A Few Links to Dispel Conservative Myths, Part One: Obamacare

I've been discussing politics with liberal friends since I was a kid. But it's only been since I joined facebook that I've debated facts and political philosophy with conservatives. It's been quite an experience. Most arguments follow the same flow chart:
I. Conservative friend begins with a false claim, such as: "Single-payer health care can never work. It's bankrupting the countries that have it."
II. I respond with the facts, accompanied with web links. For example: "Not true. Countries with single-payer spend far less per capita than the US."
III. Conservative friend then responds in one of three ways:
     A. Dismiss any and all facts I link with the statement, "I refuse to believe left-wing web sites and/or the "lamestream media.""
     B. "Joe you're too stupid for me to argue with."
     C. Conservative friend turns into a WWII veteran suburban father lecturing his lazy hippie son. "Single-payer can never work because it's something for nothing! You need to realize that every bum has to pull his own weight!"

Maybe it's pointless to keep linking conservatives to actual facts. But I like to think it's possible for a little light to shine through the curtain of ignorance and prejudice from time to time. So here's Part One: a catalog of links to facts to counter the most common conservative myths, misconceptions and outright lies about the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

Part One. Obamacare Myths
Myth: Obamacare has caused health care premiums for most Americans to skyrocket.
Fact: 80% of Americans get health insurance through their employer or a government program. Under Obamacare, U.S. employers are experiencing the smallest increases in health care costs in 15 years.

Myth: "There are less people today with health insurance than there were before this law went into effect." - Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner
Fact: By March of 2014, nearly 10 million previously uninsured people gained insurance thanks to Obamacare. The percentage of uninsured Americans is now the lowest on record, having fallen from 18% in 2013 to 13.4% in mid-2014.

Myth: Obamacare will explode the federal budget deficit.
Fact: In 2010, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated Obamacare will reduce the deficit by $143 billion through 2019, and an additional $1.3 trillion (that's trillion with a "t") between 2020 and 2029. In 2014, despite some changes in implementation of the law, the CBO confirmed, "the agencies have no reason to think that their initial assessment that the ACA would reduce budget deficits was incorrect."

Myth: Obamacare will cause the cost of individual health care policies to skyrocket.
Fact: Health insurance premiums rose 4% for family coverage in the first year of Obamacare. That was half the 8% average of the previous decade. Across the country, rates for a benchmark silver plan will actually go down slightly in 2015 over 2014. Furthermore in July of 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a report explaining that the Affordable Care Act has already saved consumers $9 Billion since it was enacted. The bulk of the savings was in reduced premiums. But it also included $330 million in 2013 alone of refunds to consumers when their insurance companies had engaged in the now prohibited practice of spending more than 20% of premiums on overhead.

Myth: Millions of people have lost their health insurance.
Fact: Only about 5% of Americans have non-employer provided individual plans. It's true that certain health care plans in this market are no longer available due to changes in the law. But many of these were not insurance at all, but junk plans that didn't offer real coverage.  Furthermore, Obamacare is not the reason why most of those folks who are changing plans this year are doing so. On the individual health insurance market, plans typically are sold with one-year contracts that change prices and/or benefits year-to-year. Even before Obamacare, only 17 percent of consumers in this market kept the same plan for two years or more. Fewer than one million people who previously had individual market insurance transitioned to being uninsured.

Myth: With Obamacare policies, millions can no longer see their doctor of choice.
Fact: There’s no evidence that those who had individual market policies that were discontinued ended up not being able to keep their own doctors under their new Obamacare-compliant policies. There is no data that indicates that those on plans from the new exchanges have more or less narrow networks than existed in the individual market previously.

Myth: Because Obamacare insurance plans are required to cover contraception, even for unmarried women, the taxpayers are being forced to subsidize sexual promiscuity. "What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her?" "It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps." - Radio personality Rush Limbaugh, speaking on women's health advocate Sandra Fluke in 2012.
Fact: Many women are prescribed birth controls pills for non-contraceptive reasons.

Myth: Doctors are leaving the medical profession because they don't like Obamacare. There's going to be a terrible shortage of physicians.
Fact: This myth comes from the distorted analysis of a couple of dubious survey questions. One was a poll of members of a right-wing fringe group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons that largely exists to fight health care reform. The other was a Physicians Foundation survey of 13,000 doctors which discovered that 60 percent of respondents would retire today if they could as compared to 45 percent who gave the same answer before Obamacare was passed into law. They were not asked whether their feelings on retirement were related to Obamacare.

