Republicans Let IRS Chief Off the Hook for Chilling Dissension

House Republicans reached an agreement late Wednesday to avoid a potentially divisive floor vote on impeaching IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

The deal scraps the vote on the so-called “privileged” impeachment resolution that had been expected to take place Thursday. Instead, the House Judiciary Committee will consider Koskinen’s impeachment, with the IRS boss expected to testify sometime next week.

The agreement makes it unlikely that any vote by the full House to impeach Koskinen will happen until after the November election, if at all. House Republican leadership had balked on moving forward on impeachment proceedings during an election season, arguing that an impeachment vote risked irritating voters. Others said Koskinen deserved a full House Judiciary Committee probe before embarking on the seldom-used impeachment process.

Amazing. When it comes time to fund Obamacare, let Obama get away with unconstitutional executive orders, increase taxes, massively spend and borrow, hand over the Internet to a world body run by socialists and dictators, and raise the national debt into infinity, Republicans in Congress never worry about “irritating the voters.” They seem unconcerned with “divisiveness” when it comes time to alienate the conservative, libertarian, Tea Party and independent voters who repeatedly put them in office.

Avoiding divisiveness is not the job of a party in opposition to the ruling regime. Avoiding divisiveness is the job of compliant, fearful, unprincipled little weenies who don’t want to ruffle any feathers in their corrupt, Washington DC fall-of-the-Roman-Empire kind of head-in-the-sand existence.

The more honest thing for Republicans to do would have been to say, “We just don’t want to deal with this corrupt IRS Commissioner, not before the election. And let’s be real: We won’t deal with it after the election, either.”

The only thing more appalling than saying it openly, like that? Handling it the way they did.

When a representative government becomes completely divorced from the people who elect and struggle to keep those representatives in office, it’s time to conclude that the republic is very possibly over. At a minimum, there is no two-party system. We have a one-party government, plain and simple. We’re talking about Republicans here, the “opposition” party in name only. Republicans control the Congress right now. They ran on a platform of holding Obama’s IRS legally accountable for the downright tyrannical approach of this IRS toward citizens who do not agree with Obama’s policies. If the voters who elected these Republicans cannot count on Republicans to defend them against these overt attacks on freedom of speech, then where are they to turn? And they wonder why Donald Trump won the nomination.

The effort by conservative Republicans flows from the IRS’ 2013 admission that for several years, it had targeted Tea Party groups seeking tax exemptions for rigorous examinations.

Conservatives say Koskinen obstructed the House GOP’s investigation of the treatment of tea party groups seeking tax exemptions. Koskinen and his Democratic allies say he did nothing wrong and provided Congress with all the information he had and knew about.

This is all old news to potential and actual victims of IRS policies singling out dissenting opinions. It should be the easiest of priorities for a Republican Congress–that may or may not be fully Republican after the upcoming election–to face this issue head on. Instead, they kick the can down the road, just as they always do. Why? Because they’re afraid of losing power. But when they run the Congress the same way Democrats would if they were still in control of it, what’s the point of staying in power? Why the worry about losing power when you stand for absolutely nothing, and pay no attention whatsoever to your core constituency, the people who elect you? If you have no principles, there’s nothing left but power for its own sake. Since the Republicans in Congress never display any concern for principles, we can only assume one thing: That they only care about power.

The moment government is no longer accountable, it’s a tyranny. With neither Republicans nor Democrats willing to hold any corrupt government officials accountable, not when it might “irritate” people, then face the truth: You’re living under a tyranny, plain and simple. Enjoy your freedom of speech while you still have it. Increasingly, it’s all we have left, and on our present course it cannot last for long.