Wolves in Creep's Clothing

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

31 October 14

very now and again, we check in on No Labels, the mock-Centrist collection of political pickpockets whose primary purpose in our politics is to drop "bipartisan" camouflage netting over Republican policies so as to divorce said policies, which suck gallons of pond water on their own, from the flying monkey escadrille that makes up the rest of the Republican party. Many people are attached to this long con, most of whom are fairly dingy characters, low-rent magicians from a flea-bitten political burlesque parlor. Morning Squint is deeply attached to them, as is Jon (Third Place) Huntsman, who needed a gig after the Republican primary electorate stopped laughing at him. It's the brainchild of Mark McKinnon, a Texas grifter and a former acolyte of C-Plus Augustus in the latter's rise to power. Having enabled a catastrophic presidency in such a way that he should be kept out of political life for the same reasons we keep toddlers out of the hand grenades, McKinnon's made a sudden retreat into bipartisan "problem-solving," perhaps the least-convincing transformation since Vladimir Putin abandoned the KGB for elective office.

Anyway, there's this really tough U.S. Senate election out in Colorado. Incumbent Democratic senator Mark Udall -- son of Mo, of sainted memory -- is life-and-death with a fetus-fondling grab-bag of pure crazy named Cory Gardner, who's as far into the izonkosphere as Joni Ernst, but who doesn't have a second career of castrating hogs on which to fall back. In his career in the House of Representatives, Gardner supported that personhood amendment, and he fought to change the definition of "rape" to "forcible rape," a far-from-merely-semantic distinction that put Gardner in the same boat with Todd Akin as they rowed steadily away from the shores of sanity. He's a climate change denialist, a Steve King ally on immigration, and so anti-gay that Rick Santorum thinks he's just peachy, and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is? Gardner has managed to soft-pedal his extremism to the point where he just might win, largely because the political press is willing to purchase all manner of swampland at a very reasonable cost. NPR's Mara Liasson turns out to have been the latest, and most predictable, mark.

So you'll probably never guess who looked at Cory Gardner and saw, not a career extremist with a gift for rancid opportunism, but a man who can bring the nation together behind a National Strategic Agenda to Solve Our Problems the way President Jon Huntsman has over the past two years? I'm telling you, you'll never guess.

Dammit, how'd you guess? You guys are really smart.

No Labels' move to more aggressively back the Colorado Republican seems uncharacteristic, however, especially since controversy involving Gardner already consumed the nonpartisan group earlier this year. No Labels endorsed Gardner in April, angering Senate Democrats. The backlash led the organization to clarify that any candidate could earn its endorsement -- including Udall. The No Labels Seal of Approval is awarded to members of the Problem Solvers Caucus who have worked across the political aisle and support a national strategic agenda of shared goals for the country," said Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to George W. Bush and a No Labels co-founder. "We are happy to award the Seal to people running in the same race."

"Uncharacteristic," my arse. This is entirely in keeping with the organization's real agenda, which is to Bring The Nation Together behind the Republican platform of 2000, before the nation went entirely to the dogs by electing the guy who ran on it. And, of course, a deep concern for "civility" is one of the important elements of the con. Udall has been inconveniently pointing out, over and over again, the fact that Gardner is perfectly willing to pitch the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population overboard, and that Gardner's doing his damndest to conceal that fact. (This sent the editorial board of the Denver Post to the fainting couch, from which it produces the single dumbest editorial endorsement in American political history.) Alleged Democratic senator Joe Manchin (D-Anthracite), who is a co-chair of this passel of political bunco artists, at least has had the decency to stand by Udall. Of course, in this case, as in so many others, we defer further comment on Manchin's decision to Mr. Rock of Brooklyn.

No Labels' decision to get behind Gardner should be the final straw for anyone to the left of the Green Room of MSNBC. Gardner is not a reasonable man. He is a fanatic. He wants to solve problems, all right. One of the problems he wants to solve is a woman's reproductive autonomy. Another problem he wants to solve is the country's pale effort to deal with the greatest environmental crisis of our time, which he does not believe really exists.The decision by No Labels is of a piece with that dog's breakfast of a column that David Brooks dropped on us the other day about "partyism," a word Brooks invented because it rhymes with "racism" and "sexism" and therefore sounds spookier than "partisanism," which is what politics are supposed to be about. Every time the country starts to notice the effects of the prion disease that has been afflicting the Republicans since it first ate the monkey brains back in the 1980's, and every time the Democratic party seeks to make a political point that the Republicans thereby have been driven mad, we get paragraphs like this from Brooks.

