Since his emergence as a national political figure, Barack Obama has managed to deflect accusations of wrongdoing and impropriety with ease. Republicans on Capitol Hill are determined to put that to an end by making him pay for the unfolding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.

“Ultimately responsibility lies with the president. Obama has spent the better part of the last five years doing non-stop campaigning,” says a senior Republican Senate aide who points to the administration’s larger pattern of “using political offices to intimidate and harrass” its opponents. “When bureaucrats see the leader of an organization doing that, it shouldn’t shock us when they start doing the same. That appears to have been what happened here.”

Republican lawmakers, led by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Florida senator Marco Rubio, are now hammering the president for fostering a “culture of intimidation” that encourages the vilification of one’s political opponents. “There is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration,” McConnell told NBC’s David Gregory on Sunday. “It’s no wonder the agents in the IRS sorta get the message. The president demonizes his opponents.” On the Senate floor last week, Rubio too described a “culture of intimidation” and, referring to the IRS’s targeting, argued that the culture “leads to this kind of behavior throughout the administration.” House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp spoke of the same culture his opening statement at Friday’s hearing on the IRS scandal.

The repeated use of the term is no accident. “Mitch McConnell doesn’t say anything without thinking about why he is going to say it,” another senior GOP aide tells National Review Online. “If you hear him talking about a culture of intimidation at the IRS, he’s not just coming up with that on the spot.” This is a theme McConnell has touched on repeatedly during Obama’s tenure, and it is again emerging as Republicans seek to hang the IRS scandal around the president’s neck. 

The president has frequently been called thin-skinned; he is noticeably irked by criticism and it is hard to miss the contempt in which he holds his critics. In press conferences, campaign speeches, and off-the-cuff remarks, he has returned fire. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the billionaire Koch brothers have all been targets. “I can’t remember a president ever singling out individuals the way he does, it’s just unprecedented,” the Senate aide tells me. The manner in which the president has reacted and responded to his critics over the past four years is now being used to substantiate Republicans’ charge that, if the top dog acts like a bully, his underlings are likely to follow suit.

Take Fox News. In June of 2009, the president complained about a “certain cable network” devoted entirely to attacking his administration. Four months later, former White House communications director Anita Dunn in 2009 said of Fox, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” adding, “We don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” The administration went on to try to exclude Fox from the network pool that covers the White House, making a recent appointee – pay czar Kenneth Feinberg – available for interviews to every network but Fox. When the other networks refused to conduct the interview until Fox was included, the White House relented. But the verbal assault continued, with Obama telling Rolling Stone magazine in 2010 that the network represents a point of view that is “ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

Charles and David Koch have come in for similar treatment. The billionaire brothers, who co-chair the country’s second largest private company, sit atop a constellation of right-leaning non-profit organizations opposed to the president’s agenda. With administration officials urging reporters to write about “the most insidious power grab of all time,” and the president warning of “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates across the country,” the Koch brothers became the bête noire of the midterm election.

McConnell last year warned that the administration’s actions demonstrated its willingness to use the powers of government to silence American citizens. (He also cited the IRS’s harrassment of Tea Party groups as a case in point). The Koch brothers, McConnell said, became household names “not for the tens of thousands of people they employ, not for their generosity to charity,” but because of the administration’s bullying. “If the President of the United States opposed these kinds of tactics, all he’d have to do is condemn them. Instead, he’s joined the effort.” He went on to link the president’s rhetorical war against them to the harrassment and death threats to which they were subjected.

As with Fox News and the Koch brothers, so too, Republicans say, with the Tea Party. “The White House may be keen on this strategy that it was one or two employees at some far off agency, but president was very clear on strategy that these groups were not to be trusted, and if you’re working at one of these agencies,” argues the Senate aide, “and if you want to see the president get reelected, you want to make it difficult for these organizations to form and flourish.”

Both GOP lawmakers and their staff are careful about lodging accusations about what the president knew about what was happening at the IRS – and when he knew it – saying that the investigations currently underway by both Congress and the inspector general will determine that. But to make the president pay for this scandal, in their view, that may be immaterial.  

On the Sunday shows today, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer sought to discredit criticism over how the infamous Benghazi talking points were scrubbed of references to terrorism by focusing on the differences between how ABC News described a single White House email and its actual text:

Here’s the evidence that proves the Republicans are playing politics with this: They received these emails months ago, didn’t say a word about it, didn’t complain, confirmed the CIA director . . . right after that. And then last week, a Republican source provided to Jon Karl of ABC News a doctored version of the White House email that started this entire fury. After 25,000 pieces of paper that were provided to Congress, they have to doctor an email to make political hay, you know they’re getting desperate here.

This is wrong in four ways.

