In what can only be described as a judicial takedown, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously delivers a scorching rejoinder to the IRS and DOJ’s brazen refusal to comply with a federal judge (even calling into question whether the Department of Justice is even seeking to provide “justice”) in one of the ongoing federal lawsuits over the IRS targeting scandal.
What you are about to read (and if you have the time, the entire opinion is well worth reading) is the opening salvo – a line drawn in the sand – by the federal judiciary against the out-of-control, politically corrupt IRS and DOJ:
The entire opinion is a blistering exposition of the IRS’s intractable refusal to comply with not only the law but the federal courts as well.Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen—Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian—should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds. Yet those are the grounds on which the plaintiffs allege they were mistreated by the IRS here. The allegations are substantial: most are drawn from findings made by the Treasury Department’s own Inspector General for Tax Administration. Those findings include that the IRS used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by so-called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the Inspector General called “unnecessary information.”
Yet in this lawsuit the IRS has only compounded the conduct that gave rise to it. The plaintiffs seek damages on behalf of themselves and other groups whose applications the IRS treated in the manner described by the Inspector General. The lawsuit has progressed as slowly as the underlying applications themselves: at every turn the IRS has resisted the plaintiffs’ requests for information regarding the IRS’s treatment of the plaintiff class, eventually to the open frustration of the district court. At issue here are IRS “Be On the Lookout” lists of organizations allegedly targeted for unfavorable treatment because of their political beliefs. Those organizations in turn make up the plaintiff class. The district court ordered production of those lists, and did so again over an IRS motion to reconsider. Yet, almost a year later, the IRS still has not complied with the court’s orders. Instead the IRS now seeks from this court a writ of mandamus, an extraordinary remedy reserved to correct only the clearest abuses of power by a district court. We deny the petition.
Tell Congress: Pass the Fair Tax Act of 2015! Sign the petition.