Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Glenn Reynolds: Washington's culture of corruption rots on

Glenn Reynolds: Washington's culture of corruption rots on:
When bureaucrats are above the law, ordinary Americans may want to follow suit.
Last week saw the passage of a grim milestone in government corruption: Pepperdine University Law Professor Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog marked the 1000th day of the scandal involving the IRS’s deliberate political targeting of conservative “Tea Party” groups. 
There are some lessons in this, and they’re mostly bad news.
The first sad lesson is that the notion of an impartial, professional civil service is a fiction.
The big government designs of Democrats and the federal bureaucracy are aligned, and the bureaucracy often deploys its powers in ways calculated to frustrate Republican presidents and to protect Democratic ones.
This is an open secret in Washington, leading Bloomberg View writer Megan McArdle to comment that even if elected, a President Trump wouldn’t change much because the bureaucracy wouldn’t go along:
“Anything that gets done by Washington must be done by the civil service. 
These folks are lifers. 
You can’t fire them. 
Because of the abovementioned legislative compromises required, you also can’t push a bill through that will let you fire them. 
And they — not the president, and not the cabinet secretaries — are the folks who do most of what government does. 
The president can wave his hands like Jean-Luc Picard and say, ‘Make it so.’ 
But if they don’t wanna, they ain’t gonna.”
This should be infuriating to anyone who actually believes in democratic governance, but on the other hand, since most political ideas are half-baked, anything that slows them down is probably a good idea.
But what happened in the IRS scandal wasn’t a case of bureaucrats slow-walking ideas they think are dumb. 
It was, instead, a case of bureaucrats targeting people because of their political views.
Ohio Tea Party activist Justin Binik-Thomas noticed in 2012 that the IRS was asking Tea Party organizations if they knew him.
The IRS denied that it was targeting people based on their political views, then admitted that it was doing so but blamed low-level employees in the Cincinnati office.
Then it turned out that, as the Treasury Inspector General found, there was much more going on.
The next day, the acting IRS commissioner resigned..."
Read on and get angry!

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