Jonathan Weisman and Matthew Wald write in The New York Times:

“Since last year’s elections, Republicans in Congress have struggled for traction on their legislative efforts, torn between conservatives who drove the agenda after the 2010 landslide and new voices counseling a shift in course to reflect President Obama’s re-election and the 2012 loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate.”

Enter the IRS. We’ve learned the Internal Revenue Service, a branch of President Obama’s Treasury Department, has orchestrated a campaign of abuse and harassment since 2010, lasting at least through the 2012 re-election campaign, against conservative, Tea Party and even pro-Israel groups.

Continue Messrs. Weisman and Wald in The Times, “…the accusations of IRS abuse are sure to fuel an effort that appears to be uniting dispirited Republicans and their conservative political base: investigating Mr. Obama and his administration. Republicans are pushing a portrayal of an administration overreaching its authority and punishing its enemies.”

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because Mr. Obama and his IRS aren’t carving new paths through the political jungle. In other words, we’ve been here before.

In their Washington Post column, Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan quote Doug Schoen, pollster for NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg: “Politicizing the IRS was one of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. That being said, we are still a very long way from that point. The allegations are very, very serious, and it is simply impossible to believe that it was just Lois Lerner and some low-level employees in Cincinnati who came up with this scheme to systematically focus on Tea Party and ‘patriot’ groups.”

Right now, the level of outrage and exasperation with President Obama and the IRS is still so high, relatively little focus is being given to the 2014 elections, still more than 17 months in the future. But once we know more about who really knew what and when, and who really ordered the IRS to lay siege to conservative America, you can assume the IRS will garner central focus among what already appears to be shaping up as a scandal-centric election cycle.

And this does not bode well for Democrats, because those ever-important swing voters in the center don’t like to be pandered to, don’t like to be taken for granted, and most of all, don’t like to be lied to.

A recent CNN poll released May 19, 2013, shed some interesting first looks at the challenges ahead for Democrats if they handle the IRS and other scandals badly. By other scandals, I’m referring to the murders of the American diplomat and security staff in Benghazi, the alleged extortion of health care companies by HHS Secretary Sibelius, and the likely-illegal wiretapping and seizure of personal emails of AP and Fox News reporters by the Obama Department of Justice that could very well end with the firing, resignation or impeachment of Attorney General Eric Holder.

According to the CNN poll, 6% of Americans have a very favorable opinion of the IRS (I’d love to meet these people—I’m assuming they’re friends of family of IRS employees), 28% have a somewhat favorable opinion, 30% a somewhat unfavorable and 35% very unfavorable. In all seriousness, the combined 34% very/somewhat favorable is important because these responses are highest among younger, lower-income, liberal, Democrat, non-white households – exactly those least likely to turnout to vote in the “second off-year” elections when a liberal, Democrat president’s party is depressed, under attack, and unmotivated to vote.

CNN asked respondents, “As you may know, the IRS targeted conservative political groups for greater scrutiny of their applications for tax exempt status. How important in issue do you think this is to the nation?” Overall, 85% of respondents said it is important (55% very, 30% somewhat), to just 10% who say “not too important” and 5% who say “not important at all.”

So who were these people? Non-white respondents (62% very important) are more likely to say it was important than white respondents (52% very important). There’s a major crack in the Obama wall, reminding us of Dr. Dre’s immortal quote (I’m sure you quote the good Dr. as often as I do), “The only two things that scare me are God and the IRS.”

College educated respondents (53% very important) are more likely to say it is important than those who haven’t attended college (57% very important), another potential crack in the Obama base.

Only when sorted by ideology did answers fall back into more predictable patterns: conservatives 71%, moderates 47%, liberals 39%.

Even more interesting is the partisan divide as to whether Mr. Obama is telling the truth. Among Democrats, 86% insist that he is (31% completely, 55% mostly). Just 28% of Republicans agreed (4% completely, 24% mostly).

Comparatively, among Independents, only 8% say Mr. Obama is still being completely truthful, and 50% said he was still being mostly truthful. That number, the mostly truthful folks, are the ones with the greatest chance of moving if it is proven the White House did have internal knowledge of the IRS actions before Mr. Obama’s reelection.

This is where it may all come crashing down – and why I wasn’t surprised to see what could be the first of many senior administration staffers asserting their Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress.

Finally, one figure outshone all the others as hinting at a volatile 2014 election year, and all the credit goes to Independents once again.

In response to CNN’s question about whether or not Republicans are over-reacting to the IRS scandal, or if Republicans are reacting appropriately, 42% say Republicans are overreacting, while 53% say Republicans are acting appropriately. A surprising 31% of Democrats and an unsurprising 85% of Republicans believe the GOP is responding appropriately.

It’s too early to know what will happen in 2014, but the senior Democrats announcing their retirements, distancing themselves from the President, calling for investigations into the IRS, into Benghazi, into the scandals? They are clearly seeing the same patterns I do.

It’s a good time to be a Republican.

