Freedom Line Blog

At NRO today, Jillian Kay Melchior has a very important story about how the leaders of one of my favorite organizations, what I have described as “the heroic True the Vote” group, have been harassed by not one, not two, not three, but four separate federal agencies that had never before done anything to look even slightly askance at those leaders — never, that is, until just after True the Vote was formed. The IRS, the FBI, the ATF, and OSHA all have made life miserable for True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and her husband, Bryan.

The situation escalated in 2012. That February, True the Vote received a third request for information from the IRS, which also sent its first questionnaire to King Street Patriots. Catherine says the IRS had “hundreds of questions — hundreds and hundreds of questions.” The IRS requested every Facebook post and Tweet she had ever written. She received questions about her family, whether she’d ever run for political office, and which organizations she had spoken to.

Read the whole thing. It is mind-boggling. It is frightening. It is a story about government tyranny. It is sickening.

At CFIF alone, I have written about True the Vote here and here and here. The group does a wonderful job fighting against vote fraud, while carefully staying well within all legal bounds itself.  For daring to help empower ordinary citizens to act as watchdogs against incompetent or corrupt government, Catherine Engelbrecht has now been treated by multiple organs of government as if she is a criminal, maybe even dangerous.

This must not stand. MUST….. NOT….. STAND.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT:  Roger Ream, President and Chief Operating Officer, The Fund for American Studies – Capitalism, Individual Responsibility, Freedom and Free Markets;

4:15 CDT/5:15 EDT:  Michael Cox, Director of the O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University’s cox School of Business – The Fund for American Studies video, “How Nations Succeed: What’s the Secret to Ending Poverty;”

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT:  Quin Hillyer, CFIF Senior Fellow and Senior Editor at American Spectator – Benghazi;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: David French, Senior Counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice – ACLJ Lawsuit and IRS Intimidation Scandal; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT:  Keli Carender, National Coordinator for Tea Party Patriots – What Happens Next?

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis has done a smart, well-reasoned analysis of the underlying meaning(s) of Barack Obama’s week of scandals. He rightly notes that “Obama’s administration struggles mightily with the threshold concept of accountability.”

And:

The emerging argument, which seems to be that the Obama White House was detached enough to rely on the expertise of its department heads to resolve the dilemmas around each event in the current spotlight, would sound strained even if it came during a presidency that was famously disengaged….

More fundamentally, the “we left it to our division heads defense” would not excuse any executive leadership in the public or private sector from the imperative of setting values and standards of conduct for decisions made inside the organization’s own walls, and policing the extent to which those standards survive.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that at a minimum, if you credit its defense, that this government seems more rudderless than could have been imagined eleven days ago.

Also of great note, Davis rightly focuses on a supremely important facet of the Benghazi scandal that the establishment media seems to have willfully ignored, even though it is one of the most despicable aspects of the administration’s longer-term response to the attack:

Even if one buys the rationalization that Benghazi was only so much internecine backbiting between two old rivals, the State Department and CIA, that rationalization entirely omits the evidence that a career diplomat was punished for raising internal questions about security in advance of the Libyan attack, as well as about the unofficial chronicle, or “talking points”, regarding what led to the assault. What kind of leadership is oblivious to the immediate fortunes of a reasonably high ranking whistleblower?

Of course, this is hardly the first time that this administration has tried to bully whistleblowers. They did it to Justice Department whistleblowers J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates; they did it to five (!) different Inspectors General; and they at the very least undermined a whistleblower in the St. Paul, Minnesota case that has so badly (and rightly) harmed the confirmation prospects for Labor Secretary nominee Thomas Perez.

Anyway, Davis has a lot of other insights well worth reading in his post.

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, says the group is readying a federal lawsuit to be filed next week on behalf of at least 25 conservative groups targeted by the IRS, in an interview with National Review.

On its website, ACLJ provides a list of sample questions the IRS asked various conservative applicants, showing clear instances of intrusion into out-of-bounds issues.

This likely will be the first of many, many lawsuits against the IRS.

A friend who wishes to remain nameless, somebody without known connection to the stories herein, first  identified the two “canards” I discuss below.

