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In March 22, 2012, then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified before a House Ways & Means subcommittee that there was no targeting of Tea Party groups for special scrutiny by the agency.

"We've seen some recent press allegations that the IRS is targeting certain Tea Party groups across the country -- requesting owners' documents requests, delaying approval for tax-exempt status and that kind of thing," Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana observed during the Q&A portion of the hearing. "Can you elaborate on what's going on with that? Can you give us assurances that the IRS is not targeting particular groups based on political leanings?"

Shulman's answer is worth considering at length, because it helps explain what otherwise seems a mystifying denial. It's all about the culture of the IRS and what its more general approach to people is. His reply:

Thanks for bringing this up because I think there's been a lot of press about this and a lot of moving information, so I appreciate the opportunity to clarify. First, let me start by saying, yes, I can give you assurances. As you know, we pride ourselves on being a non-political, non-partisan organization. I am the only -- me and our chief counsel -- are the only presidential appointees, and I have a five-year term that runs through presidential elections, just so we will have none of that kind of political intervention in things that we do.

For 501 (c)(4) organizations, which is what's been in the press, organizations do not need to apply for tax exemption. Organizations can actually hold themselves out as 501 (c)(4) organizations and then file a 990 with us.

The organizations that have been in the press are all ones that are in the application process.

First of all, I think it's very important to emphasize that all of these organizations came in voluntarily.

They did not need to engage the IRS in a back-and-forth.

They could have held themselves out, filed a 990, and if we had seen an issue, we would have engaged but otherwise we wouldn't....

And so what's been happening has been the normal back-and-forth that happens with the IRS. None of the alleged taxpayers and obviously I can't talk about individual taxpayers and I'm not involved in these -- are in an examination process.

They're in an application process which they moved into voluntarily.

There is absolutely no targeting.

In short, according to the IRS, if you're minding your own business and the agency decides to go after you or your group about your taxes -- for an examination or an audit -- you've been targeted. But if you apply for your group to be a tax-exempt one and your application gets sat on for more than a year or you receive a flurry of excessive and/or illegal information requests, that's not targeting. That's what former acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller, speaking at a new Ways & Means hearing, on Friday called "horrible customer service."

To a layperson, the semantic parsing over whether the Tea Party-type groups were targeted or not seems astonishing. Republican Rep. Tom Reed, a self-described "country lawyer from upstate New York," said the burgeoning scandal should be called "IRS Targeting-gate."

But if you look closely at Shulman's answer, it's clear that from an inside-the-agency perspective, it's hard to conceive of the tiny part of the massive national organization that involves review of voluntary requests for evaluation performing a targeted intervention, since the IRS does not require the groups to file such requests, and did not ask them to do it.

Such a way of defining targeting doesn't make any sense from a lay perspective -- but Shulman's more than year-old answer reveals a lot about the IRS perspective on the world and the agency's general level of power.

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"What kicked off the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party groups?"

Sean Higgins of the Washington Examiner raises an interesting question. "The Treasury Department's Inspector General apparently knows but the rest of us cannot. His report on the scandal includes three timelines of events, but in each case, the first item in the timeline has been redacted."

"The mystery date was apparently February 25, 2010," he concludes from reading the reports. "...The reference to February in both appendixes indicates something particularly noteworthy happened then in the evolution of the IRS's policy. What was it?"

On the theory that media reports might have been involved (since the agency says media reports led to the end of the special scrutiny of Tea Party and other conservative groups in February 2012), I went back and read through some of the national newspaper coverage on the Tea Party groups in mid-to-late February of 2010.

There was a big David Barstow piece in the New York Times on Feb. 12, 2010, examining the political aspirations of Tea Party and other groups: "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right." Within the first five paragraphs, it mentions the Tea Party, the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots, Friends for Liberty, Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, described as "a new player in a resurgent militia movement." As the Times described it:

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

Loose alliances like Friends for Liberty are popping up in many cities, forming hybrid entities of Tea Parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal -- a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain....