Point one: Republicans never “received” the emails. Here’s what really happened: On March 19, the White House briefed the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, along with staff for Speaker John Boehner and minority leader Nancy Pelosi, on the emails in question. Those at the briefing were permitted to take notes but not copy the contents of the emails. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, was not represented at this session.

Point two: Republicans raised strenuous objections based on the information they were given at that briefing. In their interim report on Benghazi, released April 23, House Republicans alleged that “White House and senior State Department officials altered accurate talking points drafted by the Intelligence Community in order to protect the State Department.” The report described and, in one case, quoted from the emails in question.

Point three: Nothing was “doctored.” Following the House report, Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard revealed a significant amount of new detail, followed by Jon Karl at ABC News. Both Hayes and Karl refer to summaries of the emails, meaning they presumably relied a great deal on the notes of those at the March 19 White House briefing. Karl inaccurately quotes from one email, which may have been based on faulty note-taking or some other error. While this is significant, the email in question exists and has the same core content as the email quoted by Karl — there was no wholesale fabrication.

Point four: The differences between the two versions of the email have been overstated. At issue is the involvement of Ben Rhodes, a senior White House aide, in directing the various members of the inter-agency discussion to resolve their dispute.

Here’s the relevant part of the email as quoted by Karl:

We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.

Here’s the relevant sentence from the real email:

We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.

The email is important because in the preceding email back-and-forth, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland had urged that references to terrorism be removed because they could be a political liability to State. Whether Rhodes said Nuland’s objections should be accommodated explicitly or by implication is a difference, but it’s a pretty small one.

Furthermore, there is ample evidence beyond this email that the White House and State Department were deeply involved in editing the talking points to scrub references to terrorism. The evidence blows Jay Carney’s repeated assurances that the White House and State Department only made one “stylistic” edit out of the water — with or without this email.

Senior Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer tried to deflect Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace’s questions about the president’s whereabouts and involvement in the decisions on the night of the 9/11 attacks in Benghazi. He went on to call the suggestion of the questions to be “offensive.”

Wallace asked whom President Obama met with and where throughout the day of the attack, and positing if it could have been in the Situation Room. “I don’t remember what room the president was in on the night, and that is a largely irrelevant fact,” Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer later appeared to struggle to address Wallace’s questions about the Benghazi talking points and references to protests about a YouTube video as the catalyst for the attacks. Pfeiffer said the CIA mentioned protests in its version of the talking points, but Wallace interjected to say that the reference to protests is that the Benghazi attacks where inspired by protests in Cairo. Pfeiffer appeared to agree, but not directly.

After trying to get clarity from Pfeiffer, Wallace directly asked, “There was no demonstration against the video in Benghazi?” Pfeiffer did not provide a clear answer before moving on. U.N. ambassador Susan Rice blamed the attacks on the YouTube video on the Sunday morning talk shows the weekend after the attacks.

If we had a Republican administration — a Romney or McCain or George W. Bush administration — and the IRS had systemically targeted liberal groups, while letting conservative groups slide: What would liberals be saying? What would the Democratic party be saying? What would the mainstream media be saying?

I think it would be Armageddon.

P.S. What if a right-wing administration had singled out Jewish groups? Think of the associations that would have called up!

P.P.S. Weren’t the Democrats telling us at their last convention that “Government is the only thing we all belong to”? What happened to that?

P.P.P.S. American life is more and more resembling an Ayn Rand novel. The common experience among righties is, you start out Randian when you’re a teen and then grow out of it and into conservatism. Hell, I think I may be going the other way . . .

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward downplayed any direct comparisons to the recent scandals as being Watergate, but noted that there are some similarities, specifically pertaining to Benghazi.

“This is not Watergate, but there are some people in the administration that have acted as if they want to be Nixonian, and that is a very big problem,” Woodward said on Meet the Press. For example, he explained, the CIA’s original talking points for the Benghazi attacks explicity highlighted ties to al-Qaeda, but that those references were eventually scrubbed.

“This is a business where you have to tell the truth and that did not happen here,” he said.

Amid the recent series of scandals surrounding the Obama administration, senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said that the president’s healthcare law will probably still be the focus of the midterm elections next year.

“If I were predicting what’s likely to be the biggest issue in the 2014 election, I think it would be Obamacare,” McConnell said on Meet the Press this morning. “I think it’s coming back big time.”

McConnell went on to tie the IRS with the healthcare law’s implementation, and said that is why Republicans “ought to pull it out root and branch.”

Dismissing whether his comments were a 2016 preview, Senator Rand Paul said that Hillary Clinton should have resigned as secretary of state following her failures to provide security to the Benghazi consulate prior to last year’s 9/11 attacks.

