The ‘Independent’ Revenue Service President Obama Has a Strange View of IRS Political Accountability.
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One notable aspect of the Internal Revenue Service scandal is President Obama’s strange view of accountability within the executive branch. In his Monday remarks addressing the targeting of conservative groups for tax-exempt scrutiny, Mr. Obama declared that the IRS is “an independent agency.”
In his press briefing after the story broke on Friday, White House press secretary Jay Carney hit the same note. “The IRS is an independent enforcement agency with only two political appointees,” he said.
The IRS is many things, but “independent” isn’t one of them. It is formally part of the Treasury Department and is headed by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, who is appointed by the President. The Commissioner is accountable to the President reporting through the Treasury Secretary.
The White House has also been at pains to stress that former Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who told Congress in 2012 that there had been no targeting of political groups, was appointed by George W. Bush. So the Commissioner is accountable to the President, as long as he’s the former President? Or what?
This attempt to distance Mr. Obama from any control of the IRS is especially rich in light of the Administration’s recent attempts to bend other genuinely independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to its will via non-recess recess appointments. The Administration is currently petitioning the Supreme Court to hear its appeal of the D.C. Circuit’s decision declaring its NLRB recess appointments unconstitutional.
So let’s look at how the U.S. legal code describes the varying standards of Presidential “accountability”: The IRS Commissioner “may be removed at the will of the President.” A labor board member “may be removed by the President, upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.” At the CFPB, the President “may remove the Director for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The IRS job is not like the other two.
Congress gave the President the power to hire and fire the IRS chief precisely to ensure that the tax authority is politically accountable. By claiming the IRS is “independent,” Mr. Obama is trying to rewrite the lines of accountability to spare himself, even as he demands for public soundbite purposes that any culprits be held “fully accountable.” In any case it’s hardly reassuring if the politicized tax enforcement was done by career bureaucrats. This would mean such abuses are embedded in IRS enforcement culture.
The White House says Mr. Obama only learned of the IRS political abuses from news reports. Funny, that’s also how they learned about the Justice Department seeking the phone records of the Associated Press. And who knows what the State Department or “the intelligence community” was up to on Benghazi. The Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso joked on Twitter that “Seal Team 6 is the only govt agency that acts directly on Obama’s behalf.” All others are run by career officials who keep screwing up. Your “independent” government at work.
A version of this article appeared May 15, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The ‘Independent’ Revenue Service.
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