Confirming a new attorney general is near the top of the new Senate’s to-do list. The power not to confirm the president’s nominees is near the top of the Republicans’ new consignment of political clout. Needless to say, without the White House, the GOP can’t implement their preferred policies, but they can use the confirmation process for quid pro quos. They should focus on the president’s AG nominee, Loretta Lynch, and they should refuse to confirm her until she commits to appointing a Special Prosecutor to investigate the IRS.
So long as the Justice Department is controlled by the Obama administration, it’s going to obstruct any investigation that might embarrass the White House. So the Republican Senate can hold hearings—on Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the keeping-your-doctor fiasco, the outing of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan (remember that?), and any other cover-up it’s inclined to try to unravel. But the IRS’s persecution of Americans of a particular political stripe is far and away the most important scandal of the bunch. It’s the defining corruption of the era.
Requiring Lynch to promise a full investigation, headed by a special prosecutor, has ironclad precedent. In 1973, the Senate Judiciary Committee threatened to reject the appointment of Elliot Richardson unless he appointed Archibald Cox as a Watergate special prosecutor. Richardson was confirmed as attorney general on May 25, 1973; a week before that, on May 18, it was announced that “Attorney General-designate Elliot L. Richardson” had appointed Cox, and agreed, per the Judiciary Committee’s demands, to give him “an unprecedented degree of independence from Federal interference and influence in investigating and prosecuting the case,” according to a contemporaneous report in the Harvard Crimson. (Richardson was a Harvard alumnus.)
As things stand, the Republican caucus is gearing up to grill Lynch on immigration; enforcement of immigration law is expected to be her principal litmus test. Which is fine, but ultimately, the executive amnesty is going to be decided by the courts, and in the short term, the IRS targeting is more important. The emails of six IRS employees have gone missing. Thanks to a lawsuit and a court order, some of those “lost” emails have been recovered. The Senate should decline to confirm a new attorney general until it’s been assured that every one of the remaining lost emails is going to be found, and that the corruption at the IRS is finally going to receive the scrutiny it deserves.