The call to action: Tweet out the #8pages hashtag, because Gabriel Gomez can’t even be bothered to read 8 pages about women’s issues.

Of course, the problem with urging people to use a hashtag like this one is that there’s a way to measure your ad’s effectiveness. And this one isn’t doing that well.

If you don’t count current Markey campaign and other Democratic political staff, political consultants, abortion-rights groups that are backing Markey, journalists writing about the ad, and people mocking the hashtag, about 13 real honest-to-goodness people have actually tweeted or retweeted this hashtag in the ten hours or so since it was posted online.

Looks like a bit of a social media #fail.

UPDATE: Minutes after I posted this and tweeted it out, Ed Markey’s youth coordinator was the next to tweet out the #8pages hashtag.

UPDATE UPDATE: Oh, and he was just re-tweeted by three other Markey staffers. Well played, gentlemen.

So let’s say you’re a healthy 40-year-old single man in California. You make roughly $55,000 per year, but your employer doesn’t offer health insurance — or if he has been offering it, he’s just told you he’s scrapping it next year because it costs him a fortune and you can purchase a better plan anyway through Covered California, the new Obamacare health insurance exchange.

You’re healthy, and your income is average. You can’t afford huge premiums for a top-flight insurance plan you know you probably don’t really need anyway. But Obamacare says you can’t buy a “catastrophic” plan at your age. So you decide to buy a “Bronze” plan, defined under Obamacare as a plan that would pay 60 percent of the average person’s medical bills after you take things like the deductible and coinsurance into account. 

Today, you can go to EHealthInsurance.com and find the cheapest plan fitting this description for your age — at $111 per month, the California Farm Bureau’s HSA 4500 plan. You’re on the hook for your first $4,500 in medical bills (your deductible), but you’re totally in the clear after that because there’s no coinsurance above that. The terms are as simple as can be, and they are exactly the same for prescription drugs and everything else. With this plan, you’ll never pay as much as 10 percent of your current income toward health care in any given year — and that includes your health insurance premiums. (If you want, you can set up a Health Savings Account and use pre-tax money to pay your medical bills, but that’s entirely up to you.)

I ran the details of this bare-bones near-catastrophic plan through the HHS actuarial value calculator and found that it would qualify for Bronze status, with an actuarial value of 63.3 percent.

Alas, this plan won’t qualify, because this plan will no longer be available when the exchange starts up. This morning, California’s state health exchange — California Covered — unveiled the options that consumers will have in the individual market beginning next year when the exchange becomes operational. So what can you expect? The cheapest bare-bones plan you can get in the entire state is more than $200 per month. But that might not be available to you, depending on which region you live in. If you live in say, Napa County, you can’t get any kind of health insurance through the exchange for less than $257 per month (corrected). The California Farm Bureau isn’t offering plans on the new exchange.

So it looks like you’re just going to pay a lot more.

Until this fall, more detailed comparisons for family plans and such won’t be possible. And surely, there will be someone who gets a rate cut somewhere. But if you’re in the situation of our hypothetical 40-year-old, too bad.

Update: The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein also makes the point that the average rate paid in Calilfornia’s individual market will go up 80 percent under Obamacare. The media are really dropping the ball here by citing California Covered’s press release uncritically.

RBPundit

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with a 501 c(5) labor association (i.e., a union) expressing political views like the one below, and it’s understandable that a group representing government employees would rail against the possibility of a government shutdown.

But it is kind of interesting, given what we now know was going on at the IRS at that time — and all the work being done to prevent Tea Partiers from having the same privilege of being able to pool their own money and spend on issue advocacy without having their cash taxed an additional time.

Update: I see RB has posted a piece on it here.

A perfect storm of controversies and incompetence has reached a head in the last couple of weeks, plaguing the Obama administration and testing just how good Jay Carney is at his job. 

On the foreign policy front, the precarious nature of the U.S.-Russian relationship over Syria was exposed in the ousting of an American embassy staffer on charges of spying and the hearings on the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi exhibit an administration as a whole in over its head.

Domestically, the IRS targeting of conservative Tea Party groups and the Justice Department’s wiretapping of the Associated Press and Fox News reporters show an executive branch willing to run roughshod over the Constitution and rule of law to get what it wants and to punish political opponents.

Didn’t conservatives warn about these outcomes when voters elected and reelected Barack Obama?

Self-described conservative Andrew Sullivan has quickly informed the rest of us that there is nothing to see here when it comes to the president’s culpability. Conservatives, he argues, shouldn’t act as though there is, making the same mistake as those he condemns in rushing to judgment before all of the facts on the table. But the truth is that it is not necessary for Obama to be personally involved for this to reflect on his legacy. As Democratic president Harry Truman once observed, the buck stops at the Oval Office.

History remembers Ulysses S. Grant as a great general and an honorable man, certainly one who is partially responsible for the preservation of the United States. Yet as a president, Grant is considered among the worst in American history, largely because under his administration, the executive branch was full of scandal and corruption, so much so that it sparked a decades-long movement to reform government.