The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What's more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party. (emphasis added)

It's a really long and interesting piece, and worth a read as a reminder of what the Tea Party movement looked like earlier in its development, when it was a more fiery force.

What else happened in February 2010? The first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., featuring a major speech by Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee. The New York Times lede on that story, published on Feb. 6: "As Sarah Palin left the stage at the inaugural National Tea Party Convention here Saturday night, the crowd erupted into chants of 'Run Sarah Run!'" The headline? "Palin Assails Obama at Tea Party Meeting." More suggestions of active electoral political activity.

And then this caught my eye.

On February 23, 2010, Robert Wright, writing for the Times' Opinionator blog, looked at "The First Tea Party Terrorist?" His column on the Andrew Joseph Stack incident is chilling in retrospect and in light of the IRS's subsequent decision to begin sorting exemption applications for groups with "Tea Party, "Patriot" "9/12" and other conservative buzzwords in their names for referral to a specialist.

On February 18th, Stack had flown a small airplane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, killing himself and IRS agent Vernon Hunter and injuring 13 on the ground. Stack left behind a six-page rant against the federal government and the IRS. His conclusion: "I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."

Readers took issue with Wright's description of Stack as a Tea Party type, leading to him to update the column to note: "When I said in this column that you could in principle follow my logic to conclude that Joseph Stack was a Tea Party terrorist, I should have added the explicit reminder that this logic depended on accepting the somewhat squishy definition of 'Tea Party' ideology that, I argue, is appropriate given the still-inchoate nature of the movement." Frank Rich later took issue with Wright (who, full disclosure, blogged for TheAtlantic.com in 2012), arguing that "Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a 'Tea Party terrorist.'" But writers from other media outlets also piled on, according to a roundup published in the National Review Online, connecting Stack and the growing Tea Party and anti-government movement.

"After reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we're hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement," wrote Jonathan Capeheart of the Washington Post in a blog item. According to a piece on Fox News:

Joseph Stack, the 53-year-old software engineer who crashed his small plane into a seven-story office building in Austin, Texas, was part of a growing, violent anti-tax and anti-government movement that has become increasingly alarming to law enforcement agencies.

Stack, who torched his home Thursday morning before setting out on his suicide flight, was fueled by his hatred of the Internal Revenue Service, which had offices and employed nearly 200 workers in the building.

Stack was not a member of his local group, the Austin Tea Party Patriots, as its founders repeatedly tried to make clear in February 2010. 

We don't know what led the IRS to begin looking more closely at Tea Party groups and the conservative anti-government movement. But if you want to know how the Tea Party and the IRS and electoral politics were being discussed in February 2010, there's your answer.

The Treasury Inspector General report on the IRS mishandling of conservative advocacy group applications for tax exempt status between March 2010 and February 2012 was released Tuesday, and it is a doozy.

The report, conveniently titled "Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review" -- in case you had any question as to its conclusions -- points the finger at "ineffective management" as the cause of the improper selection of groups using the words "Tea Party," "Patriot" and "9/12" for additional review and questioning.

The report fills in some important blanks in our knowledge about how the groups were selected and how their applications were managed. Most intriguing to me is the apparent case of this one guy in an office in Cincinnati who sat on the selected applications for 13 months because he or she was waiting for assistance from the Washington, D.C., office, which took forever to arrive. Talk about your bureaucratic cul-de-sacs!

Follow along with me. The report summary states that "Although the processing of some applications with potential significant political campaign intervention was started soon after receipt, no work was completed on the majority of these applications for 13 months. This was due to delays in receiving assistance from the Exempt Organizations function Headquarters office."

It wasn't until "[m]ore than 20 months after the initial case was identified" that "processing the cases began in earnest."

