Citizens United: The IRS Scandal's Smoking Gun?
...Obama used his 2010 State of the Union address to insult the conservative justices to their face and threaten an end-run around Citizens United by legislation or executive order, an assault cheered on by congressional Democrats. True to his word, the president tried to choke off corporate spending with the Disclose Act, a hyperpartisan travesty designed to identify political "enemies" for harassment from the left while giving unions a pass. It failed in the Senate.
No longer able to wield the FEC as a partisan sword, and frustrated by his inability to stifle conservative speech with his shiny new law, Obama set about denouncing conservatives as enemies of democracy, while Democratic Senators bombarded the IRS with letters demanding a regulatory crackdown against the Tea Party and other right-wing extremists.
Obama and the Democrats got their wish, but now their bad behavior has come back to haunt them. In the wake of the IRS targeting scandal, the Citizens United saga looks for all the world like brass-knuckle Chicago politics. Worse, because they obviously shared the partisan objective of stifling anti-Obama campaign speech, the bad guys at the IRS and the White House-led Citizens United "resistance" are politically joined at the hip
Like the IRS harassment campaign that replaced it, FEC suppression of political speech relied on uncertainty, intimidation, and delay to work the administration's political will. This was not lost on the court. Citizens United pointed an accusing finger directly at the White House, warning against the chilling of political speech by "uncertainty caused by the litigating position of the Government."
The mechanism for regulatory abuse was the very case-by-case approach demanded by the administration and defended by Stevens....
IRS's Lerner Had History of Harassment, Inappropriate Religious Inquiries at FEC
Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency's growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct....
...The trouble with this defense is that, prior to joining the IRS, Lerner's tenure as head of the Enforcement Office at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was marked by what appears to be politically motivated harassment of conservative groups....