The background is this: In addition to deliberately targeting conservative groups to keep them from receiving tax-exempt status, the IRS also — according to an increasing number of reports — was also increasingly harassing existing conservative groups with invasive, expensive audits, no matter how thin (or non-existent) the reasons for suddenly claiming an audit was appropriate. It turns out that the good folks at the venerable Leadership Institute were among those targeted for such an audit, as LI reports here.

What the IRS asked the Leadership Institute

Copies of applications for internships and summer programs; to include: lists of those selected for internships and students in 2008.
— In regards to such internships, please provide information regarding where the interns physically worked and how the placement was arranged.
— After completing internships and courses, where were the students and interns employed?……

This is just one of the examples LI gives in its report of the obnoxious and irrelevant data demanded by the IRS. It’s also chilling: What was the IRS planning to do with its list of names?

Quote from LI founder and president Morton Blackwell: ”

“The IRS’ indefensible behavior is worse than we first thought, as it targeted both new and existing conservative groups in politically motivated attacks,” said Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute. “Fortunately my Leadership Institute had the resources to stand up to the government’s bullying and intimidation. Other groups, including grassroots and tea party groups we’ve helped train, did not.  Defending ourselves from the harassing audit cost my organization more than $50,000 in legal fees alone.”

This is inexcusable. Anybody who has ever dealt with Morton Blackwell knows just how fastidiously he has observed all relevant regulations for the more than three decades LI has been in operation. He will not discuss partisan political organizing on his LI email. As the longtime Republican National Committeeman from Virginia, Blackwell is well known for leaving LI’s offices to go use a phone elsewhere in order to avoid using LI phone lines when on RNC calls. Again and again and again, Blackwell has made clear to everybody at LI, and all those who deal with him while he is in LI offices, that certain rules prohibit LI from direct partisan or overtly political activity. After thirty years of this, surely the IRS should have known this about the IRS.

Nonetheless, the audit came. And it was unlawfully invasive. Indeed, so obsessed was the IRS with LI that it even demanded the following from The Hawaii Tea Party in a January 26, 2012 letter: “Provide details regarding your relationship with the Leadership Institute. Provide copies of their training material.”

Huh? Why is a Hawaii Tea Party being asked about connections with LI, as if LI is some nefarious organization? This is sickening.

NOW, HERE’S THE RUB: There have been two excuses offered by hardened lefties for why (they say) the IRS scandal isn’t really much of a scandal at all. First is the idea that the poor overworked IRS employees were just trying to figure how to deal with such a huge surge in 501(c)(4) applications and that it was all these new requests that caused the problem. But… the audits of LI and others (granted, the audits came from a different division, but that means there should be ANOTHER investigation, of those) had nothing to do with new applications. And, as this story shows, even the new applications weren’t rising. So this whole excuse completely falls apart.

Secondly, to quote my aforementioned friend: “LI is a 501c3. The other lefty narrative has been that this is about 501c4s, these legal structures that have a new life since Citizens United. Lefty legal people say ‘501c3 law is SO WELL UNDERSTOOD and NO ONE UNDERSTANDS 501c4 law.’ So the Citizens United thing is a canard. This is just about using the IRS to intimidate enemies.”

I hope that makes sense. In other words, the argument that the IRS officials were confused because they were dealing with different regs (the c4 ones) than they were accustomed to (the c3 ones) is absurd, at least as far as the audits of LI and others were concerned — because LI was a c3!

Finally, it’s worth noting that the 501(c)(4) spending was not, despite Obama’s and others’ complaints, driven by the famous Citizens United case that Obama loves to castigate; instead, even according to the left’sown favorite election-related lawyer, Rick Hasen, that spending rose as a result of the Wisconsin Right to Life case from two years earlier.

In all, there remains no excuse for the targeting of Tea Parties, of other conservative organizations, or the auditing of conservative organizations and individuals. All the excuses offered so far are as thin as gossamer, and not even as strong.

So the IRS singled out conservative citizens and organizations for persecution, while giving liberal counterparts a “pass,” in the words of USA Today.

As we note this week in our commentary “The IRS, Campaign Finance and Freedom of Association,” the scandal proves the inherent danger of federal micromanagement of American citizens’ private political activity.  As the Supreme Court observed in NAACP v. Alabama (1958), revelation of an organization’s members or supporters exposes them to reprisal, harassment and threat.  We now have a perfect illustration.

