlai Stevenson

In her most recent press release, one can almost see state Democratic Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo ticking off the “made in Washington” campaign talking points:

Boughton, “war on women,” check.

Boughton,” anti-gay,” check.

Boughton, “Tea Party,” check.

Boughton, “extremist,” check.

A busy demagogue, Ms. DiNardo usually is able to mold her mud pies into brief media bites at a moment’s notice. Here is the core of her media release:

“Mark Boughton needs to let Connecticut know why he is so close to such a dangerous extremist and if he agrees with Senator McLachlan’s agenda. Does Mark Boughton want to force ultrasounds on pregnant women? Does he support McLachlan’s anti-gay views and Tea Party agenda?”

The “dangerous extremist” whom Mr. Boughton is “close to” would be State Senator Mike McLachlan. Apparently, in Ms. DiNardo’s world, extremism is catchy, like the flu. One has only to be “close to” a retrograde senator like Mr. McLachlan to be infected with the affliction of extremism. 

In current Democratic demagoguery, “an extremist” is anyone whose positions on a narrow range of “social issues” do not correspond with those of Ms. DiNardo and other seeming “moderate” social engineers who want to change the nature of marriage, economics, constitutional prescriptions, religious prescriptions and the always delicate balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in the United States.

The Democratic Party in Connecticut has over the past couple of years abolished the death penalty for multiple murderers shortly after two vicious murderers, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, had slaughtered the Petit family in Cheshire, and only a few months before Adam Lanza had murdered his mother, six faculty members and twenty school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Mr. Lanza committed suicide upon the arrival at the school of first responders but, had he been taken alive, Mr. Lanza could not have been executed for mass murder in Connecticut, thanks to a bill produced in the General Assembly that ended capital punishment for all future felony murders, however horrific.

Republicans voted against abolition. Democrats, in voting for abolition, flouted their seeming high minded courage by exempting from their abolition bill the ten convicted murderers awaiting execution on death row. This exemption, a clear violation of the “natural law” underpinning all jurisprudence – which holds that in the absence of a proscriptive law there can be no punishment – is likely to be found unconstitutional by any appellate judge who has a nodding acquaintance with the Code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta or the U.S. Constitution. It would have been politically inconvenient at the time for Democrats to reverse so many very expensive court decisions relating to the “Death Row 10.” The abolition measure, universally embraced by Democrats, we are to assume, is neither a “social issue” nor is it dangerous to the public weal. But Mr. McLaughlin IS a dangerous extremist and must be publicly shamed and demagogued by “non-extremist” Democrats who voted to abolish the death penalty for cop killers, terrorists and mass murderers.

All laws affect society, and there is not a piece of legislation created by any legislative body in the United States in the last 238 years that has no social repercussions. The term “social issue,” especially when employed in campaigns by demagogic partisans, is a false category.

Really, one wonders how many of Mr. McLachlan’s Democratic colleagues in the General Assembly – law makers all, artificers of social legislation -- feel comfortable with Ms. DiNardo’s estimation of him as a “dangerous extremist?” Has anyone taken a poll?

Do Democrats in the General Assembly who find themselves in agreement with Ms. DiNardo’s demagogic assessment of Mr. McLaughlin believe that the Senator’s imperfections have been transferred to Mr. Boughton through a process of osmosis? If Mr. Boughton has been tainted by his proximity to Mr. McLaughlin, what of the members of the General Assembly who were “close” to Mr. McLaughin as they toiled together in the same body to hammer out various laws? Will the pox that has spread so rapidly from Mr. McLaughlin to Mr. Boughton through mere association also affect General Assembly Democrats who worked cheek by jowl with Mr. McLaughlin? Have Governor Dannel Malloy and leading members of the General Assembly been polluted by their close proximity to former Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, some of whose political associates have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison?

This is mud-slinging of a high order. Why, if Mrs. DiNardo could order up capital punishment for Tea Party members in her state, her rhetoric suggests she might go for it. But her party has abolished capital punishment for mass murderers, and it would be politically indelicate to send to the death chamber what one Tea Party organizer called “Governor Dannel Malloy’s neighbors” after having abolished capital punishment for Connecticut’s future Lanzas.

The War on Constitutional Rights

The war on the Tea Party, much more than a rhetorical offensive, continues unabated months after the putatively non-partisan Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – the guys and gals that audit you to make sure you are paying your “fair share” to support your president, your U.S. Congress and your federal courts – had targeted tea party political groups for punitive audits.

The same “death to the Bill of Rights” progressives at the U.S. Treasury Department have now promulgated rules that will, they hope, insure the extinction of the political sons and daughters of Sam Adams, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and – coming closer to Connecticut  -- Roger Sherman, William Samuel Johnson, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, Lyman Hall and the authors of Connecticut’s 1818 “Declaration of Rights,” Governor Oliver Wolcott Jr. among them, which declares in section 4:

“Every citizen may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty.”

And in section 5:

“No law shall ever be passed to curtail or restrain the liberty of speech or of the press.”

And in section 9

“No person shall be arrested, detained or punished, except in cases clearly warranted by law.”

And in section 14:

“The citizens have a right, in a peaceable manner, to assemble for their common good, and to apply to those invested with the powers of government, for redress of grievances, or other proper purposes, by petition, address or remonstrance.”

No one in Connecticut surrendered such rights and immunities, many of which are also mentioned in the U.S. Bill of Rights, when the state moved into the 21st century, which has turned out to be far less liberating than the 18^th, the crucible of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For some reason, a muscular federal agency, this time the U.S. Treasury Department, now feels comfortable in abolishing such rights through administrative edict.

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal tells us how the MS functioning IRS assault on the liberties of Americans is to be accomplished:

“In the media blackout of Thanksgiving week, the Treasury Department dumped a new proposal to govern the political activity of 501(c)(4) groups.”