Meanwhile, in reality, the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Osteopathic Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American College of Cardiology all endorsed the health care reform law. The number of primary physicians in America per 100,000 population increased from about 44 in 2010 (the year the law was passed) to 46 in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. The number of specialty physicians increased more significantly, from 60 to 65 per 100,00 population over the same time frame.

Myth: Under Obamacare policies, "You have insurance in places like U.K. and Canada, where they say, oh we cover you. But you don’t get it, because it’s rationed. That’s what’s going to happen." - Florida Governor Rick Scott
Fact: The health care law "rations" care no more nor less than the current health care system does. (The United Kingdom and Canada don't ration care either.)

Myth: Obamacare is incredibly unpopular.
Fact: It's true that slightly more people describe themselves as against the law rather than for it. However most of the folks who are against it don't have Obamacare policies. More than 70% of those who do have the policies rate them as "good" or "excellent". And despite Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, a majority of Americans want to keep the federal health care law as is, or make some changes to improve it. It's also the case that many of those who describe themselves as against the law are Democrats who feel that the law does not go far enough to reform health care. Most of the law's key provisions are very popular. In a 2012 poll, 61% of respondents favored allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26. 72% of respondents wish to maintain the requirement that companies with more than 50 workers provide health insurance for their employees. 82% of respondents favored banning insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

Myth: Republicans have a plan to replace Obamacare.
Fact: They have no plan, nor have they ever had one. I wrote about this in my last post. While Republicans have made bold talk about passing a comprehensive plan to replace health insurance for tens of millions of Americans in 2014, they are instead offering only a "messaging strategy," while quietly admitting they don't intend to do anything on the issue.

Myth: The President refused to work with Republicans on crafting the law.
Fact: The President sought compromise but Republicans refused to negotiate. Time magazine described a meeting between President Obama and congressional Republicans on health care in this way, "So, right there in the Cabinet Room, the President put a proposal on the table, according to two people who were present. Obama said he was willing to curb malpractice awards, a move long sought by the Republicans and certain to bring strong opposition from the trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party. What, he wanted to know, did the Republicans have to offer in return? Nothing, it turned out. Republicans were unprepared to make any concessions, if they had any to make." Conservative pundit David Frum, describing the attitude of his fellow Republicans said, "the intransigence of Republican leaders had thrown away opportunities to negotiate improvements in the health bill"..."we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing."

Myth: Obamacare will kill millions of jobs.
Fact: The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reports that Obamacare creates jobs. The ACA will, "boost overall demand for goods and services over the next few years because the people who will benefit from the expansion of Medicaid and from access to the exchange subsidies are predominantly in lower-income households and thus are likely to spend a considerable fraction of their additional resources on goods and services." This, the report says, "will in turn boost demand for labor over the next few years."

Myth: Obamacare is turning America into a "part-time nation" by encouraging employers to hire part-time rather than full-time so that they will not have to provide health insurance.
Fact: Private-sector employment has grown for 54 consecutive months, and, the percentage of jobs that are full-time rather than part time is rising.

Myth: The online "exchanges" for Obamacare fell dramatically short of their goals for signing up the uninsured.
Fact: The program set an ambitious goal of 7 million signups through the exchanges in the first enrollment period. The number actually signed up and paid through the exchanges in the first enrollment period was at least 7.3 million.

Myth: The President lied about the cost of Obamacare. He promised the first ten years would only cost $900 million. It will actually cost $2 billion over the next decade!
Fact: The President did suggest that the law would cost $900 million the first ten years. The Congressional Budget Office agreed, saying the expansion of coverage would cost the federal government $710 billion in the fiscal years 2015 through 2019, plus the cost in the early years before the law went fully into effect. Just recently, the CBO has lowered the $710 billion estimate to only $571 billion – the President’s $900 million estimate was actually too high! The CBO did also say that the cost of Obamacare will be $2 billion for a decade, but that's for the fiscal years 2016 through 2025.

Myth: Seniors and the disabled "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care." - Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin
Fact: A provision not part of the final legislation would have insured doctor appointments for seniors who wanted to discuss do-not-resuscitate orders, end-of-life directives and living wills. The visits would have been completely optional and only for people who wanted the appointments.

Myth: Democrats didn't even read the legislation before they passed it. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "We have to pass it so we can find out what's in it."
Fact: Nancy Pelosi said, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy." And that was true. With people like Sarah Palin spreading bald-face lies to scare people, we DID need to pass the bill so that consumers could find out what's really in it.