“Whether it has political overtones or not, it really goes to the heart of who you are as secretary of state if you do not provide security to an embassy that’s begging for it,” Paul said on State of the Union this morning. “That’s absolutely a dereliction of duty, and she should’ve resigned and accepted blame for it.”

Earlier this month, Paul told an audience in Iowa that her handling of the attacks ”precludes Hillary Clinton from ever holding office.” “I think her mistakes were of such significance that she should never again be in that position, to make those decisions,” he said.

On “Face the Nation” this week, Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) said it’s past time for Attorney General Eric Holder to step down. He cited Fast and Furious, as well as  the Department of Justice’s monitoring of AP reporters’ phone calls. Cornyn also questioned the circumstances of Holder’s recusal. “You know, I’ve lost confidence in the attorney general a long time ago over his cover-up over the Fast and Furious investigation,” he said. 

“I think it’s past time for him to go and for the president to appoint somebody who the public can have confidence in,” he concluded. 

This morning on “This Week,” White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer said that the law regarding the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party-affiliated groups is “irrelevant.” When host George Stephanopoulos asked him if the president thinks it is illegal for IRS employees to create lists targeting groups and individuals, Pfeiffer responded, “I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity needs the stopped. It needs to be fixed.”

Senator Rand Paul said that the diplomatic facilities in Libya should be under the guard of military command rather than relying on local militia for security, and compared the “war-torn country” to Iraq. He described the decision not to do so prior to last year’s 9/11 attacks in Benghazi as “tragic.”

“Even now, the embassy in Tripoli should be under the guard of military command similar to what we do Baghdad,” Paul state on CNN’s State of the Union this morning. “We shouldn’t treat Tripoli and Benghazi like Paris, we need to treat it more like Baghdad.”

Representative Paul Ryan described the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups as another example of the federal government’s ”arrogance of power, abuse of power to the nth degree.” “This is big-government cronyism,” Ryan said on Fox News Sunday.

“To claim that this is just some bureaucratic snafu, that’s already been disproven,” he explained after providing evidence of the IRS only singling out tea-party groups, religious groups, and donors to these groups, and leaked some of that information. At Friday’s Ways and Means Committee hearing on the IRS, the agency’s acting commissioner told Ryan that the groups were singled out as “a shortcut” to centralize applicants based on political activity.

Ryan told Chris Wallace that Congress would continue to investigate the situation, since the previous report was an audit.

Some readers — reader-listeners — have asked about the music at the end of the latest Need to Know. It’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen,” by Grieg (Troldhaugen being his home outside Bergen). Mona Charen and I end our ’cast with a report from Norway (whose national day, or Constitution Day, was yesterday). “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” is about as Norwegian a piece as there is.

Although many, over the years, have noticed a resemblance between it and “The March of the Royal Siamese Children” from The King and I. Bergen and Bangkok are a long way apart — about 5,500 miles.

“I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”

I learned about the first successful human cloning last Monday, but couldn’t write about it until Wednesday because of a news embargo. The peer reviewed paper in Cell was rushed to print because is a huge deal. But, much to my surprise, it only made mild news. There were two reasons for that I think. First, we just went through a very busy news week. But I think the primary reason is that the scientists and media pretended that this wasn’t really human cloning for political reasons; just a step in that general direction. 

But human cloning it was, and that is a huge deal, opening up the possibility of genetic engineering of embryos, creating custom made fetuses as organ farms, and the birth of a cloned baby.  News stories often acted as if the experiment merely turned “unfertilized eggs” and skin cells into embryonic stem cells. Not true: The act of cloning creates an embryo. After that, the cloning is over.

Just like Dolly the cloned sheep was a cloned sheep embryo before she was a born lamb, these human embryos were nascent human beings created through asexual means. They were not implanted into a uterus, as Dolly’s embryo was, but destroyed for their stem cells. Indeed, they were created precisely to be destroyed. That is a very big moral deal.

Even though it is off to a slow start due to advocacy obfuscation, the reality of human cloning will soon create white-hot public controversies, a few of which I discuss elsewhere. These include:

• Whether Human SCNT Cloning should be outlawed;
• Whether the federal government should fund human cloning research;
• How–and whether–to protect women from being exploited for their eggs–the essential ingredient in human cloning, one egg per try–since egg extraction can cause significant harm and death to suppliers.

I conclude with a warning. From, “The Arrival of Human Cloning:”

The fact that human beings can be cloned is a scientific triumph, but it is also an ethical earthquake. Because these experiments offer the potential to advance scientific knowledge, they will tempt us–always for “the best”reasons–to set aside our convictions about the intrinsic dignity of all human life. 

The next decade may well decide if Huxley was right about the coming of Brave New World.  