U.S.  House Ways and Means Committee investigators are concerned that the new regulation “was reverse-engineered—designed to isolate and shut down the same tea party groups victimized in the first targeting round. Treasury appears to have combed through those tea party applications, compiled all the groups' main activities, and then restricted those activities in the new rule.”

Here’s how the constitutionally dubious attempt by Barack Obama’s White House and Tea Party averse Democratic Congressmen to overthrow commonly accepted constitutional immunities will work:

“To get or keep tax-exempt status, 501(c)(4) organizations must devote a majority of their work to their "primary" social-welfare purpose. Most tea party groups were set up with a primary purpose of educating Americans on pressing problems—the size of government, the erosion of the Constitution—and did so mainly via nonpartisan voter guides, speakers forums, pamphlets or voter-registration drives.

“What the proposed Treasury/IRS regulation would do is to re-categorize all these efforts as "political activity"—thereby making it all but impossible for tea party groups to qualify for 501(c)(4) status. Say an outfit's primary purpose is educating voters on our unsustainable debt, which it does mainly with a guide explaining the problem and politicians' voting records. Under the new rule, that guide is now "political activity" (rather than "social welfare"), which likely loses the group tax-exempt status.”

Here is a question that ought to be put to every citizen of the “Constitution State,” not excluding the state’s governor, members of the General Assembly, jurists, members of the state’s media and little children studying, one hopes, the once proud history of Connecticut: Are were really prepared in this brand spanking new century to allow a poorly administered federal bureaucracy to deprive, through an ill-conceived administrative regulation, the people of this state of rights and immunities in defense of which all the political heroes mentioned in this column were willing to give their last drop of blood?

Well… are we?

Obama’s Connecticut Praetorian Guard

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” -- George Orwell

George Orwell, like Jonathan Swift before him, is one of those large writers who simply straddle ideological categories. He was fortunate enough – or unfortunate enough, depending on one’s point of view – to have been born in what the ancient Chinese call “interesting times,” the bloody and totalitarian 20th century.

The revolutionist speaking truth to power often appears among us with a rope braided by the reigning powers draped about his neck. He steps towards gallows with a wan smile on his face.

Such was the case with Gregory Hicks, the friend and compatriot of slain Ambassador Christopher Stevens who, testifying before Congress, said he was stunned and embarrassed when he first heard U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice attribute the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi to a crowd of protestors agitated by a video that defamed Mohammed. One expects that Mr. Hick’s many years of honorable service will soon crash on the rocks of modern politics.
 

The Obama administration had hoped to put the Benghazi affair to bed early, and then direct witnesses to the murder of the Libyan ambassador showed up at the Congressional doorstep. The unwelcomed visitations were followed by an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal involving unaccountable delays of Tea Party applications for tax exempt status, which in turn was followed by yet another scandal involving phone taps placed by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ) on Associated Press reporters. The IRS has since apologized for having politicized what should have been a routine review of applications.

Of the three scandals, only the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups for punitive treatment and the overbroad tapping of AP phone lines have been unreservedly condemned by Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation. The condemnations by Connecticut Congresspersons of the IRS conform to a script adopted by the Obama administration, which unreservedly denounced what appeared to be an IRS enemies' list drawn up by as yet unknown persons who perhaps had been overstimulated by Mr. Obama’s frequently expressed condemnations of Tea Party Patriots.           

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, for more than 20 years Connecticut’s crusading attorney general, was outraged at the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups for federal tax scrutiny and “deeply troubled” concerning reports that the DOJ had collected phone records from the Associated Press. U.S. Senator Chis Murphy’s reliance on the DOJ received a blow and he hopes “the leadership there is working steadfastly” to accomplish its mission. U.S. Representative Elizabeth Esty ventured further out than either of the state’s senators; the IRS allegations, she thought, “should concern all Americans. It’s completely unacceptable for the IRS to target groups or individuals based on their political views. A full Congressional investigation is warranted, and anyone who acted inappropriately or abused power must be held fully accountable.” U.S. Representative John Larson, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee that oversees the IRS, thought the IRS action were “absolutely inexcusable." U.S. Rep Rosa DeLauro entertained the hope “that those who participated in inappropriate activities are held fully accountable,” and U.S. Representative Joe Courtney was moved to tweet, “The actions taken by the IRS should alarm all Americans. A full investigation is warranted.”

The person in charge of the IRS unit that so disappointed Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation, it should be mentioned, was given a promotion of sorts; she has been put in charge of the many hundreds of workers in the IRS who, as part of the implementation of Obamacare, will be rifling through health care records in an attempt to weed out frauds. Provided the frauds are not conservative, few insuperable obstacles may be put in their way – if the IRS processes are unreformed.
 

ABC News was among the first mainstream news outlets to report that “the Internal Revenue Service official in charge of overseeing tax-exempt organizations — an operation now under fire for targeting Tea Party groups and other right-wing entities — is now in charge of IRS accounting for President Obama’s health-care overhaul initiative, or Obamacare. Sarah Hall Ingram oversaw tax-exempt organizations for the IRS from 2009 to 2012. The misdeeds allegedly occurred at the IRS from 2010 to 2012.”

It is not known at this point how many of the distressed members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation oppose Mr. Obama’s stunningly inept appointment or what form their opposition to the appointment of Ms. Ingrahm might take. While Peter Weber of The Week has speculated that Ms. Ingram’s head may roll, it is a safe bet that it will not land in Mr. Blumenthal’s lap. Both Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy, since their fairly recent elevations to the U.S. Senate, have been stout supporters of all things Obama, and the entire Connecticut Congressional delegation is part of the vast Beltway Praetorian Guard charged with protecting the president’s idiocies.

 

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.