Next time I'll be covering myths about the deficit, climate change and a lot of other things. That is, if I can even get all the conservative myths left into only one more post. Good night and good luck.

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Republicans on Obamacare: Repeal - Yes! Replace - We'll Get Back to You...

By the fourth anniversary of its signing this past March, U.S. House Republicans had voted 54 times to fully repeal, defund and/or delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. The more time goes by of course, the greater the impact of a full repeal. A recent study by the Rand Corporation found that a net 9.3 million previously uninsured Americans gained coverage during Obamacare's first enrollment period.

No problem, say Republicans, our plan is to repeal and replace Obamacare. Mitt Romney ran on "repeal and replace" in 2012, but apparently spent all his energy working on a bunch to untruths and misinformation regarding what the ACA would and would not do, thus leaving him with little time to devote to the "replace" part of his plan. As John Avlon of the Daily Beast noted in June of 2012, "Mitt Romney still needs to decide which specific policy plan he would enact. Unclaimed ideas range from medical-malpractice reform to expanding health savings accounts to allowing insurance purchases across state lines to generic-drug importation."

And that's been the hallmark of Republican claims that they will replace Obamacare: we're working on it, nothing specific yet, we'll get back to you, we promise. With Romney's candidacy in the past, leadership on "repeal and replace" has passed to the Republican-controlled US House. This past March, in what now seems to be an incredibly gullible act of journalism on the part of the Washington Post's Robert Costa, he suggested that the Republican repeal and replace scheme was a fait accompli; not much left for them to do except vote on it:

"House Republican leaders are adopting an agreed-upon conservative approach to fixing the nation’s health-care system, in part to draw an election-year contrast with President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together. The tenets of the plan -  which could expand to include the ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations - are ideas that various conservatives have for a long time backed as part of broader bills. But this is the first time this year that House leaders will put their full force behind a single set of principles from those bills and present it as their vision. This month, House leaders will begin to share a memo with lawmakers outlining the plan, called "A Stronger Health Care System: The GOP Plan for Freedom, Flexibility, & Peace of Mind," with suggestions on how Republicans should talk about it to their constituents."

Powerful stuff, Mr. Costa. Small problem though: everything you just said about the Republican "plan" is not true. Just two days later, Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times put a less optimistic spin on the same news:

"Senior House Republicans — struggling to find consensus for health care legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act — are planning to test ideas in April at town-hall-style meetings that could provide a path toward a long-promised alternative to President Obama’s signature legislative achievement. The "House ObamaCare Accountability Project" is still months away from producing actual legislation. With Democrats opposed, Republican leaders will have a hard time finding enough votes for any plan, and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio remains cool to guaranteeing a vote."

Fast forward just six weeks, and Republicans plans seem to be in trouble. From a May msnbc.com article by Steve Benen:

"Despite months of assurances that the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act is on the way, any day now, Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) recently told his constituents what many have long suspected: "For the next six months, we're going to go into an election knowing that we’re not going to do anything to address health care."

"In fact, David Drucker reports that the 35-member House Obamacare Accountability Project – honestly, that’s what it’s called – is still plugging away. "[The] working group of about 35 GOP members, has written a “draft” proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, according to one House Republican familiar with the effort. But the group has not shared the draft with their colleagues and is engaged in an internal debate over whether their goal should be to simply introduce legislation, or also hold floor votes."

Weeks later, we don't seem to have heard much more about the House plan. Although I do note this interesting observation last month from Elise Viebeck of the Hill, "House leaders have organized a group known as HOAP — the House ObamaCare Accountability Project — to organize a messaging strategy against the law that will trickle down to constituents."

So in three months, the House leadership has gone from promising a comprehensive plan to replace health insurance for tens of millions of Americans, to offering only a "messaging strategy." Or as Speaker John Boehner said last week, "You know, the discussions about Obamacare and what the replacement bill would look like continue." You'll notice he said, "would look like" rather than "will look like," thus implying there's no reason to believe the replacement bill will ever exist in any form.

It's not surprising that Republicans have never been able to rally around an alternative health care proposal; they've never really believed that health care reform is needed. Everyone needs health insurance. Mitt Romney himself pointed out in 2010, "It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility." Of course once Romney became the Presidential nominee, he changed his tune, "Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance, ... If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and -- and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care."