Let's look at that more closely. The report states that:

The Determinations Unit developed and used inappropriate criteria to identify applications from organizations with the words Tea Party in their names. These applications (hereafter referred to as potential political cases)(13) were forwarded to a team of specialists (14) for review. Subsequently, the Determinations Unit expanded the criteria to inappropriately include organizations with other specific names (Patriots and 9/12) or policy positions. While the criteria used by the Determinations Unit specified particular organization names, the team of specialists was also processing applications from groups with names other than those identified in the criteria.

The Determinations Unit is based in Cincinnati. Later, the report gets more specific about what happened to the tagged applications: "The team of specialists stopped working on potential political cases from October 2010 through November 2011, resulting in a 13-month delay, while they waited for assistance from the Technical Unit."

The Technical Unit was based out of the Exempt Organizations main office in Washington, according to the report.

This is where it gets into facepalm territory. Footnote 14 earlier tells us that this "team" of specialists that stopped working on potential cases was just one guy.

(14) Initially, the team consisted of one specialist, but it was expanded to several specialists in December 2011. The EO function referred to this team as the advocacy team.

So basically, according to the IG report, a substantial portion of the delay in processing the improperly selected cases came about because they were sent for review to a team consisting of one guy, who then had to wait more than a year for help on them from the main office.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why people hate the government.

***

You can read the full IG report online here.

Are the AP snooping, Benghazi, and IRS scandals about to destroy Obama's second term? Not really—because hyperpartisanship in Washington had already stalled the president's agenda and put the 113th Congress on track to become another one of the young 21st century's already-legendary do-nothing bodies.

Most of what a president can accomplish takes place early in a term. But as Republican communications pros are fond of reminding reporters, Obama's second term was already off to a rocky start.

Gun control already failed.
The major reason the Toomey-Manchin bill to expand background checks failed was distrust of the federal government. That's not going to change. The IRS and AP scandals will no doubt worsen distrust of the federal government, especially in circles already prone to such sentiments and make it harder for members of Congress to withstand gun-lobby pressure. But the important thing to remember is that every major gun proposal before the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate already failed at a time when the political winds were as favorable to such reforms as they have been in more than a decade. And none of those proposals ever had a shot in the U.S. House.

Budget negotiations already failed.
The sequester was supposed to be a budgetary approach so stupid no one would ever allow it to be implemented, and yet here we are, with the Pentagon planning to furlough 650,000 civilian workers and Head Start and other programs across the country slashing services or putting off planned innovations. Even in the wake of a decisive reelection and while riding a crest of positive national sentiment, the president was unable to come to a grand bargain on revenues and spending with Republican leaders, and so instead we have the sequester, and no sign that Congress is eager to revisit the issue or reverse it. Republican willingness to negotiate with the president was always low, and what remained at the end of his first term seemed to evaporate early in the new year—that is, well before the current scandals.

Obama's appointments were already stalled.
Some worry that the scandals now providing fuel for congressional investigations could weaken the president and embolden his enemies to such an extent that they will prevent his second-term Cabinet from being seated in a timely manner, or as the president might wish. But after the successful Republican opposition to the idea of a Susan Rice nomination to the State Department and the GOP's pre-scandal efforts to thwart or delay the seating of Thomas Perez as Labor Secretary and Gina McCarthy as EPA Administrator, it will be hard to tell the difference if that's the case. The appointments process under Obama has been broken since 2009.

As for the matter of whether the AP scandal will lead to calls for Eric Holder's head, it's worth recalling that the chairman of the Republican National Committee already called for him to resign in December 2011 over the Fast and Furious program, releasing a web ad accusing him of a "cover-up." There may be more calls, but they won't be the first ones.

