Any lingering doubts that President Obama has no interest in stopping political targeting by the IRS of conservative, Tea Party and evangelical nonprofit advocacy groups were obliterated by the Nov. 26 announcement that the federal tax agency is moving to suffocate political speech on a much wider scale. The tools for this expanded effort are proposed rules implementing detailed regulation of the activities of 501(c)(4) advocacy groups by the same IRS bureaucrats who for three years have been harassing political groups on the Right. The ghosts of presidents John Adams and Woodrow Wilson — enforcers, respectively, of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Sedition Act of 1918 — must be dancing in the White House.

As bad as both of those disreputable laws were — dozens of people, including journalists, went to jail because of them — what Obama and the IRS are doing today is far more dangerous. That is because, whereas the previous outrages against the First Amendment and political speech at least had the imprimatur of Congressional majorities that approved them, the proposed IRS rules now being considered will erect a web of regulations that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court would likely approve. Laws can be repealed, but, short of congressional defunding, it is all but impossible to force federal bureaucrats to pull back from regulations that justify their jobs.