The fact that Republicans don't believe that people really need health insurance apparently makes them obtuse when it comes creating viable plans to insure the unisured. The bankruptcy of conservatives on health care reform is typified by the idea that, "people should be able to buy insurance across state lines."

There's one reason why that's a terrible idea, and another why it's completely unworkable.

It's a terrible idea because buying insurance across state lines would mean the new national standard would be whichever state least regulates insurers, sets the weakest coverage minimums and makes it most difficult to sue your insurer. Or as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post put it, 

"The (insurance) industry would put its money into buying the legislature of a small, conservative, economically depressed state. The deal would be simple: Let us write the regulations and we'll bring thousands of jobs and lots of tax dollars to you. Someone will take it. The result will be an uncommonly tiny legislature in an uncommonly small state that answers to an uncommonly conservative electorate that will decide what insurance will look like for the rest of the nation."
 
The idea is also unworkable because rates in Mississippi are based on costs for care in Mississippi, not costs in California. It surprises me that this fact is not more frequently discussed in the mainstream media (or maybe it doesn't). It took me a while for find anyone saying much about it. But I finally found a good summary of the problems associated buying health insurance across state lines in an editorial in Raleigh, North Carolina's News and Observer:

"(A)n insurance company selling a policy in Arkansas wouldn't mind if I purchased such a policy so long as I went to Arkansas to use health care. If I wanted to buy a policy developed for consumers in Arkansas, but wanted to use care in North Carolina, they likely wouldn't sell it to me because the premium is based on the health care experience of someone living in Arkansas. Similarly, car insurance rates are based on loss rates in the ZIP code in which you live, because that is where you car is most often at risk of becoming a loss.

An individual health insurance premium is based on several factors: the health of the customer and therefore the expected use of care, the benefits covered, the provider network (doctors and hospitals) that patients can use and how medicine is practiced where the patient lives. State regulations influence benefits and therefore premiums. However, the way medicine is practiced (called practice patterns) where the insured person lives has a tremendous influence on premiums, but it greatly affects the expected losses of an insurance company."

Americans have made it clear they don't want what little Republicans have to offer on this subject. A HuffPost poll in April showed only 17% of Americans want Obamacare replaced with a Republican-sponsored alternative. It's also hard for Republicans to continue to claim any credibility on the subject. Republican predictions that Obamacare would not reach enrollment goals were wrong. Conservatives predicted skyrocketing insurance and healthcare costs; instead year over year insurance cost increases will probably be less than in the past as will the cost for care.

Republican rhetoric on health care is a lot like their rhetoric on taxation, the economy, foreign policy, and, well, pretty much every other subject I can think of. Once you start to compare what Republicans say and how the world actually works, Republican policy doesn't look very good.

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Auditing the IRS Controversy: There Is No More "Scandal," Folks

A conservative friend reminded the other day, as they often do, that President Obama used the IRS to target Tea Party-friendly political groups. On the one hand, my inclination is to dismiss the suggestion as quite ridiculous. And not just because I don't think President Obama would try to use the IRS to attack political enemies. One thing that conservatives just refuse to understand: liberals LIKE the Tea Party people because they hurt the Republican party far more than they help it. The Tea Party helps nominate extremist candidates, which, among other things, caused the GOP to lose five Senate races  between 2010 and 2012 that it otherwise would likely have won. Leading Republicans admit this, with even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell boasting that when Tea Party candidates attempt to defeat the Republican establishment, he will help, "crush them everywhere." And when it comes campaign contributions, Tea Party leaders are also, quite frankly, a bunch of thieves. Consider Sarah Palin's political action committee, created to solicit money for Tea Party Republican candidates. In one quarter of 2012, Palin's PAC raised $388,000 and gave exactly zero dollars to candidates while compensating PAC staff members with lavish salaries.

On the other hand, if I'm going to argue the reality of the "2013 IRS Scandal," I have to have the facts at my command. And man oh man has it been hard to understand what really happened here, given the widespread misinformation campaign Republicans have conducted on the subject. So I'll take up the facts first, and the lying later.