This mentality also ruins human interaction. There is a tremendous variety of human beings within each political party. To judge human beings on political labels is to deny and ignore what is most important about them. It is to profoundly devalue them. That is the core sin of prejudice, whether it is racism or partyism.

So, apparently, pointing out the positions that the likes of Cory Gardner have held for their entire political lives, until they decided they wanted a better gig, is roughly the same "core sin" that was present in American society under Jim Crow?

Yeah, right.

No Labels loved that column, by the way.

Even if it were honest, which No Labels now has demonstrated conclusively is beyond its poor abilities, the search for the Golden Mean remains largely a unicorn hunt because the true cause of our political dysfunction is deliberately misdiagnosed, time and time again. One of the two political parties that we allow ourselves has gone stark raving mad, largely through the efforts of the likes of Cory Gardner. Mr. Yeats lowballed it. Not only can the center not hold, it can't even be the center.

Remember the "IRS Scandal" of 2013? They're Still Looking

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

30 October 14

Scandal-that-never-was may be cooling, but it’s not over yet

f you follow Fox News, Breitbart, The Blaze, Judicial Watch, Media Research Center, The Daily Caller, and others, you might believe the “IRS scandal” of 2013 was not only real, but remains hot – even though mainstream media are engaged in a massive conspiracy not to report any of the heat investigations are generating.

If you follow USA Today, maybe you believe the “IRS Scandal” is actually over, whether it was real or not. In an August column, the paper suggested that the “scandal” was fake, but the “cover-up” was real. On October 23, USA Today ran a story about a federal judge dismissing parts of two lawsuits. The story had no links to the two written decisions. The sole link in the story went to an irrelevant USA Today story from September 2013. The paper’s misleading headline (like a similar one in The Hill) awkwardly announced:

“Tea Party loses court battle over targeting to IRS”

If you follow Reader Supported News, you learned early on that the “IRS scandal” is a big fuss about nothing much with nobody behaving very well on any side. When the story first broke in May 2013, RSN readers learned that Karl Rove was one of the people who turned the 501(c)(4) designation into a hot button, but that he couldn’t have done that if the IRS hadn’t failed to enforce the law as written since 1959. RSN readers also learned that media coverage was, for the most part, shamefully and deliberately dishonest. In February 2014, RSN readers learned that the fake “IRS scandal” was as far from dead as it was from significance, that elements in Congress weren’t about to let it go, and parties of various sorts were increasingly turning to the courts to resolve it, assuming the courts could find a real issue.

And if you just follow your gut, maybe you say to yourself, why did Lois Lerner break the story by apologizing public before the American Bar Association? Why did she falsify the facts when she apologized? Why is the IRS not forthcoming? What’s really going on here?

Now, if you follow United States District Judge Reggie B. Walton, a Bush appointee to the federal bench, and if you’ve read his decisions in two relevant cases, then you know that he found no appropriate issue to be before the courts. You also know the “IRS scandal case” is still not over, but getting closer. And finally, you know that the Tea Party plaintiffs haven’t yet come close to making the case in court that they seemed to make so persuasively to the media and the Congress.

TRUE THE VOTE, INC v. INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, et al (#13-734)

True the Vote, a Texas corporation, filed its claim in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on May 21, 2013. (A year earlier, RSN readers learned that True the Vote is a nasty little outfit whose activities include race-baiting, but none of that is relevant to whether the IRS violated its rights.) True the Vote complained that the IRS unfairly and unlawfully delayed acting on its application for 501(c)(4) status filed in July 2010. The IRS granted the status in September 2013, in the midst of the litigation. The IRS also moved to dismiss the complaint in its entirety.

True the Vote’s complaint had five counts seeking establishment of its tax exempt status, monetary damages, and three determinations that the IRS violated the law and should be restrained by injunction in the future.

