"Have you noticed that the Internal Revenue Service scandal seems to be getting ever closer to the White House? The IRS originally tried to set up 'rogue employees in Cincinnati' as fall guys. But in congressional testimony, they revealed that the targeting of dissenting groups was directed from Washington. ... 

"As this column has argued before, the higher this scandal goes, the better it is for the country. We say that not because we don't care for Barack Obama -- let's be honest, a President Biden would be no bargain either -- but because the president can be held accountable if it turns out he or his top aides essentially instructed the IRS to steal the 2012 election. A corrupt administration can be dealt with, as Richard Nixon's was 40 years ago. 

"By contrast, if career IRS employees acted on their own, it means the integrity of American democracy itself is threatened by an out-of-control administrative state. In that case, how to solve the problem is not at all clear."

"Amid a lot of buildup and raised expectations, the White House has announced that it is going to return to returning to the economy. That’s right: This week President Obama is going to make a series of high-profile speeches promoting his economic policy du jour in Illinois, Missouri and Florida. It’ll be interesting to see if any of these speeches highlights the glaring deficiencies of his previous plans for the economy. I don’t expect the White House to admit failure, but hopefully even it realizes that more of the same is undesirable. We’ve tried Obama’s stimulus. We’ve watched as this president has raised taxes, heaped regulations on businesses, been a friend of trial lawyers, declared war on coal and discouraged oil drilling whenever he thought he wouldn’t get caught. And the cascading calamity of Obamacare has united private employers and labor unions in their near-panic to avoid the crippling realities of the job-killing, so-called health care plan."

"The Department of Health and Human Services is about to hire an army of 'patient navigators' to inform Americans about the subsidized insurance promised by Obamacare and assist them in enrolling. These organizers will be guided by the new Federal Data Hub, which will give them access to reams of personal information compiled by federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. ... 

"This spring, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee lawyers were also told by HHS that, despite the fact that navigators will have access to sensitive data such as Social Security numbers and tax returns, there will be no criminal background checks required for them. Indeed, they won’t even have to have high-school diplomas. Both U.S. Census Bureau and IRS employees must meet those minimum standards, if only because no one wants someone who has been convicted of identity theft getting near Americans’ personal records. ... 

"'Giving community organizers access to the Federal Data Hub is bad policy and potentially a danger to civil liberties,' House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan told me recently. 'But it’s one of the most underreported stories I’ve seen. If people only knew about this Data Hub program, it would touch off a huge public outcry.'"

"President Obama touted Obamacare’s supposed benefits Thursday in the hope of distracting attention from Wednesday’s bipartisan House vote that for the first time revealed fissures in congressional Democrats’ lockstep support for his health care law. An unprecedented 35 Democrats bucked the president by voting to delay Obamacare’s 'employer mandate,' while 22 Democrats voted to delay its 'individual mandate' for one year. Obamacare opponents now have an opportunity to widen the fissures among its supporters. ... 

"[...] While most House Democrats voted to preserve the individual mandate — which may haunt them in their next election — one in six voted against President Obama on the employer mandate, while one in nine voted against him on the individual mandate. These votes exposed the first fissure in more than three years of lockstep support for Obamacare among congressional Democrats, and are the latest sign that support for the law is fracturing. ... 

"Every implementation glitch that emerges between now and 2014, every complaint ObamaCare supporters hear from unions and other Democratic constituencies will soften congressional opposition to reopening ObamaCare. If the same one-in-nine share of Senate Democrats buck the president on the individual mandate, there would be more than enough Senate votes — 52 — to delay or repeal the individual mandate through the budget-reconciliation process."

"The congressional investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea-party groups inched closer to the White House yesterday as testimony from three IRS attorneys indicated lawyers in the agency’s chief counsel’s office were involved in reviewing the applications of tea-party groups for tax exemption. The office is led by William Wilkins, one of two IRS officials appointed by President Obama. 

"A source tells National Review Online that Judith Kindell, a senior adviser to Lois Lerner, also held up the processing of tea-party cases by demanding to review them herself. ... 

"Wilkins, who, according to the IRS, heads an office of 1,600 attorneys, has been involved in Democratic politics for over three decades."

"Welcome to the Obama administration's cringe-inducing non sequitur of the week. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder continued stoking the fires of racial resentment over a Florida jury's acquittal of George Zimmerman. In an address to NAACP leaders, who are demanding federal intervention, Holder attacked Stand Your Ground self-defense laws. ... 

"The Obama administration's cynical campaign against Stand Your Ground laws is a racially charged weapon of mass distraction. The goal isn't public safety or community harmony. The goal is for conservative political opponents to Surrender Your Ground. Silence, as always, is complicity. Political self-defense, as with physical self-defense, begins with self-assertion."

"The Treasury Department has admitted for the first time that confidential tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were improperly scrutinized by government officials, but the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the cases. 

"Its investigators also are probing two allegations that the Internal Revenue Service 'targeted for audit candidates for public office,' the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, has privately told Sen. Chuck Grassley. ... 

"Mr. Grassley has asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to explain why the Justice Department chose not to prosecute any of the cases. The Iowa Republican told The Washington Times that the IRS 'is required to act with neutrality and professionalism, not political bias.'"

"The George Zimmerman case was a wretched spectacle from the beginning, but for this we are glad: People in America are still tried in the courts rather than by left-wing protesters or by the media. To their credit, the jurors appear to have decided the case strictly on the facts, which gave them no choice other than to acquit Zimmerman, despite the long campaign of defamation against him outside the courtroom. ... 

"We wish the purveyors of perpetual outrage would pause from saying stupid and inflammatory things about the Zimmerman case long enough to consider how wrong they were about it all along. But we are realists."

"The conventional wisdom evolves. Yesterday, Washington was merely broken, gridlocked, dysfunctional. The passive voice spread the blame evenly. Today it’s agreed that Republican obstructionism is the root of all evil — GOP resistance having now escalated to nihilism and indeed sabotage. 

"Sabotage carries a fine whiff of extralegal, anti-constitutional vandalism. This from media mandarins who barely bat an eyelash when President Obama unilaterally suspends parts of his own health-care law — just as he unilaterally stopped enforcing current immigration laws for 1.7 million young illegal immigrants, thereby enacting by executive order legislation that had failed in Congress. So much for faithfully executing the laws (Article II)."

"Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, tweeted Wednesday evening that the Senate's immigration bill is unconstitutional because it raises revenues and originated in the Senate instead of the House. ... 

"Language in the U.S. Constitution requires any bill that raises revenue, also known as a tax, must originate in the House of Representatives, not the Senate. America’s founders included that language because they believed the House was more accountable to the people of the country than the Senate, which was elected at that time by state legislators rather than through a direct vote. That clause of the Constitution is called the 'origination clause' and reads as such: 'All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.'"