In my continuing effort to assist the dead-tree deprived, here’s a comparison of today’s New York Times and Washington Post on their handling of the IRS scandal. Keep in mind that print headlines and web headlines often differ.

The Post has two front-page above-the-fold articles on the scandal, a news story and an in-depth look at the IRS in the wake of the controversy. There’s also a tough lead editorial expressing renewed outrage at the IRS’s conduct and demanding thorough reform.

Yet after the first dramatic day of congressional hearings, the Times has no front-page coverage at all of the scandal per se. Instead we have a story on President Obama’s efforts to move his agenda forward, beyond “distraction.” The Times story quotes White House aides accusing Republicans of seizing on “woes” to thwart the president’s agenda. The paper itself seems to be taking the White House line.

Just below the Times story on Obama’s attempts to move past “distraction,” a tiny squib notes that there is an article about the IRS on page 12. The teaser is: “Republicans are widening their aim at the Internal Revenue Service.” The headline of the page 12 Times article itself is: “Republicans Broaden Scope of I.R.S. Inquiry, Hoping to Entangle White House.” For comparison, the Post’s front-page news story headline is: “Panel grills IRS on tax targeting.” In other words, the Times treats the scandal as little more than a Republican-hyped distraction, while the Post takes it as a matter that should concern everyone. In contrast to the Post, there is no Times editorial on the scandal today.

Colbert King’s Op-Ed in today’s Post condemns the IRS in passing, while also trying to rescue government itself from the taint of the scandal. Times Op-Eds by Gail Collins and Charles Blow in various ways try to minimize the scandal. All the Op-Eds seem to line up fairly well with the news coverage and official editorial stances (or lack thereof) of their respective papers.

My Hillsdale colleague Steve Smith reads Dan Brown’s Inferno so you don’t have to. He recommends reading Dante’s Inferno instead.

This weekend’s “Masterpiece” column in the WSJ is by me, on Gray’s Elegy.

“Gray’s Elegy,” wrote Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf), “includes more familiar phrases than any poem of equal length in the language.” Its 32 stanzas burst with celebrated passages: “The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day”; “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”; “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”; and so on. Robert L. Mack, Gray’s definitive biographer, has observed that a recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations draws from 15 stanzas and reproduces 13 of them whole.

I’ve also included a James Bond reference.

Charles Krauthammer was unimpressed with the testimony of IRS chief Steven Miller, arguing that it “falls under the category of ‘How stupid do you think we are?’”

“Here’s a guy who says that the IRS openly discriminated against groups on the basis of their politics, but the action was not a political action, it was instead an attempt at efficiency,” he said. “You’ve gotta be a knave or a fool to say that and you’ve gotta be an idiot to believe it. It’s simply a contradiction in terms.”  

In the early days of this scandal, I opined in a Corner post that it was believable this might be just a few low-level employees. I would like to state this is now obviously untenable. I also mentioned NOM’s experience — its legally protected Form 990s leaked, which has since hit Drudge and elsewhere.

For the record, this happened after I stepped down from NOM and I don’t have inside information about what happened. My theory that it was a former employee who requested the data is only a theory. We need someone with subpoena power to find out what really happened.  

The House of Representatives’ own version of the Gang of Eight has announced agreement on an amnesty bill, though without revealing what they actually agreed to. It’s clear the bill legalizes (i.e., amnesties) illegal aliens, since one sticking point was “how the legislation would handle health care for immigrants on the pathway to citizenship.” Since I can’t imagine that the Democrats in the gang (Becerra, Yarmuth, Lofgren, and Gutierrez) would ever agree to postponing the grant of legal status until E-Verify, exit-tracking, and real border control are in place, it seems likely their bill will follow the basic pattern of the Senate’s Schumer-Rubio bill — amnesty first, in exchange for promises of enforcement.

If that turns out to be the case, then it would appear that at least four House Republicans (Carter, Diaz-Balart, Sam Johnson, and Labrador) join Marco Rubio, Grover Norquist, et al. in trusting Barack Obama. As I wrote on the homepage today, it seems like an odd place to put your trust.

Charles C. W. Cooke drew attention earlier today to an astonishing new piece in the Telegraph estimating that Christians will be a minority of the British population even sooner than earlier projections had suggested — in fact, within a decade. 

This religious free-fall both across the Atlantic and here at home is one of the subjects of my new book, How the West Really Lost God. The question of just why so many Western men and women no longer know Easter from the Easter bunny — or care — is one of the most fascinating intellectual puzzles out there. And the going explanations for secularization, as explained recently in the British magazine Standpoint, all come up critically short. So do others, as I argue in the book.