According to many liberals, however, the problem isn’t too little citizen privacy but too much.  Already during today’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the IRS practices, liberals such as Richard Neal (D – Massachusetts) and Charlie Rangel (D – New York) have asserted that Citizens United is the real problem.  Apparently, forcing citizens to disclose even more of their First Amendment activity to government will transform abusive IRS bureaucrats from perpetrators into saints.

Their agenda is wholly irrational, but all too predictable.   We must fully investigate and expose the IRS abuse, but we must also ensure that the longer-term takeaway is more individual freedom for American citizens, not less.

As I discuss in my column this week, the primary beneficiary of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s legally suspect lobbying of private health companies is the non-profit community organizing outfit Enroll America.

The group’s Advisory Council includes several members of the liberal establishment such as NAACP, La Raza, Planned Parenthood, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

But wait, there’s more:

“Enroll America’s board of directors is made up of insurers and hospital organizations that will benefit from enrolling millions of people in Obamacare. But its management is 100 percent political. Its president is Anne Filipic, formerly deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, where she networked with community organizers. Before that, she had a top job at the Democratic National Committee, and before that she managed Obama’s victorious 2008 Iowa Caucus bid,” according to the Boston Herald.

“To design a media campaign, Enroll America hired Lake Research, which also manages messaging for ACORN, MoveOn.org, LaRaza and 39 members of Congress, all Democrats”

At least now we know how Sebelius is feathering her post-HHS nest – by funneling money to just about every radical liberal group in America.

A group of powerful Republicans in the House and Senate is demanding an investigation into potentially illegal fundraising calls by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to private health companies.

In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, three House committee chairmen and two Senate ranking members said, “The Secretary’s actions show an apparent disregard for constitutional principles and may violate the Antideficiency Act, the prohibition against augmenting congressional appropriations, and executive branch ethics laws,” according to reporting by Politico.

As I explain in my column this week, Sebelius has been caught quoting specific dollar amounts that private companies should donate to a pro-ObamaCare community organizing group getting ready to promote the law ahead of this year’s October enrollment.

Whatever GAO decides to do, it’s a near certainty that the relevant Republican-led House committees with jurisdiction over this scandal will soon launch investigations into Sebelius’s conduct.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In the second update today on items I wrote about last week, it turns out that what I described as the “heroic organization True the Vote” was one of those conservative groups targeted by the IRS. The Washington Post, in an eye-opening report co-written by my old friend Juliet Eilperin (yes, conservatives can have liberal friends), confirmed the apparent abuse of True the Vote  while showing the IRS scandal extends well beyond “low level IRS employees in Cincinnati.”

True the Vote is dedicated to careful and fair application of voting laws. It should be praised, not targeted for abuse by rogue bureaucrats (or by the administration that employs them).

My column last week included yet another update on the long-running dispute between the oil giant Chevron and a group of apparently underhanded plaintiffs’ lawyers with regard to a rather obviously bogus lawsuit involving alleged Ecuadoran environmental damage.

Just a little update: Now Chevron isn’t just fighting back against the main plaintiffs’ lawyers and against corrupt judges in Ecuador, but also against the major DC law/lobby firm Patton-Boggs. This is serious stuff. Not to pre-judge the outcome of this counter-suit, but the very act of suing Patton-Boggs directly is a major and, I think, unusual step. Usually it’s not the firms themselves that get sued. Then again, rarely has a company been so abused as Chevron has been by the long-running lawsuit, so it should be no surprise that Chevron is looking absolutely everywhere it can to be “made whole.”

On the underlying case (not the specific claims against P-B), Chevron of course continues to prove its points, again and again and again. Chevron clearly has been wronged, and everybody, including Patton-Boggs, should acknowledge as much.

Newly installed Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, former senator from South Carolina and favorite of conservatives just about everywhere, was in Mobile, AL last week to give  a speech for the superb Alabama Policy Institute. I wrote about it here.

But one part of my interview I did not write about last week (because it didn’t fit the main theme I was writing about) should give pause to those so-called conservatives, mostly younger ones, who seem blithely unconcerned (or at least only marginally concerned) with the continuing cutbacks in the U.S. defense budget.