The implementation of Obamacare was already going to be complicated and rocky.
The period in which a massive new law is implemented is always full of kinks. That was going to be the case no matter what. The one thing that might potentially change in the wake of the IRS scandal is the willingness of Republicans to increase funding for the taxing agency, so that it can oversee the implementation of the tax credits, tax increases, and individual mandate compliance that are a key part of the Affordable Care Act. But given that the Republican-controlled U.S. House has already held 36 votes to repeal Obamacare—a 37th is planned this week—and opponents of the law already contested it all the way up to the level of the Supreme Court, it is not far-fetched to imagine that adequate funding to implement mandate oversight was always going to be a hard sell. As the Fiscal Times reported in an examination of the issue, "long before the current uproar over the IRS scrutiny of these politically motivated groups seeking non-profit status, Republicans were challenging budget and staffing levels at the IRS and demanding to know how much the agency intended to spend to implement Obama's health care reform law."

Republicans have also already refused to appoint people to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, tasked with finding Medicare savings under the health-reform law. Last week, before the AP scandal broke and before the extent of the IRS one came into view, Democratic congressman John Larson of Connecticut predicted that the road ahead would involve "yet another round of obstructionism, another round of hostage-taking and another round of trying to block anything that Obama does."

Immigration reform was always going to be a difficult bill to pass.
The best chance for Obama to enact a major domestic priority this year involves the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill, which revives the goal of providing undocumented immigrants with a pathway to citizenship. Attempts at comprehensive immigration reform have failed over and over since Reagan's 1986 "amnesty" bill, leading the Washington Post's Rachel Weiner to conclude in January, "if immigration reform succeeds, it will go against a quarter-century of political history."

Circumstances are more auspicious today than they were during the 2004-07 failed reform attempt period, but the Republican split on immigration is not something that will be resolved or erased by a new round of scandal investigations in the House. Republicans need to solve—or at least mitigate—their problems with Hispanic voters in order to have a shot at the White House in the years ahead, and the Washington leadership of the party knows this. That is a fact on the ground, as will be Hispanic anger if immigration reform and the fate of 11 million undocumented people fall victim to Republican opposition to the president thanks to Benghazi, the AP records snoop, or what went on in 2010 at the IRS division that reviews tax-exempt organizations. And yet there is also—already—substantial Republican resistance to a comprehensive bill, especially when it comes to questions like gay and lesbian immigration equality. "If the Judiciary Committee tries to redefine marriage in the immigration bill they will lose me and many others," Graham tweeted Monday.

Obama has said he will sign a bill that does not provide for gay and lesbian immigration equality, and ongoing scandal investigations might diminish his negotiating power on that front. But a much more significant factor than administration scandals when it comes to the fate of gays in the immigration reform bill will be the Supreme Court decisions, expected in late June, on two gay marriage cases.

In short, those who wondered why Obama seemed so singularly unenthusiastic about the prospect of a second term while in the midst of running for it now have their answer. Because it looks like this. Because despite optimistic rhetoric about how the 113th Congress would be different from the 112th, which was the least productive Congress since the 1940s, the likelihood was that it was always going to look like this.

A report in Roll Call in March 2012 revealed that leading members of Congress not only were aware that the Internal Revenue Service had begun investigating the political activity of would-be 501(c)4 Tea Party groups that winter, but showed to what an extent members of Congress had been actively putting pressure on the agency to take a closer look at tax-exempt conservative organizations in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. Reported Janie Lorber in 2012:

Tea party outrage over a spate of IRS letters to conservative groups has revived a long-standing dispute over the agency's controversial role in policing politically active nonprofits.

In January, the IRS began sending extensive questionnaires to organizations applying for nonprofit status as part of a broader project to understand whether social welfare organizations—which are not required to disclose their donors—are actually acting as political committees.

Campaign finance reform groups and lawmakers in both parties have repeatedly demanded that the IRS examine the activities of tax-exempt advocacy groups, which proliferated during the 2010 cycle and are on pace to play an even larger role in 2012.

Democrats, whose affiliated outside groups have lost the fundraising race to Republican organizations this year, have been particularly vocal, sending repeated letters to the agency requesting an investigation. On Wednesday, Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) asked his colleagues in Congress to sign yet another.

