We have been waiting more than a year, since the enactment of welfare reform in August 1996, to congratulate the Republican Congress on a meaningful and clear-cut political victory. Those congratulations are now in order. The three-day Senate Finance Committee hearings on the Internal Revenue Service were a small but unmitigated triumph of congressional authority, conservative agenda-setting, and also — pardon the expression — partisanship. If the GOP interprets this success correctly, the IRS hearings may herald a much-needed revival of party confidence and purpose leading up to next November’s mid-term election.
The first thing to note about these hearings is how little was expected to result from them. Sen. Fred Thompson’s campaign-finance investigation had just about killed off hope that congressional Republicans were capable of using their oversight function coherently to criticize any facet of the public sector. The White House knew this full well, and so it spent an industrious few days before the IRS hearings pre-spinning them as a thuggish ” trash” job on the tax agency: a melodrama of anecdotal hysteria designed with GOP fund-raising in mind. In their opening statements on September 23, a number of Democrats on the Finance Committee echoed this theme. And the president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents IRS agents, was warning reporters outside the hearing room that Republicans were granting lunatics implicit “permission” to commit acts of violence against his membership.
Inside, something very different was happening. Committee chairman Bill Roth of Delaware and his Republican colleagues offered consistently elaborate praise for “most” IRS employees. They heard from a Government Accounting Office expert who testified that the IRS maintains few reliable data on its practices, and cloaks even those in secrecy. So the subsequent evidence did turn out to be largely anecdotal. But these were not your ordinary anecdotes.
On September 24, a retired Roman Catholic priest told how he had been jerked around by the IRS for eight months over an $ 18,000 tax bill he had never actually owed. A construction contractor named Tom Savage told how, over three and a half years, the agency concocted a fictitious partnership between his company and an unrelated, tax-delinquent business and billed him for $ 167,000. A woman named Nancy Jacobs described a 17-year-long ordeal during which the IRS mixed up taxpayer identification numbers and then hit her up for failure to pay someone else’s tax debt.
And then there was Katherine Hicks. You could hear a pin drop in the Senate’s Dirksen office building as she testified. Ms. Hicks struggled with the agency for 13 years, as computer glitches and errant mail notices led to proliferating penalties for a 1983 tax bill sent without her knowledge to a former husband. In February of this year, faced with threatened seizure of her home, and to protect her second husband from financial ruin, she filed for bankruptcy — and divorce.
That did it. Democrats on the panel announced themselves appalled. Peter Jennings called the second-day proceedings “stunning.” Tom Brokaw called them “scary.” A Gallup poll conducted immediately after the hearings reported that a three-to-one majority of Americans had decided the IRS enjoys excessive power — and that 69 percent of respondents believe the agency exercises that power abusively. The Finance Committee was deluged with phone calls, faxes, and letters from ordinary citizens incensed that the federal government could act this way in their name. A follow-up news story in the Washington Post concluded that the hearings” portrait of “egregious” IRS brutality was so convincing as to have rendered questions of GOP partisanship “irrelevant.”
Pretty neat. And it became neater still when the Clinton administration, more surprised than anyone that the Republican party had managed to draw political blood, failed to respond with its customary super-professional eelishness. It actually defended its tax collectors against proposed management reform. “I believe the IRS is functioning better today than it was five years ago,” a huffy President Clinton insisted.
What a gift! The GOP has an actual issue.
For nearly three years, Republicans in Washington have struggled vainly to comprehend their true standing in the American political cosmos. In phase one, made heady with ambition by the electoral success of 1994, they were foolishly convinced that conquest was already complete, that they had only to sack the capital and make off with its legislative treasures. But that pillage was stiffly resisted, and King William eventually smote the invaders with his veto sword, to applause from the peasantry. So in phase two, our Republican heroes wore sackcloth and hid behind a fortress of do-nothing bipartisanship.
The news has been so bad for so long that the GOP is practically desperate for any sign that a third phase might finally be underway. Perhaps, they’re thinking, their IRS show trial is a happy omen. They are right — so long as they see the event for what it was, and embrace the political mission it clearly implies.
Already there are Hill Republicans gone giddy over these particular hearings and intent on using them to advance more sweeping tax reform. Fine, we say. Advance at will. But lest they float all the way back into the phase- one ether, Republicans should remember something basic and inescapable. They are an opposition party. They will remain an opposition party until they retake the White House. And one thing an opposition party must do is oppose. It must manage the system of checks and balances as aggressively as possible. It must support and enforce public scrutiny of executive-branch behavior. It must cry foul whenever fouls are committed.
Heaven knows, in the Clinton administration, there are endless policy and procedural fouls to choose from. Heaven knows, too, it is sorely tempting for the GOP not to make very much of them. That kind of partisan work is so . . . you know, “negative.” But the public must be persuaded about what’s wrong before it will trust the GOP prescription for making it right. And doing that takes meticulous, even repetitive argument. Without it, the more “positive” achievement everyone wishes for will be endlessly delayed.
So, if we are to replace the IRS with a flat tax or a sales tax, there must first be another round of hearings — or two or three or ten. If we are to have a congressional vote next year on ending racial preferences by the federal government, as Newt Gingrich has announced, we must first have a long series of congressional hearings on how those preferences are administered and why they are so malign. There have been such hearings before. There will have to be more.
The list of issues ripe for similar treatment is very long. Is it an irony that the biggest Republican victory in 1997 should have come in the form of an administrative oversight hearing? No. Oversight is important. A conservative Republican future depends on it.
David Tell, for the Editors