Judge Walton’s 23-page decision centered on the uncontested fact that True the Vote had received the tax exempt status it had applied for, resolving that claim completely and making it moot. By granting the tax exempt status, as well as suspending its alleged scheme, the IRS also satisfied some or all of the other claims, in the court’s view. This set off a cascade of legal consequences undermining the entire complaint:

Unless an actual, ongoing controversy exists in this case, this Court is without power to decide it…. Even where a case once posed “a live controversy when filed, the [mootness] doctrine requires” the Court “to refrain from deciding it if ‘events have so transpired that the decision will neither presently affect the parties’ rights nor have a more-than-speculative chance of affecting them in the future.’

… Here, after the plaintiff [True The Vote] initiated this case, its application to the IRS for tax-exempt status was approved by the IRS…. The allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which delayed the processing of the plaintiff’s tax-exempt application and brought about this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiff.

In similar fashion, the court disposed of the rest of plaintiff’s claims, including any possible monetary damages. On October 23, 2014, the court then ordered the dismissal of all plaintiffs. In its third footnote, the court noted:

The Court’s opinion should not be interpreted as an assessment of the propriety of the alleged conduct by the defendants [the IRS], as resolution of the motions does not require an assessment of the merits of the plaintiff’s claims.

LINCHPINS OF LIBERTY, et al., v. UNITED STATES, et al. (#13-777)

Filing in the same federal district court in the District of Columbia on May 29, 2013, Linchpins of Liberty was one of 41 plaintiffs in this case, all of which “sought or are still seeking tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”)….” In his 22-page decision on October 23, 2014, Judge Walton summarized the case this way:

The plaintiffs filed suit on May 29, 2013,… and have since amended their complaint twice, once on June 25, 2013,… and again on October 18, 2013….

Counts one through three seek monetary damages against certain defendants in their individual capacities for carrying out the alleged IRS scheme in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments….

Counts four through seven generally accuse the defendants of violating the APA and seek declaratory and injunctive relief….

Count eight seeks declaratory relief under 26 U.S.C. § 7428 for those plaintiffs that are awaiting determination of their Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status….

And through count nine, the plaintiffs seek monetary damages for violations of 26 U.S.C. § 6103, because the defendants allegedly “obtained, inspected, handled, and disclosed” the plaintiffs’ tax return information “illegally.”

Using much the same arguments, based on similar facts, in some of the same language he used in the True the Vote case, Judge Walton arrived at essentially the same result. He dismissed “counts one through three of the complaint against all of the plaintiffs with prejudice for the failure to state a cognizable claim for relief under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure….”

Judge Walton also dismissed counts four through seven, seeking injunctions against government behavior “for want of subject-matter jurisdiction pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure … as to all of the plaintiffs. The judge outlined his basis for issuing no injunctions this way:

Here, the Court is satisfied that there is no reasonable expectation that the alleged conduct will recur, as the defendants [the government] have not only suspended the conduct, but have also taken remedial measures to ensure that the conduct is not repeated…. Accordingly, counts four through seven no longer warrant the Court’s attention and further use of its resources.

Count eight applied only to four plaintiffs who were awaiting action on their tax exempt status, two of whom had since had their applications approved. Judge Walton dismissed this count for these two plaintiffs, but let it stand for the other two.

Count nine sought monetary damages from the government. Judge Walton also dismissed this count with prejudice as to all the plaintiffs for failure to state a proper claim for relief. He wrote:

The plaintiffs’ real bone of contention is that the [government] allegedly “demanded information” that “was not necessary for determining their tax-exempt status,” and then “inspected, handled, and disclosed” it…. Thus, although the plaintiffs challenge the defendants’ inspection of their tax return information, it is actually the defendants’ alleged unconstitutional conduct in acquiring that information that forms the basis for count nine of the complaint….

We therefore agree with the district court that the validity of the means by which the return information was disclosed is irrelevant to whether the disclosure of the information violated § 6103. We further agree with the district court and the majority of courts which have considered the issue that there is nothing in § 6103 which requires that the underlying means of disclosure be valid before [a disclosure exception] applies.

As in the True the Vote decision, the court included the same third footnote, saying in effect that even if the government did do something wrong, if the plaintiffs ever had a case, they don’t have one now.

The IRS isn’t done with court yet, and not with Congress, either

In May 2013, Judicial Watch filed the first of at least three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the IRS that have become the center of a federal lawsuit alleging IRS failure to comply. Judicial Watch describes itself as “a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.”