Even so, as this latest example from the Telegraph goes to show, at least part of Western religious decline shares a dark ironic root: the unwitting collaboration of some churches. As sociologists have known for decades, and as observed in this piece in Time, it is the stricter churches that are stronger in the long run — in part because the others don’t reproduce themselves, including literally, as demographer Eric Kaufmann and more recently author Jonathan Last have shown. In effect, the pastors of Christianity Lite who held that the churches were now indifferent to procreation wrote themselves out of their jobs, and the ones who said “anything goes” didn’t realize that this prophesy would include their congregations. 

And that’s just one of the unexpected twists in the real whodunnit over what, exactly, is buried in the “tombs,” as Nietzsche called the churches and cathedrals, of Western Christianity.

Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, just published by Templeton Press.

One of the many troubling features of Obamacare is that it dramatically expands the reach and scope of the IRS. Two provisions in particular — the individual mandate, requiring people to buy health insurance; and the employer mandate, requiring employers to cover their workers — require substantial new enforcement powers for the IRS. I explain why in a new post for my Forbes blog: Basically, the IRS needs to know the specific insurance policy you’ve obtained, whether on your own or through your employer. The law also has the effect of forcing employers to make you disclose your household income to them. As I write:

To enforce the individual mandate, the IRS needs to know whether or not you have purchased insurance this year. It will also need to know the specific insurance policy you have, in order to ensure that it meets Obamacare’s “minimum essential coverage” requirement.

To enforce the employer mandate, the IRS needs the same information from employers in terms of the specific policies employers purchase for their workers, and also the hours worked by every part-time employee. In addition, your employer will need to know what your household income is, in order to ensure that the coverage it offers you is “affordable” to you by the law’s definition.

Some conservatives are raising the alarm: can a politicized IRS handle these duties in a non-partisan way? Or will your health records get leaked by the agency? Indeed, the IRS is subject to a class-action lawsuit in California, alleging that the IRS has improperly obtained personal medical records for 10 million individuals in that state, without a warrant.

Others are suggesting that the duty to enforce the individual and employer mandates be taken out of IRS’ hands and moved into another agency. But, to me, this doesn’t make much sense. Do we really want another government agency to have sensitive information about our incomes and our insurance policies?

The only viable solution to this problem is to repeal the employer mandate altogether, and to replace the individual mandate with something else, like a limited open enrollment period, that does not require expanding the power and the authority of the IRS.

Repealing the employer mandate will give employers additional incentive to dump workers onto Obamacare’s exchanges. But, in my view, this is on balance a good thing, because it will mean that individuals can shop for insurance themselves, something that economists of all stripes support.

The only real solution is to repeal both mandates. There are policy ramifications for doing so, as I discuss in the post, but overall the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Mark Steyn’s weekend column.

This week on “Need to Know,” the perspicacious James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal joins Jay and me. He answers the question: Which of the Obama scandals is the worst? We wonder about trusting government and – who can resist? – ponder how a Republican administration that was revealed to have sicced the IRS on its opponents would be treated. James muses on what happens when you elect a community organizer as president of the United States. We tour the lesser scandals of the week (oh yes, there are more), pause to praise Rudyard Kipling, and ponder the greatness of people who stand up for freedom and human dignity in repressive states, knowing that they will be tortured. Jay rubbed shoulders with some of them this week at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Tune in.

The IRS will be going to court, if Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, has anything to say about it. ACLJ currently represents 25 tea-party groups who believe they were targeted by the IRS because of their politics. Sekulow talks with National Review Online about what he’s looking at and about the court case to come.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: When did you first realize there was a real scandal involving the IRS?

JAY SEKULOW: We became aware of a problem in late 2011 and early 2012, when we were started receiving calls from a number of conservative groups that had concerns about the questions they were receiving from the IRS concerning their applications for tax-exempt status. More and more requests for assistance came into our offices in early 2012, and I assembled a legal team to investigate. It didn’t take long to realize what was happening: a coordinated attempt by the IRS to target and intimidate these conservative groups.

The questions posed by the IRS were extremely intrusive and outside the scope of what the IRS is permitted to do under its own rules and regulations. And the questions, a sample of which is posted here, are not only intrusive – they violate the First Amendment rights of our clients.

We began working with these clients immediately. We represent 27 tea-party organizations: 15 have received tax-exempt status, with all of them experiencing long delays. Ten of our clients are still being harassed and investigated, and their applications are still pending at the IRS after years of waiting. In fact, it’s especially troubling that this harassment and abuse is continuing even today, after the IRS admitted to this unlawful targeting scheme. One of our clients, whose case is still pending, received a new letter from the IRS just days ago seeking more intrusive and unconstitutional information.

LOPEZ: How many requests have you seen in recent days? How many cases have you taken on?

SEKULOW: We have heard from dozens of organizations in recent days. We continue to meet with them and examine their cases.