I asked DeMint if he was more or less satisfied with how the battle over the budget “sequester” had played out. Frankly, I was not even thinking about defense, even though I have written that Republicans should have moved heaven and earth to protect defense from most of the effects of sequestration. When I asked the question, my assumption was that he would say he was largely satisfied with this interim step in the ongoing budget battles; my idea was to ask a follow-up question, based on the details of his response, about the bigger pictures of the larger, long-term budget problem.

I give that context only to show that I did not prompt DeMint in the slightest about defense. But here’s what he said, with his first words in response to my question:

“No, I’m not happy because so much was taken out of defense.” Then, after about three sentences to say he also didn’t think sequestration did enough to restrain spending on matters other than defense, he returned to his original point: “We do need to go back and figure out if we have enough money for modernization of our defense forces. I don’t think we do.”

This is significant. DeMint is well-known as a spending cutter, a hero to small-government advocates, a budget balancer extraordinaire. Yet, given the chance to crow about how Republicans had won a political skirmish against Obama with regard to sequestration, DeMint’s first thought instead turned toward protecting our nation from foreign threats. Tea Partiers, younger conservatives, and the increasing strain of conservatives who tend toward isolationism all should pay heed.

The fact of the matter, as Frederick W. Kagan wrote in the May 6 National Review (and as the good folks at The Weekly Standard have repeatedly argued in theme if not in the following specific examples), the sequester directly has caused “the cancellation of scheduled deployments of eight U.S. Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier destined for the Persian Gulf, and the grounding of 17 U.S. Air Force squadrons,” resulting in “a devastating blow to American global credibility just when our enemies and friends are watching most closely.” We thus have “created a window in 2013 during which the United States will have no aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf,” thus leading the Iranian Revolutionary Guard publication Mashregh to exult that this move gives the lie to any perceived threat of American military force (if Iran suddenly brings to full fruition a nuclear weapons program).

Kagan described plenty of other dangerous effects on our defense forces as a result of sequestration, and explained why it is that President Obama has far less ability to move funds among Pentagon accounts (and thus to avoid some of these ill effects) than is widely assumed.

Kagan is correct, as is DeMint. It’s long past time for conservatives to start again recalling, and acting on, those once-prominent parts of our beliefs, growing from our Goldwater-Reagan roots, that always have placed a strong national defense posture front and center among public-policy imperatives.

Sally Pipes identifies an “escape hatch” for small businesses trying to avoid the costly employer mandates threatening employers with costly insurance premiums or fines:

A RAND analysis found that a fifth of firms with 50-200 workers had self-insured by 2010, the year Obamacare became law — up from 14 percent of such companies in 2006.

A survey by Munich Health North America found that 82 percent of health insurance executives report seeing growing interest in self-funded coverage among employers. A California-based benefits consulting firm that helps companies self-insure told Kaiser Health News that its business has doubled in the past six months. And Cigna says that it saw self-coverage for small businesses grow by a fifth last year.

Companies with younger, healthier workforces are leading the way. After all, with their population of low-risk employees, they have the most to gain. And that’s bad news for Obamacare’s exchanges.

The problem for ObamaCare is that the only way health insurance premiums will be (theoretically) affordable is if legions of young, healthy people join the exchanges’ insurance pools. That’s because they are needed to pay into the system so that older and sicker people can draw down the benefits.

But if small businesses opt to self-insure – especially if they are newer businesses more likely to employ younger and healthier workers – then that will drain the ObamaCare pools of the very people who will make them (barely) affordable.

With this in mind, don’t be surprised to see an IRS or HHS rule come down that prohibits self-insurance to prop up ObamaCare’s exchange pools.

As with the so-called “family glitch,” it’s a ploy the Obama administration will be ready to use if its slapdash law continues to produce embarrassing unintended consequences.

(Note: This is the first of either three or four blog posts coming today, on different subjects. LOTS going on. Please keep coming back to this site today and tomorrow….)

Okay, first, there are several important developments regarding Tom Perez, whose nomination for Labor Secretary is slated, after several delays, for a committee vote this week.

First, Republican opposition to Perez seems to be stiffening, with several senators coming out definitively, or in some cases more strongly than they already have, against his nomination. Most significant was the stout statement last week by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.:

“He is a committed ideologue who appears willing, quite frankly, to say or do anything to achieve his ideological ends.

