A professor from Syracuse University filed papers in US District Court last week, contending that the Bush Administration stopped complying with a court order directed at the IRS since 1976. The court order required the IRS to disclose detailed tax enforcement data. You know, the kind of data that tells the public whether the IRS is going after more poor people or more rich people.
LINK
Syracuse University Professor Susan B. Long said in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle late last week that
since Nov. 1, 2004, the Internal Revenue Service has violated a 1976 court order requiring the release of the data.
IRS spokesman Terry Lemons responded Friday, "We do not believe we are in violation of the court order."
Long, who has researched and written about federal tax administration for more than 30 years, used the Freedom of Information Act to win the court order in 1976 directing the revenue agency to provide her regularly with its data on criminal investigations, tax collections, the number and hours devoted to audits by income level and taxpayer category and other enforcement records.
Interesting, isn't it? Don't you think this comes within the President's declared powers: restricting access to data on tax enforcement actions? Doesn't that fit in nicely with illegal eavesdropping?
TRAC has used the records to report in 2000 that the Clinton administration was auditing poor people at a higher rate than rich people and in 2004 that business and corporate audits were down substantially and criminal tax enforcement was at an all-time low. TRAC also reported that in fiscal 2002-2004 IRS audited on average only a third of the largest corporations, which control 90 percent of all corporate assets and 87 percent of all corporate income.
The 1976 court order listed 38 types of IRS reports, including five produced quarterly, that Long was entitled to receive "promptly" and regularly under the Freedom of Information Act. The court said IRS must continue to make the same statistical data contained in the listed reports available without charge in future years "regardless of the format ... hereafter compiled."
Despite filing regular FOIA requests for the material, the last data Long received arrived Nov. 1, 2004 and covered only the first six months of fiscal year 2004, through March, 2004, she said in an interview.
"They really shut down access," she said. Although the original court order covers some data compiled every three months, Long said in recent years she had shifted mainly to requesting annual data compilations.
But when IRS stopped releasing the data, Long shifted first to six-month, then nine-month, and finally monthly requests "because that's how they compile that data" -- all without success.
Now, after providing this data for many years, the IRS suddenly asserts it "cannot find" the papers describing which data the professor should be allowed to access.
Lemons said "the IRS continues to provide annual data to TRAC -- just as it has done for years." As evidence he cited a report TRAC issued in April 2005, but that report only contained data through March 2004, which is the last data set Long said she received.
Lemons acknowledged the court order "is still in effect. Nobody disputes that." But he said the agency cannot find copies of the reports from the 1970s listed in the court order to determine exactly which data Long is entitled to. She replied that record retention rules require IRS to keep historical copies of its manual, which describes each record.
Honestly, folks, I'm not a tin-foil hat type. But, sheesh... the president admits to illegal eavesdropping; he orders the illegal kidnapping and torture of suspects, rather than going through courts of law; he openly abrogates international treaties and conventions; he wants (renewed) authority to snoop through library loan lists, medical and business records, financial reports - all without ever disclosing the searches; he asserts his right to torture 'enemy combatants'; and now the IRS wants to hide the data about who they are targeting with enforcement efforts.
Doesn't this start to be just the least bit spooky?
Is Congress going to assert its authority and reign him in, as Noah Feldman asserts is needed in the January 8 issue of the New York Times magazine? LINK (subscription required)
The stakes of the debate could hardly be higher: nothing is more basic to the operation of a constitutional government than the way it allocates power. Yet in an important sense, the debate is already long over. By historical standards, even the Bush administration's critics subscribe to the idea of a pre-eminent president. Administrative agencies at the president's command are widely understood to be responsible for everything from disaster relief to drug approval to imposing clean-air standards; and the president can unleash shock and awe on his own initiative. Such "presidentialism" seems completely normal to most Americans, since it is the only arrangement most of us have ever known.
It is customary, when making a plea on behalf of Congress, to give the legislature special consideration because it is the branch originally designed to represent the people. But this is not wholly justified: after all, nowadays the people directly elect the president, and the politicization of Supreme Court nominations ensures a fair amount of popular input into the composition of the court. It is also not certain that a rejuvenated Congress would be more effective in supervising the president than the Supreme Court. The real reason, then, to hope that Congress will resurrect its lost powers is that the balance of powers remains, as the framers thought, the best guarantor of liberty in a constitutional government. The basic fact of presidential power is now irreversible. No one denies that a strong executive is needed to respond to the threat of terrorism. But this just means that the presidency requires greater vigilance than ever to prevent violations of liberty.
No court alone can do the job of protecting liberty from the exercise of executive power. For that most important of tasks, the people's elected representatives need to be actively involved. When we let them abdicate this role, the violations start to multiply, and we get the secret surveillance and the classified renditions and the unnamed torture that we all recognize as un-American. Our Constitution has changed enormously over the last two centuries, and it is sure to change much more in the future. Just how it changes, though, is up to us.
Or ...
Do we just snooze through this and more, until we wake up with neither civil rights, nor knowledge about what the president is doing in our name...? It is a question I never thought I'd ask. It is something I cannot even contemplate. But, here and there exist plenty of hints and signs that we'd better start worrying - and making our voices heard!