LOPEZ: What’s the ACLJ approach here? Is it ultimately to try to take down the president?

SEKULOW: The ACLJ is focused on one thing — protecting the constitutional rights of our clients. This is one of the most abhorrent breaches of trust imaginable. We now know this coordinated intimidation scheme went beyond tea-party groups to include Jewish organizations and even groups that discussed the Constitution.

First, by singling out tea-party organizations and related groups for special scrutiny based on their political views, IRS agents violated their own agency’s mission, to operate with integrity and fairness.

Second, with their actions, IRS agents violated the requirement to act impartially.

And third, IRS agents engaged in dishonest, notoriously disgraceful conduct. The same can be said of IRS leaders who knew of, but failed to rein in, such biased, politically motivated conduct, thereby allowing the politicization of the IRS. Each such action was prejudicial to the government and had a negative impact on the reputation of the IRS.

It is no wonder that, in light of the open and notorious politicization of the IRS vis-à-vis the Tea Party and other conservative groups, many Americans view with outright alarm the planned expansion of the IRS to implement the Affordable Care Act. Agencies such as the IRS must be scrupulously apolitical to retain the confidence and trust of the American people. In its treatment of many groups, the IRS failed miserably at that. The growing mistrust of the IRS is the inevitable (and totally understandable) result of its unwise actions.

And another important point: Despite the assertion by the IRS that this scheme originated with a couple of rogue agents out of the Cincinnati office, the ACLJ’s clients have received letters from Cincinnati, but also from two offices in California, El Monte and Laguna Niguel, and the national office in Washington, D.C. In fact, the Washington office sent a letter to one of our clients as recently as one month ago.

The IRS must be held accountable for this dishonest and notoriously disgraceful conduct.

LOPEZ: Some on MSNBC last night were suggesting that people like yourself are overjoyed by this opportunity to make all your favorite anti-government points while targeting President Obama. Does that describe your current mood or approach?

SEKULOW: These critics are simply trying to deflect what most Americans understand. President Obama continues to fail to show leadership as this IRS scandal continues to expand. The resignation of acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller does not solve any of the problems of this tainted and politically driven agency. He was scheduled to depart anyway.

The American people and our clients deserve much more. There are many questions that President Obama continues to ignore — to fail to address — including what he knew about the IRS scheme and when he learned about it.

Another problem: President Obama’s attorney general is heading up this criminal investigation. An independent counsel needs to be appointed, with no ties or allegiance to this president.

The IRS scheme to target conservative groups because of their thoughts and ideological positions is both unconscionable and intolerable. It is also actionable.

LOPEZ: So what’s next?

SEKULOW: We are finalizing a federal lawsuit to be filed next week. We will be representing a number of clients — some of whom we currently represent — including some who have received tax-exempt status and some who are still pending. At the same time, we will be representing new clients, conservative organizations that were also targeted, who have approached us in recent days.

This lawsuit will be significant, and will focus on constitutional issues as well damages incurred by the organizations.

We applaud the congressional efforts underway to get to the bottom of what happened concerning this IRS conduct. In written testimony provided to the House Ways and Means Committee, we detailed the abuse and harassment of our clients and noted: “The IRS, as well as this Administration, needs to understand that all Americans are now aware of this unconstitutional targeting of American’s First Amendment rights and demand that it cease immediately. Only transparency and accountability to the Congress and the American public will root out corruption in the IRS.”

BuzzFeed’s Business section has a story that they apparently find appalling:

How’s this for poor taste: millionaire hedge fund manager Mike Wilkins rented out AT&T Park, home of the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants, on Thursday afternoon, just as the stadium’s concession workers are preparing to strike over low wages.

Wilkins, a partner at Kingsford Capital Management, which has more than $400 million under management, and his hedge fund buddies sipped drinks from a bar brought onto the field and took batting practice with a Giants bullpen pitcher, according to two sources with knowledge of the event, one of whom passed along the invitation from Wilkins.

One of the sources described the afternoon as “grown up boys fantasy time” for millionaire hedge fund managers.

That is indeed pretty much what it sounds like, and here’s the tariff for fantasy time:

According to the AT&T Park website, it costs $200,000 to rent out the stadium for a day. Batting practice costs $5,000 per person, or about $500,000 for 100 people without a bulk discount, and includes “use of batting tunnel and dugout with professionally trained staff.” The price also helpfully includes “a paramedic stand-by,” according to the website.

The hedge funders’ afternoon of baseball comes amidst an impending strike by the park’s concession workers, who are demanding employment contracts (they are currently working without contracts) and protesting a proposed three-year wage freeze and healthcare changes.

