| Politics Scandal 2.0 How the Tea Party and its backers are making sure the IRS scandal will live on. By David Weigel
Posted Wednesday, Jun 19, 2013, at 11:39 PM ET  The single most important politician at Wednesday's Tea Party rally against the Internal Revenue Service spoke for less than two minutes. He wasn't drowned out by applause, either. Michigan Rep. Dave Camp was merely explaining how he was going to shoehorn the IRS scandal into the headlines and cable news chyrons again. "My committee was trying to get answers from the IRS for two years," said Camp, the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. "We know that conservative donors were threatened with gift taxes. Conservatives had confidential tax information leaked." This was not the scandal that stirred the Tea Party one month ago. Sure, the scandals sound similar, and for Camp to succeed, one story needs to bleed into the other like two murals caught in the rain. They need to because the theory that President Obama ordered his IRS to slow-walk the applications of Tea Party groups has been methodically shredded by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee—or maybe just by the facts of the case. Democrats took back the story last week, when they made a counterintuitive request for more information from Rep. Darrell Issa. The House Oversight chairman had asked for the initial inspector general report on the IRS after Tea Party groups complained (with merit) that they were getting irksome, obsessive questionnaires about their groups. There was a scandal there about the biases of bureaucrats, but Republicans, naturally, attempted to solve the case deductively. They knew what President Obama thought about ... To continue reading, click here.
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