Included are the Black Friday gold speculation ring, the Whiskey Ring, a trading post extortion scam involving Secretary of War William W. Belknap, bribes taken by Interior Secretary Columbus Delano for fraudulent land grants, the Crédit Mobilier scandal (not always included, since the company was founded during the Lincoln administration) and the list goes on and on.

Although most consider Grant’s personal character above reproach, it is generally acknowledged that he was far too careless with his associates in the administration. Yet Grant’s good intentions are not offered as proof that he was a good president. The corruption in government is enough to tarnish Grant’s legacy, regardless of the effectiveness of his policies. History may come to regard the Obama presidency in the same way.

As the full details of each of the recent scandals and blunders come out, America will find out which conservative prediction was right: a) That Obama would practice so-called “Chicago-style” politics, b) That a first-term senator with no record of legislative or private accomplishment was not ready for the most powerful job in the world; c) That he spends too much time playing golf and not doing his job; or d) All of the above.

At a minimum, it is fair to say that the facts show a president unwilling or too naïve to stick to a line in the sand concerning Syria (and by extension Russia), as well as Iran and North Korea; a president too out of the loop to deal with a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11; a president who failed to rein in his attorney general despite his department’s wiretapping of media outlets and the government-sanctioned arming of Mexican drug cartels; a president whose IRS targets political opponents at the very moment they are causing him the greatest trouble on his signature law. (Although, to be fair, the Wall Street Journal’s James Bovard assures us that Obama is in good company here.) 

This is a legacy of scandal and corruption at home and incompetence abroad, one to which no one would want to be attached.

Perhaps it really isn’t Obama’s fault. Perhaps any president would have suffered from the same bad luck in these times. Perhaps David Axelrod is right when he says, “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.”

To which statement, the conservative rejoinder is: Exactly, David. Exactly.

But it’s also important to note that already, three major insurers representing 7 percent of the individual market will not be participating in the new state exchange. That’s not a huge share, but it’s not negligible, either. If you see a major increase in individual market premiums, this reduction in competition will probably be part of the reason, as will the requirement that plans be fairly comprehensive and, for most people, include relatively low deductibles. At the moment, Esurance.com shows that a single 26-year-old man living in California can get: 

• a bare-bones plan ($3,500 deductible) for as little as $82 per month,  from Healthnet or a similar plan for $121 from Anthem.
• a zero-deductible plan from Kaiser Permanente with drug coverage ($40 co-pay for visits) for $336 per month.

If possible, I’ll circle back later and compare the new Obamacare rates to whatever comparable plans are offered.

Then there’s the IRS, which is obviously mired in controversy and will play a major role in implementing the health care law. 

Now that “TIGTA” (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration”) is becoming a household name, its reports are getting more attention in contexts other than IRS harassment of conservative activists. The other day, the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard pointed to a June 2012 report that described the bureaucracy the IRS has assembled to implement Obamacare — eight different offices, with 1,278 full-time employees for fiscal 2012 and 859 for fiscal 2013. There were no projections for the coming fiscal year beginning in October, but fiscal 2014 will see 12 new IRS-related Obamacare provisions go into effect — twice as many as in any previous year. 

Early in this morning’s IRS hearing, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., warned against turning the IRS hearings into a partisan affair. Immediately afterward, Rep. Steve Lynch, D-Mass., obliged him, delivering 

Lynch, a moderate Democrat representing South Boston, began by comparing the IRS’s treatment of conservative non-profit applicants to the behavior of foreign regimes notorious for their human rights abuses — Communist China and Belarus. After running through a few of the Inspector General’s findings, he wrapped up by threatening the IRS witnesses, warning that there would be “hell to pay” if they didn’t start producing some useful information — which, as he noted, they had failed to do in recent hearings with other committees.

Here’s the video:

Who’s to blame? No idea. “I did ask,” is Miller’s plaintive reply.” 

They ask a very simple question — who made a particular decision to do something completely wrong — only to find that there was, at best, a half-hearted effort to figure it out a year ago. And even that effort was just dropped and forgotten when the answer wasn’t immediately obvious.

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama warned college grads about crazy people (like John Adams, for example) who warn about the constant threat of tyranny in government:

“[Y]ou’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems…They’ll warn that tyranny’s always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

He might have to give that speech to a few more groups, because a new poll suggests that Americans are going with John Adams:

[A] new Fox News poll finds disapproval of President Obama’s job performance is above 50 percent for the first time in a year, his honesty rating is at a new low and half of voters already think he’s a lame-duck.

More than two-thirds of voters — 68 percent — feel the government is out of control and threatening their civil liberties.   About one quarter disagree (26 percent).  

It’s hard to get sixty-eight percent of Americans to agree on anything, but there you have it. And when you’re a president whose philosophy turns on the idea of more robust government involvement in Americans’ lives — and who hopes people will bear with initial problems with Obamacare and keep an open mind — this is not a good sign.