“His willingness, time and again, to bend or ignore the law and to misstate the facts in order to advance his far-left ideology lead me and others to conclude that he’d continue to do so if he were confirmed to another, and much more consequential, position of public trust……

“Mr. Perez, however, does not merely push the envelope; all too often, he circumvents or ignores a law with which he disagrees.

“A few examples:

“As a member of the Montgomery County Council, Mr. Perez pushed through a county policy that encouraged the circumvention of federal immigration law. Later, as head of the federal government’s top voting-rights watchdog, he refused to protect the right to vote for Americans of all races, in violation of the very law he was charged to enforce. In the same post at the Department of Justice, Mr. Perez directed the federal government to sue against the advice of career attorneys at his own office. In another case involving a Florida woman who was lawfully exercising her First Amendment right to protest an abortion clinic, the federal judge who threw out Mr. Perez’s lawsuit said he was ‘at a loss as to why the government chose to prosecute this particular case’ in the first place.

“This is what pushing the envelope means in the case of Mr. Perez: a flippant and dismissive attitude about the boundaries that everybody else has to follow for the sake of the liberal causes he believes in.

“In short, it means a lack of respect for the rule of law – and a lack of respect for the need of those in positions of power to follow it…..

“[He is] a crusading ideologue whose conviction about his own rightness on the issues leads him to believe the law does not apply to him. Unbound by the rules that apply to everyone else, Mr. Perez seems to view himself as free to employ whatever means at his disposal, legal or otherwise, to achieve his ideological goals.

“To say this is problematic would be an understatement.

McConnell is hardly the only Republican senator to speak out. The list now includes Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, and Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, along with previously announced opposition by Louisiana’s David Vitter.

NOW, PLEASE NOTE THIS: The single biggest issue in the short term should be Perez’ refusal to honor valid congressional subpoenas, about actions of his that certainly appear to be flagrantly illegal. And even Democrat Elijah Cummings agrees that Perez’s refusal should not stand:

Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, top Democrat on the committee that held the hearing, yesterday joined Representative Darrell Issa of California, the committee chairman, in sending letter to Perez requesting that he provide all personal e-mails used to conduct official business that were subpoenaed by the panel last month, and respond by the end of this week.

It is illegal for bureaucrats to use private email for government business. It is illegal for bureaucrats to ignore a congressional subpoena (except in certain, severely limited circumstances when officially claiming executive privilege, which cannot be the case here). It boggles the mind that somebody could still even have a chance of confirmation who has done both (and continues to do the latter). And it is astonishing, or should be astonishing, that the establishment media hasn’t heavily criticized Perez for these violations.

Also, former whistleblower Christian Adams is out with one more good argument about the the thuggishness of Mr. Perez, who abuses his authority at every turn:

When local sheriffs made the mistake of asking for guidance from Perez about how to implement the Alabama immigration law, Perez threatened them in a meeting. Memo to state and local officials everywhere: don’t ask for guidance from the DOJ Civil Rights Division. The radicals running the place will take advantage of your good faith and make demands of you that the law does not support.

Perez has also threatened election officials in Alabama, threatening to “bury” the state ”with paper” if Alabama did not give in. This is typical of the would-be Labor secretary. Under oath before Congress, he is all smiles, sunshine, and bluebirds; behind closed doors he is a thuggish progressive bureaucrat comfortable wielding power despite what the law says.

Adams will be speaking down here in Mobile next week to the local chapter of the Federalist Society. He promises to have much more to say about Perez during his remarks.

It is also worth reviewing a statement on the nomination by Judicial Watch, whose work has done so much to uncover the various examples of Perez’ perfidy.

Also, Hans von Spakovsky eviscerates Perez’ excuse for using his private emails, here.

Finally, even a youth organization is coming out against Perez, on pure policy grounds. See the statement of Generation Opportunity, here.

Benghazi…  The IRS…  The DOJ snooping on the AP…

Boy, those Second Amendment advocates and skeptics of sweeping federal background check legislation are a real bunch of paranoid nuts, eh?