Peter Welch is a Democratic congressman from Vermont and sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by California Republican Darrell Issa. Welch's March 2, 2012 letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman explicitly called on the IRS to crack down on 501(c)(4)s:

We write to urge the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate whether any groups qualifying as social welfare organizations under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code are improperly engaged in political campaign activity.

Congress created a tax break for nonprofit social welfare organizations because communities across our country benefit greatly from their important work. It is clearly contrary to the intent of Congress for organizations supporting a candidate for office or running attack ads against a candidate to receive taxpayer support intended for legitimate nonprofit groups...

We strongly urge you to fully enforce the law and related court rulings that clearly reserve 501(c)(4) tax status for legitimate nonprofit organizations. And we urge you to investigate and stop any abuse of the tax code by groups whose true mission is to influence the outcome of federal elections.

In a statement accompanying the letter, Welch's office urged the IRS to "investigate whether nonprofit 501(c)(4) organizations affiliated with Super PACs—such as Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-backed group spending millions of dollars in campaigns across the country—are in violation of federal law and IRS regulations."

Issa, for his part, sent a letter on March 27, 2012 in concert with Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio, who sits on House Oversight and chairs its Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, asking the agency to look into the Tea Party group complaints about excessive information requests.

"Over the past several weeks the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sent many organizations, operating under tax exempt status, lengthy and detailed questionnaires," Issa and Jordan wrote to Lois Lerner, the director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the IRS, footnoting the above Roll Call story and a report in CNSNews as their sources. "These questionnaires ask for information well beyond the scope of typical disclosures required under IRS Form 1024....[S]everal experts suggest these recent IRS questionnaires exceed appropriate scrutiny."

"Moreover," they added, "the IRS must apply the same criteria for all organizations applying for tax exempt status. News reports, however, indicate that the IRS efforts lack balance, with conservative organizations being the target of the IRS's heightened scrutiny efforts."

A group of 12 Republican U.S. Senators on March 14, 2012 also complained to the IRS about the handling of the Tea Party and other conservative groups. "We have received reports and reviewed information from nonprofit civic organizations in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas concerning recent IRS inquiries perceived to be excessive," they wrote Commissioner Shulman. "It is critical that the public have confidence that federal tax compliance efforts are pursued in a fair, even-handed, and transparent manner—without regard to politics of any kind. To that end, we write today to seek your assurance that this recent string of inquiries has a sound basis in law and is consistent with the IRS's treatment of tax-exempt organizations across the spectrum."

Signatories on the letter included Orrin Hatch (Utah), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), and Rand Paul (Ky.).

Outside groups had been calling on the IRS to investigate non-profits—and especially nonprofit 501(c)(4) groups run by Republican political operatives—since at least the fall of 2011. The "IRS said examining the tax status of 501(c)4 political entities would be a priority for 2012," the Wall Street Journal reported in June 2012, noting that the agency was "taking initial steps to examine whether Crossroads GPS, a pro-Republican group affiliated with Karl Rove, and similar political entities are violating their tax-exempt status by spending too much on partisan activities."

Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, called on the IRS in 2010 to investigate tax-exempt groups, writing the IRS commissioner that September to request that the agency "survey major 501(c)(4), (c)(5) and (c)(6) organizations involved in political campaign activity to examine whether they are operated for the organization's intended tax exempt purpose and to ensure that political campaign activity is not the organization's primary activity." He said his request was prompted by news reports about the organizing efforts of conservative groups.

"Possible violation of tax laws should be identified as you conduct this study," Baucus wrote. "Please report back to the Finance Committee as soon as possible with your findings and recommended actions regarding this matter."

On Monday, Baucus announced plans to hold a Senate Finance Committee hearing into Friday's fresh round of revelations that the IRS had targeted conservative 501(c)4 groups.

According to a draft inspector general's audit obtained by the New York Times, the agency use of "tea party" as a key word to scrutinize applicants for tax-exempt status dated to March 2010 and continued through February 2012, when the Tea Party groups began to raise a public outcry.