In a week that featured a terrorist attack in Ottawa, a new Ebola patient and axe attack (likely terrorist) in New York, and another White House fence jumper, it is possible to miss District Judge Reggie Walton’s dismissal of a Tea Party suit against the IRS.

The suit was filed by True the Vote, a Texas nonprofit, one of a number of Tea Party groups whose nonprofit status was conveniently delayed until after the 2012 presidential election. Walton dodged the underlying issue—political targeting by a federal agency—by noting that, since the IRS had eventually granted True the Vote nonprofit status, there was no ongoing harm. Walton found that the IRS has taken “remedial steps to address the alleged behavior” and thus the case should be dismissed because there is no “actual, ongoing controversy” to be addressed. True the Vote was given nonprofit status in September of last year.

True the Vote issued a statement to Breitbart:

"We are stunned by today's judgment. The notion that the IRS can target Americans for years because of their political beliefs is reprehensible.  The Court acknowledges in its opinion that the IRS did in fact target True the Vote for our perceived political beliefs, but then it holds that neither the agency nor the individual IRS agents or officers are responsible for this unconstitutional conduct. Right now, we are considering all legal options and will announce our next steps very soon."

True the Vote, however, maintained that the IRS had cost them money through “numerous unnecessary, burdensome, and unlawful requests.”

Since I am not a lawyer, I won’t comment on Walton’s ruling.

However, I do want to make sure you see Heritage legal analyst Hans von Spakovsky’s take on the ruling:

Unfortunately for the American taxpayer, this decision and the prior case law cited by Walton really leaves taxpayers targeted by IRS officials without an effective remedy against those officials. Walton is certainly correct that there is a court remedy for organizations that have been improperly denied tax-exempt status or had their application delayed that allows a federal court to overrule the IRS.

Section 6103 ought to be amended by Congress to ban the improper “acquisition” of information by the IRS, and the law prohibiting Bivens actions for damages against individual IRS employees who engage in unconstitutional, partisan and biased behavior ought to be changed, too. Otherwise, there is nothing to deter employees like Lois Lerner from engaging in the same type of misbehavior again in this or a future administration.

While the IRS might correct such behavior by publicly renouncing it, the employees who engage in wrongdoing can retire and collect their pension or simply get transferred to another office or division within the IRS and keep getting their salary paid by the same American taxpayers they have wronged. And that is wrong.

Meanwhile, the administration is delaying Hill testimony on the missing emails of disgraced IRS official Lois Lerner, the key figure (so far) in the targeting scandal, until after the midterms.