Part I: What Happened

Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code  exempts civic organizations "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" from having to pay federal income tax. The IRS has traditionally permitted organizations described in IRC 501(c)(4) to engage in lobbying and political campaign activities if those activities are not the organization's primary activity. In May, 2013 Acting Commissioner of the IRS Steven Miller revealed that applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups had been inappropriately singled out for extra scrutiny and Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division Lois Lerner stated that the IRS was "apologetic" for what she termed "absolutely inappropriate" actions. That same month, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released an audit report confirming that the IRS used inappropriate criteria to identify potential political cases in applications for tax-exempt status, including organizations with "Tea Party" in their names. It would subsequently be revealed that this audit was flawed and inaccurate, as it falsely stated that, "the IRS did not use inappropriate criteria to scrutinize groups with "progressives" in their name seeking tax-exempt status." Further investigation revealed that certain terms and themes in the applications of liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny. When this additional information came to light, Democratic Congressman Sandy Levin of Michigan noted that, "the Inspector General’s report left out critical information that skewed the audit’s findings." In July, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George attempted to explain the discrepancy by claiming that the fact that progressive groups were also targeted had been unknown to him when he had written his report in May. (It turns out there was a very good reason George was unaware that progressive groups had also been targeted. More on that later.)

By September, 2013 Miller, Lerner and Joseph Grant, commissioner of the agency's tax-exempt and government entities division, had all resigned from the IRS. In January 2014, the FBI announced that it had found no evidence warranting the filing of federal criminal charges in connection with the scandal. The FBI also stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting." In other words, IRS employees did not maliciously manipulate the process.

And that, essentially, is the whole story in term of the IRS actions. Did the IRS really do anything wrong? Actually it didn't, as far as I can tell. As blogger Jed Lewison of dailykos.com put it,

"the IRS didn't target conservative groups exclusively. Liberal groups were targeted as well. And the reason they were targeted was understandable: They were applying for a special tax-exemption. In other words, this wasn't a case of the IRS going after political opponents; it was a case of groups seeking special privileges and being upset when the IRS asked them to provide evidence proving they qualified for those privileges."

And let's not kid ourselves here. If anyone's doing something wrong, it's the political action committees claiming to be "social welfare" organizations not primarily engaged in political campaigns. Political campaigns are not just their primary engagement, they are their ONLY engagement. Some folks are showing concern over this contradiction. In August, 2013 Democratic Congressmen Chris Van Hollen filed suit against the IRS seeking to overturn the rule that allows 501(c)(4) social welfare groups to engage in political activity. Noting that the law requires such groups to be "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare," Van Hollen said, "The law is clear. What do you want us to do, put an exclamation point after exclusively?"

Part II: What Didn't Happen

As I said before: there's really nothing more to this story in terms of what the IRS did or didn't do. Unless of course, you're California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. For the past year, Congressman Issa has used his position to channel the ghost of Senator Joe McCarthy, launching baseless attacks against political enemies, conducting highly partisan faux-investigations, lying about those investigations and what they found and in general attempting to bully and/or silence those who have attempted to gainsay his preconceived conclusions.

In June of last year, while investigation of the IRS actions was still going on, Congressman Issa began making some explosive allegations: that officials in the Obama administration were aware that Tea Party groups had been inappropriately singled-out for scrutiny before the matter became public. "My gut tells me that too many people knew that this wrongdoing was going on before the election," Issa said, "and at least by some sort of convenient, benign neglect allowed it to go on through the election." It was particularly bold for Issa to claim that, "the indication is (IRS agents in field offices) were directly being ordered from Washington," to conduction the inappropriate investigations, given that in the limited excerpts of interviews of IRS agents provided by Issa's office, the agents made it clear they had no idea whether instructions to scrutinize Tea Party groups came from Washington or not.

Within days of making these accusations, it became clear that the Treasury inspector general's report was flawed and inaccurate, and that there was an easy explanation as to why this was so. As mentioned earlier, J. Russell George's audit of the IRS actions in May, 2013 falsely claimed that the IRS did not use inappropriate criteria to scrutinize groups with "progressives" in their name seeking tax-exempt status. George would later say this was because the documents that showed IRS workers also were told to look for liberal-themed labels, "were not provided during our audit."

And why was George not provided with those documents? From Bernie Becker of the Hill, 

"The Treasury inspector general (IG) whose report helped drive the IRS targeting controversy says it limited its examination to conservative groups because of a request from House Republicans.

A spokesman for Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, said they were asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) "to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations.""

 In other words, here's what happened. The IRS had originally revealed the inappropriate targeting of certain groups. Instead of asking for a comprehensive investigation, Congressman Issa asked the IG to focus his examination exclusively on the 501(c)(4) applications of Tea Party and conservative groups. Having received the expected response that yes, it's been confirmed that Tea Party groups were targeted, and no, there's no indication that progressive groups were targeted, Issa was then able to argue convincingly, at least to some people, that persons high up in the Obama administration had either ordered the targeting or had at least been aware of it and used it to their advantage.

