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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Firing Government Employees Is Too Hard; the Constitution Intended for It to Be Easier

by Hans Bader on May 22, 2013 in Economy, Employment, Legal

It’s hard to get rid of a career bureaucrat, even at the managerial level. “After you’ve been here for a year, it’s easier to kill you than fire you.” That’s what my co-workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics would tell me on a sunny day, after we’d used up our lunch hour, but wanted to walk around the National Mall rather than go back to work. I was reminded of this when I learned that not one IRS employee has been so much as reprimanded for their role in making incredibly burdensome, intrusive, and unconstitutional demands for irrelevant information from non-profit groups critical of the government. (By contrast, the head of the IRS was forced to leave his position a month earlier than he wished, in a presidential “firing” designed to create the illusion of accountability.) As Reason magazine notes:
The IRS has admitted to sitting on applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups for political reasons.

According to the government’s own investigation, applications containing terms such as Tea Party and Patriot were singled out for delays and holds even as groups with liberal-sounding names like “Bus for Progress” and “Progress Florida” sailed through the process.

President Obama said “the report’s findings are intolerable and inexcusable” and even fired the acting head of the Internal Revenue Service.

But “intolerable and inexcusable” doesn’t mean any consequences, at least not yet. Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS Exempt Organization Division, is now pleading the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering any questions. (Even left-leaning fact-checkers say she has lied to the public.)To Read More….

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