Apparently, spending $200,000+ at the stadium on a day when it would otherwise stand empty is in poor taste. Perhaps you weren’t about to take lessons in good taste from BuzzFeed anyway, but how exactly do they expect concessions workers to be paid, or paid more, unless the Giants’ owners make money on the operation of their stadium? (Not all stadiums are owned by their tenant team, but AT&T is.)

The idea that we should lament rich guys’ cavorting on an empty major-league baseball field for the sake of concessions workers is probably even more silly than it looks. AT&T Park’s food concessions are contracted out, like just about every stadium, in this case to a South Carolina firm called Centerplate. Presumably most of Centerplate’s 500 employees at the stadium are hourly workers who wouldn’t have gotten work that day, with the Giants out of town, unless rich-enough people or a big-enough organization decided to rent the place out and purchase catering at the stadium. Some of the tens of thousands of dollars spent on food and drink that day likely went straight into these aggrieved concessions workers’ pockets.

Further,a lot of stadium contracts are profit-sharing agreements based on the concession’s performance, so besides the fact that hourly concessions workers just wouldn’t have gotten paid that day, their employer’s bottom line is improved any time a hedge fund spends some exorbitant amount on a day when there would otherwise be no food sold at the park. You don’t think that might help in salary negotiations? (And I’m not even going to get into what a bartender might get tipped during batting practice after a hedge-fund guy finally hits something out of the infield.)

Now, obviously, it’s quite possible that Centerplate’s workers are being paid very poorly for whatever hours they get, or that they see only the most meager slice of whatever profits Centerplate receives from its San Francisco operation. Regardless, there’s no way they’re better off if the ballpark stays empty, and they’re definitely no better off for BuzzFeed’s class-shaming of the people who pay the bills at America’s sports stadiums.

And the worst-kept secret in Washington is secret no more: Lois Lerner’s apology was part of a staged PR campaign. Celia Roady, tax lobbyist and former member of the IRS Advisory Council on Tax-Exempt Entities, who asked the question that spurred the “spontaneous” apology that got this all rolling, says:

On May 9, I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the ABA Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks.  I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day.  We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question.

Pro tip: If you want something to look spontaneous, don’t call reporters first. 

Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania gave a resounding speech during the House Ways and Means Committee hearing, in which he chastised acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller’s inability to answer many of the committee’s questions today, and reminded him of the consequences of the IRS’s actions.

“I don’t know that I got any answers from you . . . I am more concerned today than I was before,” Kelly said to Miller.

He explained, “I have a grandson who’s afraid to get out of bed at night because he thinks there’s somebody under the bed that’s going to grab him, and I think most Americans feel that way about the IRS.”

“You get a letter from you folks, or a phone call, it’s with terror that you look at it,” he told the commissioner. ”And now, this kind of reconfirms that, you know what, they can do almost anything they want to anybody they want any time they want. This is very chilling for the American people.”

When he finished his speech, the chamber gave Kelly a round of applause before the chairman called for order.

When Secretary of State William Seward purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the media derided the deal as “Seward’s Folly.” Some congressmen accused Seward of overstepping his authority. Most Americans were just plain mystified: Why would the U.S. government, already laden with the heavy financial burden of Reconstruction, give the Russians millions of dollars for a remote and frozen wasteland?

Seward, of course, didn’t see it that way. When asked to identify the greatest achievement of his long, distinguished career, Seward replied: ”The purchase of Alaska — but it will take the people a generation to find it out.” Sadly, some seven generations later, many Americans still seem unable to appreciate the importance of Alaska and the Arctic region to the nation’s economic and security interests.

On Friday, May 10, the White House published its “National Strategy for the Arctic Region.” But don’t let the title fool you. Merriam-Webster’s defines strategy as “the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces of a nation or group of nations to afford the maximum support to adopted policies in peace or war.”

The White House “strategy” document comes nowhere close to fitting that description. At best it is a set of guidelines, falling far short of the type of vision and leadership America needs for the Arctic region.

The administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the region is unfortunate because the Arctic matters a great deal to U.S. national interests. The U.S. is one of only eight countries in the world lucky enough have territory within the Arctic Circle. The region is rich in minerals, wildlife, fish stocks and other natural resources, but the Arctic’s greatest value is geo-political. The region contains an estimated 22 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas deposits. It is where the U.S. shares a maritime border with Russia and a land border with Canada. And it is an area where non-Arctic countries like China and India are getting more and more involved. 

The region is changing physically, as well. Arctic ice is increasingly melting during the summer months. As this continues, new shipping lanes will open, tourism will increase, and natural-resource exploration will expand. 