Furthermore, it subsequently became known, when the full transcripts of the interviews with IRS agents were eventually released, that IRS agents had made it very clear in those interviews that they were not, as Issa had suggested, acting on orders from Washington. According to Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, the interview transcript with a key IRS manger provides,

"a detailed first-hand account of how these practices first originated, and it debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases.  Answering questions from Committee staff for more than five hours, this official — who identified himself as a “conservative Republican” — denied that he or anyone on his team was directed by the White House to take these actions or that they were politically motivated. Instead, the Screening Group Manager explained that the very first case at issue in this investigation was initially flagged by one of his own screeners in February 2010."

Sargent also notes that,

"This comes after (Democratic Congressman Elijah) Cummings had previously insisted Issa release the full transcript himself, arguing it would show that the Republican chairman’s claims of White House involvement are false, and that Issa’s own selective release of testimony was misleading the public. Issa refused, insisting that releasing full transcripts would damage the investigation. Cummings then asked Issa to detail what specifically in the transcript would do this, and demanded an answer by yesterday. According to Cummings’ letter, Issa has yet to reply — hence the decision to go forward with the release today."

So, to summarize Congressman Issa's actions so far. In May, 2013 the Inspector General released the results of its skewed investigation. Issa then used the results of that investigation, along with excerpts from interviews with IRS agents that he refused to release publicly, to make demonstrably false statements about what the IRS was and was not doing, then made additional false accusations against the White House based on those false statements.

And how has Issa responded to being caught in his own tangled web of lies and deceit? Has he resigned in disgrace? Or at least apologized to those he's lied to, manipulated and/or falsely accused? Not hardly. Months later, Issa is still conducting his "investigation" as if nothing is wrong with what he's doing.

After June of 2013, when the Washington Post article cited above appeared, there wasn't really anything left to say about the IRS actions. Yet in September, Issa's Committee managed to publish a report on its further investigation into the matter. According to this report, the IRS singled-out Tea Peaty groups for inappropriate scrutiny because President Obama and congressional leaders had severely criticized the growth of 501(c)(4) groups and "soft-money" in politics. I'm going to let the hyper-conservative quasi-newspaper the Washington Times speak for the report for the moment. I wouldn't quote the Times, except it's literally the only source I could find that chose to report on the subject:

"As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently," the staff report concludes. "Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general."

In other words, according to this report, President Obama and other Democrats are to blame for the IRS actions, because, (again, in the words of the Times) "IRS employees were "acutely" aware in 2010 that President Obama wanted to crack down on conservative organizations and were egged into targeting tea party groups by press reports mocking the emerging movement." Is there any truth to this? It depends on your point of view I suppose. IRS officials have gone on record as stating that they were concerned enough about media attention regarding political groups applying for 501(c)(4) status that they gave those applications extra scrutiny. But we knew that already. And the report  makes no mention of the fact that progressive groups were also given extra scrutiny. That information undermines the report's claim that conservatives groups specifically, and not just political groups in general, were given extra, inappropriate attention. And given that progressive groups were also targeted, it's just as easy to suggest that media attention spurred by criticism of progressive groups by leading Republicans was the catalyst for that extra scrutiny as it is to suggest that Tea Party groups were given extra scrutiny based on the public statements of leading Democrats.

It's been most of a year since anything of substance was revealed about the IRS actions, yet Congressman Issa's witch hunt rolls on. Last year, former IRS official Lois Lerner invoked her 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination when testifying before Issa's Committee. Last week, Issa forced Lerner back in the witness chair, claiming that she hadn't actually waived her 5th Amendment rights. Why did Issa do this? The suggestion among conservatives of course, is that Lerner must be hiding something, and if so, there's still a reason for Issa's farcical investigation to continue.

At that March 5th hearing, Lerner again refused to testify. Democratic Committee member Elijah Cummings then pointed out, quite astutely I thought, that (quoting Eric Loch of Talking Points Memo),

"the committee has obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of witnesses, that the IRS had spent millions of dollars, and that "we have found no evidence to support allegations of a political conspiracy against conservative groups.""

Chairman Issa responded to this outburst by cutting off Congressman Cummings' microphone. Is there any chance someone will cut off Congressman Issa's endless investigation? I'm afraid not. 2014 is an election year, and Republicans intend to squeeze this scandal for everything it's worth no matter how much of the public's time and money they waste.

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