Dana Milbank pans the congressional investigations attempting to connect Obama to the IRS scandal, accusing them of not only “placing the sentence before the verdict, they’re putting the verdict before the trial”:
Congressional investigators have not produced evidence to link the harassment of conservative groups to the White House or to higher-ups in the Obama administration. But the lack of evidence that any political appointee was involved hasn’t stopped the lawmakers from assuming that it simply must be true. And so, they are going to hold hearings until they confirm their conclusions.
Ed Kilgore cautions that “if it’s possible to screw up this can’t-lose situation, it may well be that House Republicans are capable of it”:
I figure congressional Republicans and their media friends have about a week to make the IRS investigations interesting and/or revelatory before it begins to look like conservatives are quite literally just talking to themselves, at which time the whole thing could backfire. But they don’t exactly seem to have a firm grip on the ball or a clear play to run.
Ramesh offers advice to Republicans:
Republicans had a better response to the last round of IRS scandals, in the 1990s. In 1997, congressional hearings revealed that IRS agents were being pressured to meet quotas for back taxes and penalties. Agents, sometimes anonymously, admitted that these quotas had led aggressive collectors to squeeze taxpayers for money they didn’t really owe. … The earlier IRS scandals produced useful reforms partly because the Republicans who did the most to publicize them weren’t focused on pinning the blame on President Bill Clinton. They instead wanted to demonstrate the dangers of letting the federal government have too much power, and in finding ways to reduce those dangers.
Good luck with that, Ramesh. And I’m not being snarky there. But I suspect they’re a lost cause and this will be the only thing the House cares about in this session.
The Dish 