So far, the case (Judicial Watch v. IRS (No. 1:13-cv–1559)) has moved slowly in the U.S. district court for the District of Columbia before U.S. district judge Emmett Sullivan, with limited media attention. In July, Judge Sullivan “held a hearing about the supposedly missing emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials,” according to Judicial Watch, the results of which it found unsatisfactory:

The order from U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan was certainly clear enough. In a landmark victory for Judicial Watch, the federal judge ordered the IRS to submit sworn declarations detailing what happened to Lois Lerner’s “lost” emails and what steps were being taken to find them. What was provided this week was a garbled explanation from no less than five IRS officials with more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

On August 14, 2014, Judge Sullivan ordered the IRS to respond within eight days with satisfactory explanations:

In light of [26] the Declarations filed by the IRS, the IRS is hereby ORDERED to file a sworn Declaration, by an official with the authority to speak under oath for the Agency, by no later than August 22, 2014. In this Declaration, the IRS must:

(1) provide information about its efforts, if any, to recover missing Lois Lerner emails from alternate sources (i.e., Blackberry, iPhone, iPad);

(2) provide additional information explaining the IRS’s policy of tracking inventory through use of bar code property tags, including whether component parts, such as hard drives, receive a bar code tag when serviced. If individual components do not receive a bar code tag, provide information on how the IRS tracks component parts, such as hard drives, when being serviced;

(3) provide information about the IRS’s policy to degauss hard drives, including whether the IRS records whose hard drive is degaussed, either by tracking the employee’s name or the particular machine with which the hard drive was associated; and

(4) provide information about the outside vendor who can verify the IRS’s destruction policies concerning hard drives.”

When the IRS failed to produce satisfactory information, Judicial Watch returned to court on September 17 to file a motion for limited discovery ­– essentially a motion to compel the IRS to follow the court’ orders. In support of the motion, Judicial Watch wrote:

In order for this case to be fairly adjudicated, Judicial Watch and the Court require a clear and thorough understanding of what records are missing, how the missing records can be obtained from alternative sources, and what efforts the IRS has or has not undertaken to obtain the missing records from these other sources.

The public interest also demands clear, thorough answers to these important questions. Because the IRS has been unwilling to provide this information in any of its seven declarations and because the Court deemed this information highly relevant, Judicial Watch respectfully requests that it be permitted to obtain the information through written discovery and depositions of knowledgeable agency witnesses or some other, court-directed discovery that the Court deems just and appropriate.

The IRS filed a motion in opposition to discovery and Judicial Watch has now filed an answer to the IRS opposition. On October 29, in response to an inquiry, Judicial Watch gave this status report:

The government is mostly silent on the substance of our concerns, doesn’t deny that continuity of government backup systems exist, refuses to divulge where the records are, refuses to search elsewhere, won’t tell us when we’ll get all the records, haven’t bothered to search the IRS systems as FOIA requires, is hiding names of IRS officials who also “lost” records, and is using the TITGA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] investigation as an excuse not disclose info to the court, [Judicial Watch], and Congress.

From long experience, we’re all aware how well our government can withhold documents and other information that the public needs. And some information is withheld until never. This particular withholding is going on largely out of sight, with limited public, media, or Congressional interest, so it could easily go on for a long time, or forever. Meanwhile, here’s a tantalizing, unexplained exchange of emails between IRS employees Holly Paz, director of the Office of Rulings, and her superior, Lois Lerner, on June 28, 2012:

8:51 AM ­– Lerner to Paz:
“I need to ask you a few questions…. Is there a new number I could call to reach you?

8:57 AM – Paz to Lerner:
“Now TIGTA wants to talk to me. I am guessing they read this morning’s paper. [Apparent reference to Wall Street Journal article concerning IRS scrutiny of Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS tax exempt status]Will keep you posted.”

9:13 AM – Lerner to Paz:
“Not alone. Wait til I am there.”

09:17 AM – Paz to Lerner:
“Sorry. Too late. He already called me. It was not about WSJ. Just him trying to get better understanding of the scope of the [House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave] Camp [R-MI] request.”

9:22 AM – Lerner to Paz:
“Just as dangerous. I’ll talk to you soon. Be there in half hour.”

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.