On Tuesday, while Puerto Rico languishes and a pile of work faces our do-nothing House of Representatives, a hearing commenced to smear John Koskinen, current head of the IRS.
The clip above is a very serious Steve King very seriously questioning very biased witnesses like, for example, colleague and current chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Jason Chaffetz.
Taxpayer resources also went toward making a 10-minute video which was played during the Kangaroo Court conclave proving that the evil IRS discriminated against conservative groups which applied to campaign on the taxpayer's dime.
Elijah Cummings wrote about what a joke this was in an op-ed for The Hill Tuesday morning. After noting that the Inspector General who originally looked into the whines allegations of conservatives was a Bush holdover who nevertheless found no wrongdoing, Cummings eviscerated their claims.
"After holding more than two dozen hearings, squandering more than $20 million, and turning up nothing, Republicans are still hell-bent on pressing forward with this seemingly endless attack against a widely-respected public servant," he wrote.
It goes without saying that they won't let go of this any more than they're going to let go of Benghazi or their Planned Parenthood witchhunt. In their fevered brains, they've planned this since Mitt Romney lost the White House, and they are now in dire need of something -- anything -- to take home to their constituents as proof they're not worthless leeches on the body politic.
Remember, they held weekly meetings about which "scandals" to stir on any given week, and timing was key. Don't go hard on Benghazi too soon, they warned, or it will look like it was purely political.
Which of course, it was.
So, a reminder. True the Vote was the genesis of their claims about the IRS, and True the Vote's Catherine Engelbrecht was suddenly available for any and all press opportunities surrounding the swirling "scandal" that isn't one at all.
Ginni Thomas, Engelbrecht, Breitbart News editors, and heads of conservative non-profits planned this as a way to gum up the works and target the IRS as an evil tool of the Obama administration. As I wrote in 2013:
Catherine Engelbrecht "facilitated" the May 8th Groundswell meeting. Engelbrecht is the president and founder of True the Vote, a Texas group dedicated to challenging voting rights among the poor, students, and minorities. In addition to their regular work attacking sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act via lawsuits, Engelbrecht was the media go-to person for the media on the phony IRS scandal. That story broke on May 9th, after the Benghazi hearings had more or less fizzled out the previous day.
There was wave after wave of headlines about these so-called scandals. Some people wrote about what an awful week the White House had. It wasn't coincidence. It was orchestrated and planned by this group of people, who had the will and the power to secure the participation of people like Darrell Issa, John Boehner and more.
True the Vote led the charge to sue the IRS and serve the highest-profile plaintiff among the "aggrieved" groups. Yet this audio recording shows their president "facilitating" a clearly partisan, right-wing activist group meeting of people who claim to be fighting a "30-front war." No big deal? When is the last time anyone you know could ring up the Speaker of the House and the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee and take a face-to-face meeting in the wee hours of the evening with approval from the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice?
In the first 20 minutes of the meeting, a lot of ground was covered. The audio of the final hour or so is available, but the quality is not clear enough at this time to publish it. However, they helpfully provided handouts at the meeting relating to their voter suppression efforts discussed later on. Here are some highlights from the audio and then parts that came later.
Read on...
For three years now, I've been hammering on this because really, it does matter. Imagine these nuts backing President Hair Drumpf in his quest to conquer the world? For nearly six years, House Republicans have done absolutely nothing but serve their nonprofit -- and now, tax-exempt -- masters.
And that was their plan all along.
