Democrat: Hey The IRS Went After Liberal Groups Too! Treasury Department: Um, No.

Democratic Congressman Sander Levin claimed the IRS didn't just go after "tea party" groups but also ones that were "progressive".

Just one small problem, it's total BS.

“Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Adminstration Russell] George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill.

The inspector general also stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention.

“While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria we described in our report, including employee interviews, e-mails and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention,” George wrote to Levin, the top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

The Democrats, for obvious reasons, desperately want this to go away but it just will not.

Republicans on the other hand need to figure out what they want from this. It's not going to end in Obama's impeachment or the flat tax, so what's the goal? Is it just politics for 2014 or is there some policy goal? I'd like to see civil service reforms along the lines of what Mitch McConnell was talking about last week. I hope the GOP starts pushing bills now while the issue is hot and not waiting for endless investigations. We know there were abuses and they were enabled by a corrupt system. Let's get to fixing it while there are new revelations to keep the public focused.

posted by DrewM. at 09:44 AM

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