Dozens of nations now view the Arctic as a region offering tremendous economic opportunities. In fact, countries far away from the Arctic like China, India and Japan are now observer members in the Arctic Council. And their desire to secure a piece of the pie presents new challenges for U.S. interests. To further complicate things, more than 20 different U.S. agencies and bodies on the national, state, local and tribal level already hold sway over at least parts of the Arctic region.

Advancing our national interests through this complex situation requires a thoughtful, comprehensive, and robust strategy. But that’s not what we got last week from the White House.

Its “strategy” document totaled 13 pages (including the title page, foreword and table of contents). It was released, quietly, on a Friday afternoon — apparently in the hope that no one would notice. Compare this to other countries that apparently take the Arctic more seriously: Finland’s Arctic Strategy runs 96 pages; Denmark’s is 59 pages long. 

“Why bother releasing anything at all?” you may ask. Well, the Arctic Council held its bi-annual meeting this week, and Secretary of State John Kerry needed something to hand out, even if it had no substance.

This isn’t a strategy; it’s checking a box. 

The Arctic region is rich in opportunity and challenges. It deserves Washington’s attention and serious thought. That means developing a proper cross-government strategy and providing the resources needed to back that strategy up. 

With hindsight, it is clear that Seward made the right call 146 years ago. At 2 cents an acre, resource-rich Alaska has paid for itself many times over. Thanks to Seward’s vision and leadership, the U.S. is blessed with Alaska and its Arctic territory, and we cannot afford to let the new opportunities opening in the region slip through our hands. For the administration to continue ignoring it would be a folly indeed.

— Luke Coffey is the Margaret Thatcher Fellow in International Relations at the Heritage Foundation.

The early-May release by the Defense Department of its annual report to Congress on China’s military developments is a prime opportunity to reevaluate how the United States frames the future of its security relationship with Beijing. For too long, politicians and pundits of both parties have refused to clearly state the obvious: The U.S. and China are engaged in a long-term peacetime competition with economic, diplomatic and, yes, military components. The sooner Washington begins speaking honestly about our relationship with China, the sooner we’ll have policies that adequately address the challenges facing our two countries.

As China’s economic development continues and its regional aspirations expand, its military modernization has continued apace. This reality, and the necessity of the United States’ remaining a force in Asia-Pacific for the sake of regional stability, makes many in Washington uncomfortable. Indeed, the pressure to refrain from speaking openly about the issue has led some U.S. officials to begin referring to China as a national “Voldermort.”

It’s immensely counterproductive to avoid speaking openly and truthfully about the Sino-American rivalry and its future trajectory. By failing to acknowledge China’s military ambitions and their potential consequences for U.S. interests in the region, American policymakers are choosing timidity when resolute leadership is required.

The reality is this: Over the past decade, China has been developing military capabilities designed to deny the United States access to the waters and airspace of the western Pacific. Through the acquisition of anti-ship ballistic missiles designed to target American aircraft carriers, advanced aircraft capable of hitting U.S. and allied bases around the region, and large numbers of modern submarines, Beijing has clearly signaled its intention to subvert the balance of power that has anchored peace in Asia for six decades, and to do so in ways inimical to American interests.

This is not simply the case of a rising power seeking a military befitting its economic might; rather, China has specifically geared its military development to areas of perceived American weakness with the objective of restricting U.S. action in East Asia.

Speaking clearly about Beijing’s actions and intentions is not a fatalistic acceptance that Sino-American conflict is inevitable, or even likely. Instead, by realistically appraising Chinese intentions, the United States will be better prepared to assess our interests in Asia and act accordingly.

With 80 percent of global trade traveling by sea, a substantial amount of that through the waters of East Asia, allowing the United States to be pushed out of the region is simply unacceptable. American military power, particularly our navy, has ensured the peaceful, liberal order that currently predominates in East Asia. As our fleet has slowly atrophied from the nearly 600 ships of the Reagan era to 283 today, the ability of the United States to uphold its obligations and interests around the world has become sorely tested. Even as the Chinese are developing sophisticated systems to target our perceived vulnerabilities, the U.S. is expected to experience major shortfalls in areas from attack submarines and surface combatants to Air Force long-range bombers. Understanding, and speaking clearly about, our interests in Asia and the challenges we face is critical to fixing the military gaps we have incurred over the last decade.

The Pentagon’s latest report on Chinese military modernization is an excellent opportunity for leaders in both parties to begin the process of speaking honestly about the China challenge. Our future relations with China are not preordained. Sound policy based on American strength and rooted in longstanding American interests is achievable only through recognition that China is a long-term competitor of the United States across a range of areas, including the military. The sooner we are comfortable admitting this fact, the better our chances of marshalling the resources to maintain a free and prosperous Asia.

— J. Randy Forbes represents Virginia’s fourth congressional district and is co-chairman of the Congressional China Caucus and chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.