IRS Dirty Tricks And The HHS Mandate

Just in case you’ve forgotten, the Washington Examiner‘s Joel Gehrke shot out a little bulletin with the details.

House investigators say that IRS officials gave confidential taxpayer information to White House aides to help President Obama’s team fight lawsuits filed against the Health and Human Services contraception mandate.

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., confronted the IRS’s Sarah Hall Ingram about emails she exchanged with White House aides about organizations that would qualify for an exemption from the HHS mandate.

“Well, one of the areas of interest is there’s a significant redaction that quotes the statute 6103. Do you know who is underneath that blackout?” Issa asked Ingram, who said she didn’t remember the email.

Issa’s team infers that the redacted information is confidential taxpayer information because of the legal authority the IRS invokes to justify not revealing it to the congressional committee, section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code.

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“The documents indicate that Hall Ingram and her subordinates violated the IRS’s traditional role as an impartial administrator of the tax code by using their expertise and knowledge to advise the White House on a politically controversial subject: the four-prong test for religious exemption to the contraception mandate,” according to a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee statement concerning the emails.

Read it all.

Yet what we are expected to believe is that there is nothing to see here. Move along. Sweep that under the carpet. All is well. This administration is well meaning, and only wants what is best for the American people.

Good faith in our leaders is breaking down all over, these days. Reminds me of the title of a neat little compilation of two short novels by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which you really ought to read (they’re short!): We Never Make Mistakes.

*cough*

Meanwhile, your shepherds are at work to protect rights of conscience while the Administration works to strip them away. And the IRS? They’re looking at the $$$ from fining folks who have the charitable notion of supplying healthcare to the poor for free.