Trail in IRS scandal leads to Washington

On Sunday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) announced that interviews with Cincinnati-based IRS employees suggest that officials in Washington, D.C. directed their efforts to target conservative and Tea Party groups.  According to Politico, partial transcripts released by Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee don’t refer to a specific individual in Washington, but to the IRS Exempt Organizations office.  That office was headed by Sarah Hall Ingram, who now heads the IRS office charged with implementing the Affordable Care Act as Examiner previously reported.

 

The transcripts released do not refer directly to President Obama, but it was reported last week that the IRS commissioner met with the president 118 times in 2010 and 2011.  According to Investor’s Business Daily, President Bush met with the IRS head only once in four years.  Whatever President Obama knew about the IRS overreach, the scandal fits the pattern of centralized power and disregard for the rule of law present in other Obama Administration brushes with scandal.

 

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http://www.examiner.com/article/rep-issa-irs-scandal-leads-to-washington

Obama’s other legal problems

(Elizabeth Cromwell/Wikimedia)

By now most Americans are familiar with the legal challenges to President Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act.  In March, the Supreme Court heard three days of oral arguments on the constitutionality of the various aspects of the law including the government’s mandate that all Americans must buy health insurance.  Although the Court has not yet ruled on the case, pointed questions from the justices lead many observers to believe that at least part of the law will be struck down.

If the Supreme Court does rule that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, it will not be the first time that the Obama Administration has been chastised by the judicial branch.  Last year, President Obama’s Interior Department was held in contempt for violating a federal judge’s ruling striking down the moratorium on offshore oil drilling imposed after the BP oil spill in 2010.  After the judge ordered the moratorium lifted, the Interior Department continued to refuse to issue drilling permits for months.  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar also imposed onerous safety rules on drilling that the judge ruled were in violation of federal law.

Fast and Furious primer

http://www.wp.mil.pl

The first major scandal of the Obama Administration was not the recent revelation that Obama’s Department of Energy had expedited federal loans to solar panel maker Solyndra for political reasons.  The first scandal came much earlier but received scant attention in the media in spite of spawning a congressional investigation.  Arguably, the first scandal is more important than Solyndra because it involves the deaths of more than 200 Mexican nationals and a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Operation Fast and Furious was a sting set up by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) as part of Project Gunrunner, a long-running program focused on preventing American firearms from being smuggled into Mexico for use by drug cartels.

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http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/fast-and-furious-primer

Why Fast and Furious matters