I need to throw a tantrum.
We have at present a fistful of scandal that all revolve around a failure of checks and balances.
Let's start with the IRS.
The media and both sides of the aisle are crying viewpoint discrimination. Everyone seems to agree that these poor helpless (har har) Tea Party activists were unfairly targeted. This is indisputably so, and wholly irrelevant.
Let me make you an analogy. Let's say you and a friend go to a cockfight. You both place the same bet and win. The guy running the cockfight decides he thinks your friend is a Mexican, so he's going to wait two weeks to pay him. What grounds does your friend have to sue for discrimination? Is it not unfair of the guy running the fight to not pay your Mexican friend? Of course it is. But it's all ill gotten gains, and you cannot sue for that, because it is unjust for you to receive them at all.
501(c)4 statute reads "exclusively", not primarily. The IRS has no authority to make the change. This illegal loophole was carved out in 1959. The House Oversight Committee hearings are rapidly turning into a popcorn-worthy partisan fist fight, but the obvious solution to the underlying problem is as swift as it is efficient. Police power lies in the Executive. The IRS answers to the Treasury which is part of the Executive. The whole (c)3/(c)4 debacle could be solved with an executive order, and not even from Obama. Jack Lew could order the IRS to change the regulation to comply with the law. I have no earthly idea why this has not happened.
Then there is the spying hoopla. We discuss whether or not we have privacy. We discuss the partisan implications of the usage and timing of this program. But we have to claim utter stupidity, all of us, to not be fully aware where legal authority for this program came from. It's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. We have seen this movie, we have heard this outrage. Most of the players are even the same on the outrage end of it. Yet what are we doing? Apparently suffering from collective amnesia. Under Bush, we both hated this practice and it was illegal. So rather than leave it be illegal so our government cannot do this thing we all hate, Bush beat Congress into passing FISAA, supposedly legalizing the program.
FISAA does not authorize dragnets. FISAA does not and cannot OK the government shunting the entire internet off into a secret room to snoop through it. FISAA creates secret courts that issue secret warrants which must comply with the Fourth Amendment because they are warrants. Courts must follow the Constitution, and Congress cannot set up a Court that intentionally does not do so. The intent cannot be for the government to be able to say "hey, Verizon, give us everything you got, oh and you can't acknowledge this ever ever." The intent can only be for the the government to be able to say "hey, Verizon, so there's this guy, here's his number, we want all his records, and the records of everyone he's ever called as well, and it's national security so shut up about it." It would appear, however, that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing it was doing in 2007, just with a very thin veneer of legality. If FISA courts are just happily rubber-stamping away on warrants, then either this cannot have been the congressional intent in creating them, or Congress and its members are horribly derelict in their oversight duties.
Now, there are those (Lindsey Graham, I'm looking at you) who say they don't care if the NSA has their number because NSA is "keeping us safe" (and then shriek BENGHAZI!! at the tops of their lungs). Really? Have you noticed that the same buffoons praising the NSA for keeping us safe are also howling blue bloody murder on the IRS mess? Don't snoop through my stuff - but snoop through my stuff. This, like the overwhelming majority of right wing positions, is not tenable. It's not even coherent. The Government has a need and a duty to from time to time breach the privacy of private citizens. Applying for super special treatment where you don't have to disclose your income nor be taxed on it nor pay tax on your expenditures is one of those times. Any group, right or left, should be scrutinized to the utmost and if they do not meet the statutory definition of a 501(c)4, then the status should be denied. If Congress has decided they prefer the regulatory definition, then they must change the statute. It appears Rep. Elijah Cummings has quite had it with the bull pucky version of the scandal, but the actual statutory problem seems to have dropped out of sight.
Flip side of the same coin, picking up your Verizon phone or logging into Facebook is not one of those times the government has any duty or need whatsoever to rifle through your material. I have a right to privacy in my home. It is a gross violation of my Fourth Amendment rights for the Government to just up and decide it has the authority to bypass me and go to service providers and demand records of them, convoluted FISAA legal positions be damned. If the Government is obtaining warrants that allow them to search all of the world wide web, then I'm sorry but the "world wide" part obviously flies in the face of the "particularly describing the place to be searched" in that pesky Constitution thing. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot pick and choose the amendments, that's not how the game is played. The rule is that you follow all of the rules all of the time, and when you break them bad things happen to you.
But bad things aren't happening to anybody. The Teahadists are, thus far, keeping their 501(c)4 statuses. PRISM is ongoing. For whatever reason the Obama administration has not elected to simply kill these practices off. It wouldn't be without precedent. On DOMA, Obama refused to defend the law any further, calling it unconstitutional. He could refuse to use PRISM any further, too. He's the President, that's kind of his job to not do things that violate the Constitution. Same goes for the IRS mess. Dear underling, fix this, as in yesterday, sincerely, POTUS. We straight up railed against tyranny when Bush did this. Yet somehow, when Bush mallyhacked the rule book, it all became magically OK. Except it didn't. The Supreme Court punted on this one, kicking one suit on FISAA so far down the road that it's somewhere in the next county. The only other serious challenge is still staggering on, despite the administration's best efforts to kill it. Rand Paul would rather threaten to sue the NSA and introduce a pile of do-nothing arble-garble than introduce a bill to simply repeal the FISA Amendments of 2008. One would think the usually repeal-happy House would be happy to burn down executive power, but they're busy with jobs, jobs, jobs, by which they mean abortion.
The law has all this marvelous recourse baked right in for violations. Congress can repeal anything it decides was a bad idea. Congress can amend the law to allow more oversight, or simply exercise its existing oversight capacity. The IRS does not need to trouble itself over discriminating against Tea Partiers, it can just follow the law and deny their applications outright. The solution to all of this is as obvious as it is ignored - follow the damn law.