I’ve blogged several times (here and here) on the need to keep our focus on the larger issue—big government—raised by the IRS scandal.
I’m afraid that Rich Lowry has made the point much better:
It is appropriate that the worst scandal of the Obama administration – the IRS targeting of conservatives – is a scandal of administrators and bureaucrats, of otherwise faceless people endowed with immense power over their fellow citizens and running free of serious oversight from elected officials.
They are the shock troops of the vast bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government. Its growth has been one of President Obama’s chief goals, and the one he has had the most success in achieving. He has greatly enhanced the reach and power of regulatory agencies that are an inherent offense against self-government, even when they aren’t enforcing the law in a biased way.
The administration’s corruption isn’t bags of cash or lies about interns; it is the distortion of our form of government by sidestepping democratic procedures and accountability and vesting authority in bureaucrats. The administrative state is, fundamentally, the Lois Lerner state.
It’s interesting that former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman made more public visits to the White House than any Obama Cabinet member. (The Daily Caller’s chart on White House visits is fascinating: Shulman visited more than Eric Holder, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Kathleen Sebelius.)
When asked before a congressional committee about the visits, Shulman said sarcastically that he had been to the White House Easter egg hunt. Prediction: Shulman will live to regret this bon mot.
The reply shows that Shulman really doesn’t see the need to answer questions from a mere elected official. He doesn’t see himself as somebody accountable to the rest of us.
We need to deal with out of control bureaucracy now, before the Shulmans and Lois Lerners have even more power over our daily lives.