Bush Administration Continues Assault on Lawful Society

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!

•  Recommended!

  Yet another example of Bush doing whatever the heck he wants and hoping no one notices, and moving heaven and earth to STOP anyone from noticing.

  I swear, there is no floor, no bottom line, nothing this administration will not sink to that they don't sink lower next.

  The Music Room.

  by madhaus on Sun Jan 08, 2006 at 10:20:21 PM PDT

  •  Thank you!

    I really think someone needs to make a nice long list of all the actions taking place contra-law. It would be a long one already. Then a list like that needs to play on TV around election time - or even better - get publicity ASAP.

    Since we just hear about these piece-meal, it doesn't seem like much - just an interagency dispute or a crank complainer against the US government. But add them all up and under this administration there has been a huge change in complying with the law. They really do have no shame whatsoever. The only thing they respect is:

    Permanent Republican Majority. No matter how corrupt or unprincipled it is.....

    by YucatanMan on Sun Jan 08, 2006 at 10:53:06 PM PDT

•  WELCOME TO OROBOROS

  "When the law breaks the law there is no law."

  Tyranny of Words the Law and the courts.

  America has reach the backside of the event horizon of organised, institutionalised corruption and fraud on every level. Where protection rackets, embezzlement, larceny, confiscation, entrapment, misappropriation, and rico crimes, as well as murder have become the norm; by bullies, fraudsters, pervert soul sick class elites, politicians with their sykophants*, lobbys, lawyers of the Kelptomania class who run everything. A litigation nation where truth is treason, justice is a mockery, and liberty is for sale to the highest bidder, where action of the State, arising from suspicion and not from proof, has degenerated into the satisfaction of vendettas by a "coin-operated congress", a "blue-blooded-aristocratic Senate" and finally, a power hungry blood thirsty executive branch- a general system of tyranny, all in the name of "public safety."

  The general public means nothing to them, we have been and are being, carved out like a pumpkin, the seeds spit in our faces, while they laugh at our poverty. "The essential political choice is the same as it always was: "freedom or security" nor, is the blame entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats, and demagogues.
  If a people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name they deserve their slavery. The law has always been perverted to serve the "haves" and not the "haves-not", only not always as heavy handed as it is now. We have made progress in the recent past with "the New Deal", labor unions, civil rights, and the constitution. Only within the last few decades have the ruling elites pushed back, with their hatred of liberal democracy. What once existied in ancient Athens - now hold sway in America and Britain , (it's transatlantic and trans-national now ) where powerful and corrupt individuals, organizations and corporations are routinely using threats of vexatious and malicious litigation to bully and oppress ordinary innocent and working class people.

  Coercion seems to be covering-up greater crimes committed by these individuals / organizations. Their corrupt misuse of Law takes the form of restraint of trade and prevention of free speech, eminent domain, tax cuts for the top 1%, hidden fiat/poll-taxes, money laundering in off shore bankings and usury interests and loans. All nothing more than hypocrisy, hiding behind law.

  Take for instance, What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11.
  I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of other examples but make no mistake, "the Class War" has shifted and started a dramatic new phase of Supernova proportions with the The Rise of Rove's Republic. And the one thing that todays "New America" has in common is the elite stranglehold on Politics, medicine, law, policing, media, bureaucracy etc. where, they are all "self-regulating". Further, and not so coincidentally, all these 'trades' tend, more or less, to control their own incomes at the top levels. [i.e. the fat cats decide their own].

  by thor on Mon Jan 09, 2006 at 02:30:20 AM PDT

•  Yucatanman - well done.

  Thanks for posting about this.  

  Never, never brave me, nor my fury tempt:
    Downy wings, but wroth they beat;
  Tempest even in reason's seat.

  by GreyHawk on Mon Jan 09, 2006 at 04:47:46 AM PDT

•  GOP conspiracy is not a theory

  Add "Criminal" to "Conspiracy" and drop the word "theory" and you have a fine phrase that describes the GOP in the proverbial nutshell.

  Politics is secondary to the fact that our country has changed, drastically, over the last several years. What is that change? It is the unraveling of the American flag thread by thread. It is erasing the Bill of Rights letter by letter. It is, ultimately, about waking up one day and not recognizing this great society as the "America" we know and love.

  georgia10

  Team Bush IS conspiring to eliminate America as we all have known it.

  They have hijacked the country, their whole time in power has been an on-going coup; this issue with tax data is just one small facet of it. Not so much to downplay the significance of it, but to put it in the context of an overall mechanism designed by Team Bush GOP.

  They stole the 2000 election and most likely the last and have worked diligently to make everything but light,air, and your name a state security "secret". They have launched an illegal war, killed uncounted thousands of people, trashed the economy and spied on everybody BUT Osama bin Laden.

  With Cheney now in the hospital with "shortness of breath", Abramoff ready to sing like the K-Street Boys Choir (Gannon sings bass)and Delay having been shot out of the sky, things are looking a bit better, but we are far from "out of the woods".

  What is needed now is MORE INVESTIGATIONS. Stirling Newberry is totally correct:

  [T]he key point which the party must support is investigation. DeLay, Downing Street, Spygate, Treasongate and Abramoff demand no less than an exposure of the corrupt means by which the Republican holds power - these means are the K Street tentacle of a goptopus that has reached into the ballot box, into the tax code, into the bedrooms of Americans, into the phone conversations and emails - to attempt to strangle in the cradle any effective dissent.

  The Democratic Party, as much as I might like it to, cannot yet come to the microphone, as a party, and say: "It is time to impeach" for the simple reason that there is not enough soot blackening the Republicans. People need to know, not just the facts, but the details, they need to feel those details come in battalions. With criminal charges flying they will hear them, they will come to understand that the Republican apparatus depends on bribery to hold its power in place. We know there is smoke, but impeachment is the hose to put out the fire. And Americans will believe in that fire when they see it on the evening news.
  

  And getting all of this stuff paraded on the TV is one of the quickest and surest routes to furthering the downfall of these ugly, criminal motherfuckers.

  by xxdr zombiexx on Mon Jan 09, 2006 at 06:00:35 AM PDT