Just Punishment for the IRS.

Tea Party groups are preparing to sue the IRS for targeting their groups during the last election cycle.  One has to ask the question, aren't Tea Party groups trying to take advantage of their fellow tax-payers?

This is not necessarily so.  40 years ago, there was a scandal brewing in Washington that eventually went all the way to the President.  Perhaps you read about it in your history class, if they made it all the way to the 1970s.  It was called Watergate.  It brought down President Richard Nixon, who resigned as the US House was drafting articles of impeachment.  Several reforms came out of wake of this scandal.  But none of them involved the use of the Internal Revenue Service as a tool to punish the enemies of the President.  Because Congress has failed to act on this, something has to be done.

There are 3 ways to make laws in the US.  If legislation fails, the President or the administration can act by fiat.  This is where much regulatory law comes from.  We will likely have an opportunity on this blog to speak about regulatory fiat at a later time.  Laws can also come about by legal precedent.

Tea Party groups may not win a lot of money by suing the IRS.  That should not be the point.  If courts side with them, which they probably will, it will set a new legal precedent.  It will ensure that the tax collection arm of the Federal Government can't be used as a political battering ram.  Meaning that this president, and any future president, will be unable to use the IRS to punish political enemies.

This seems necessary.  In everything that has happened since it was revealed that the IRS was being used to punish enemies of the White House, no one, from either party, has seemed willing to draft legislation to make this behavior illegal.  It shouldn't be, and Speak Boehner seemed to think based on his, "who is going to jail" comment, that it is already against the law.  No one seems to have said that we should draft laws to ensure that this behavior is swiftly and clearly punished in the future.

In the law, you do not have to sue for money.  You can sue for performance.  You can sue to ensure your neighbor picks up after his dog.  You can sue the city to put up more street lights in a high crime area.  And you can sue to government to ensure that the IRS asks only financial questions in a audit.  You can also sue to ensure that the IRS only audits when they find financial irregularities.  And you can sue to ensure that no elected official, nor appointed official has the power to order an IRS audit unless irregularities are discovered in tax statements.

This all should have been on the books 40 years ago.  Seems we haven't learned for history.  Let's make sure that this lesson is learned now, even if we must use the courts.