Let’s see.  The federal government gathering sensitive medical and personal data, maintaining it in some vast and surely non-secure database and able to modify the definition of who is and is not allowed to purchase a firearm pursuant to the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms.  What could ~possibly~ go wrong here?  This is one of the heretofore underemphasized aspects of the onslaught of breaking Obama Administration scandals, but a valuable one going forward in the Second Amendment debate.

On the heels of a Washington Post report that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is actively soliciting health industry executives for six- to seven-figure “donations” to help publicize ObamaCare, the New York Times reveals how much she’s netted in pledges so far: $10.5 million.

And that’s just from two groups. One is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which bills itself as the largest public health philanthropy. It pledged $10 million. The other is the for-profit tax preparation company H&R Block who, according to the Times, “sees a large role for itself in helping low- and middle-income people apply for tax credits that can be used to buy private health insurance.” It promised $500,000 for the propaganda outreach effort.

An unbiased observer could look at this and easily see at least the probability if not the certainty of a quid pro quo arrangement where payment to an HHS-backed initiative now means preferential treatment later.

And remember, these two transactions are only the tip of the iceberg. Once more health industry entities confirm their involvement Sebelius’ project we’ll be able to see which firms will reap the lion’s share of benefits of ObamaCare’s corrupt pay-to-play scheme.

Crony capitalism is alive and well in the Obama Administration.

Earlier this year Michael Barone catalogued a litany of abuses to the rule of law perpetuated under the Obama Administration. “Gangster Government” is the term Barone coined to describe the behavior.

As of Friday, Barone needs to update his list.

Sarah Kliff broke the news that Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been calling health care executives, “asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law…”

Imagine the conversation. A health care CEO gets a personal call from the chief regulator of his business suggesting that the company and the people it employs make financial donations to promote a law administered by the regulator.

Sounds like a suggestion that can’t be refused, right?

As Barone would say, this is Gangster Government.

Republicans in Congress need to push back hard on this abuse of power by Sebelius.

The people running businesses are there to make profits, not spend precious resources on ruinous fights with thugs spending taxpayer money.

If Sebelius can get away with coercing businesses to “donate” money to promote a law that increases her power over them, an awful precedent will be set. She – and any of her successors – will be able to tax, fine and now “fundraise” the very people they regulate.

Fail to pay enough, and say goodbye to your livelihood.

Congress needs to put a stop to Sebelius’ abuse of power. Now.

For many months now, the excellent U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-VA, has been calling for the appointment of a special “select” committee to investigate all aspects of the 9/11 catastrophe in Benghazi, Libya. In the wake of this week’s explosive hearings, Wolf renewed his call today in a letter to Speaker John Boehner. His argument always had made sense: “A thorough inquiry will require witnesses from across government – including the Defense Department, State Department, Intelligence Community, Justice Department and even the White House.  Only a Select Committee would be able to bring the cross-jurisdictional expertise and subpoena authority to compel answers from these agencies.” Also: “It’s worth restating that the committee would be bipartisan, thereby putting an end to misguided criticism from some that this investigation is only being done for political reasons.”

Wolf’s arguments always have made sense. It’s not that Chairman Darrel Issa’s committee has been doing a bad job — far from it — but it is just a reality that the media has treated Issa’s inquiry as being partisan, and also that a select committee would have the advantages of sole focus and of cross-jurisdictional authority.

Today, the Wall Street Journal endorsed the idea, and it closed with a particularly strong argument:

“Mr. Boehner said on Thursday that the administration should release its email communications on Benghazi, but it won’t do so unless they are subpoenaed. Frank Wolf, one of the House’s most senior members, has it right. Benghazi’s explanation deserves the best effort elected officials can give it, and the right vehicle is a Select Committee with subpoena power and deposition authority.”

Those emails, by the way, are almost certainly the key. Boehner has been right to focus on them. As Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said in the past 24 hours, what really is important is not just whether there was a cover-up, but what was being covered up. What more can we learn about the State Department refusing multiple requests for added security in the months before the assault, and was the White House involved in those decisions. And, with what is more likely to have White House involvement, what about the now-confirmed story that rescuers were ready to at least try to fly to Benghazi, but were told to stand down? Who told them to stand down, and why? And where was Obama during all of this? Sleeping? Planning his fund-raising remarks for his trip to Las Vegas?

Anyway, a select committee can best look into all of this. As usual, Frank Wolf is right.