The IRS Scandal, Day 241

Most presidents pray with Pastor Billy Graham when they get elected, but President Obama audited him to get reelected. In May of 2013, the IRS scandal was revealed when officials admitted it had improperly targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups for audits who had requested tax-exempt status.

Democrats tried to calm the storm with the false claim that the IRS targeted “progressive” groups as well as conservatives. But rebuffing that ridiculous charge, the Treasury Department’s inspector general revealed that 292 – which is 100 percent – of Tea Party groups seeking special tax status were put under IRS review, while just 6 progressive groups were targeted.

The scandal appeared to be fading following the resignation of Lois Lerner, but a round of emails leaked by the Ways and Means to the Wall Street Journal, showed Lois Lerner and other Washington bureaucrats were involved in a huge partisan undertaking that was nearly impossible to execute on their own. But that was the end of the road for accountability, despite the worst aspect of the IRS scandal not even making it to a press room.

A research paper from Stan Vueger of AEI, Andreas Madestam of Stockholm University, Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), took a look at how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. Their conclusions provide the most troubling element to this story, and everyone in the media ignored it.

According to the joint conservative-liberal scholarship paper: “The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 – 8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”

Lying and cheating were part of the Obama MO from the day he entered politics in the living room of a terrorist.