The federal government made official in recent days what conservatives have known for years: Conservative groups were not just inconvenienced but illegally harmed when Lois Lerner and others at the Internal Revenue Service targeted and harassed them for several years beginning in 2010.
Some 100 conservative groups have begun to receive settlement checks in recent days to counter damages they suffered from illegal IRS targeting. The checks averaging $14,000 probably don’t come close to making up for the harm the groups suffered, and they surely don’t punish the IRS scofflaws (the money comes not from them but from the Treasury). They do, however, signify a real value for political speech rights and a recognition that government should pay when it abuses fundamental liberties.
“Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views,” wrote Judge Raymond Kethledge for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. “No citizen — Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian — should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds.”
With those opening sentences, the judges roundly rejected the IRS’ challenge to a lower-court decision ordering it to pay the damages. Kethledge and his colleagues noted that the IRS’ own inspector general determined that “the IRS used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by so-called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the Inspector General called ‘unnecessary information.’”
What the IRS did amounts to at least a minor form of tyranny. It also effectively sidelined some of those groups for the 2010 or 2012 elections, perhaps changing the outcome of discrete political races — and perhaps with public policy consequences that can never be proved but can easily be imagined.
Alas, it seems unlikely that anybody will ever see the morally satisfying occurrence of “perp walks,” as one conservative group leader suggested, for Lerner and her colleagues. But the overwhelming judicial smackdown against IRS officials, from multiple courts, should send a message that bureaucrats must not be autocrats.
Let’s hope more government officials learn it. And let’s hope that if they don’t, more judges will be willing to crack down, perhaps even harder, to keep them in line.
