Political Utility of IRS Story

It appears the Obama’sAttorney General may have signed off on the search warrant targeting Fox News correspondent, James Rosen.  Rosen and twenty reporters at AP had their records seized as a part of an investigation into the leak of national security secrets.  Of the three scandals animating Fox News at this moment, this one is actually troubling.  But more attention is being paid to the other two scandals, for reasons that have little to do with the presenting conflict themselves.  We keep hearing about Benghazi more because it is a pre-emptive strike as a potential Hillary presidential run.   

We are hearing even more about the IRS ‘scandal,’ for at least two other reasons, again rooted less in the presenting conflict itself.  First, any story about hating the intrusive IRS sells the Republican brand, particularly its Tea Party wing.  Second, as buried in an NYT story, making the IRS story salient is a lot more about dampening IRS enforcement of campaign laws in 2014 than it is about what is turning out to be a very mild and complicated illustration of what might be over-reach.

Explaining the second reason requires two steps.  First, as we unpack the presenting conflict and look at the details that do not drive headlines it turns out that some, perhaps many or most, of these Tea Party groups were, in fact, violating campaign finance laws.  This means failing to target them for additional scrutiny would have been a dereliction of duty, not the reverse storyline currently dominating the news.  As this fuller version of the story unfolds, we can then see the following:

“‘Money is not the only thing that matters,’ said Donald B. Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division who is a law professor at Ohio State University. ‘While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.’

The stakes are high for both the I.R.S. and lawmakers in Congress, whose election fortunes next year will hinge in no small part on a flood of political spending by such advocacy groups. They are often favored by strategists and donors not for the tax benefits — they typically not do have significant income subject to tax — but because they do not have to reveal their donors, allowing them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elections without disclosing where the money came from.

The I.R.S. is already separately reviewing roughly 300 tax-exempt groups that may have engaged in improper campaign activity in past years, according to agency planning documents. Some election lawyers said they believed a wave of lawsuits against the I.R.S. and intensifying Congressional criticism of its handling of applications were intended in part to derail those audits, giving political nonprofit organizations a freer hand during the 2014 campaign.”

It appears that the Tea Party groups under scrutiny did not fully understand the relevant legal regulations.  Given what we know about these groups, is that a surprise to anyone?  Or does it surprise anyone that Fox News might go so far as to undermine national security if it created an opportunity to damage President Obama? 

So, it should not be a surprise to anyone that, once we learn more about these conflicts, we discover that the presenting conflict is not the real story.  Beneath it we find a deeper conflict being advanced by amplifying a particular perspective on the presenting conflict.  Seeing this struggle over the scope and salience of individual conflicts is a key to understanding politics.