The more things change, the more they stay the same -- at least when it comes to the IRS.
That's what Convention of States Project President Mark Meckler told the Wall Street Journal last week. The new president has done surprisingly little to hold the IRS accountable for its targeting of conservative groups.
IRS bureaucrats like Lois Lerner "stripped the right to political speech from thousands of Americans over two election cycles" by dragging out the process required to become a nonprofit for conservative organizations. Some have argued that this affected the outcome of the 2010 midterms and the 2012 presidential election.
And the WSJ reports that it is still going on:
The groups targeted are still doggedly trying to obtain justice through lawsuits that have dragged on for years. They believed Mr. Trump’s election would bring an end to the government obstruction. It hasn’t. “The posture of the DOJ and the IRS under the Trump administration is identical to the posture under the Obama administration,” Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Sound Governance, tells me. “Nothing has changed.”
Mr. Meckler was one of the founders of Tea Party Patriots. His current organization is funding a class-action suit in Ohio federal court on behalf of groups targeted by the IRS. So far the effort has cost $3 million.
That money is now going to fight Mr. Trump’s administration. In recent months the Justice Department has continued refusing to hand over documents or make witnesses available for depositions. The plaintiffs finally managed to depose Ms. Lerner and another key IRS player, Holly Paz, earlier this summer. But their counsels successfully demanded that the transcripts be kept secret from the public. As former federal employees, Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz are presumably getting backup from government lawyers.
In eight short months President Trump has learned just how difficult changing Washington can be. The deep-state bureaucrats are entrenched far more permanently than many realized, and one president isn't going to be able to remove them from power.
That's why the Founders included the Convention of States option in Article V of the Constitution. A Convention of States can change the rules in Washington and flip the balance of power from the feds to the states. By proposing constitutional amendments that limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, a Convention of States can unseat the deep-state bureaucrats and return power to the people and their elected officials.
