"The idea that politicians should write laws restricting people critical of them is as perverse as the idea that the sprawling, opaque IRS bureaucracy should be assigned to construe and apply such laws. It is bad enough that there is the misbegotten Federal Election Commission to do what the First Amendment forbids — government regulation of the quantity, content and timing of political speech.  

"This column has previously noted that in 1996 a Republican Senate candidate called the FEC to dispute campaign finance charges made by Democrats. The head of the FEC’s enforcement division told the Republican: 'Promise me you will never run for office again, and we will drop this case.' So spoke Lois Lerner.  

"There almost certainly are people, above her and beyond the IRS, who initiated or approved the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerner’s history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises. Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys."

"What a small and politically vicious man New York's new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn't like charter schools. ... 

"Some 70,000 of the city's one million students, most black or Hispanic, attend charter schools, mostly in poorer neighborhoods. Charter schools are privately run but largely publicly financed. Their teachers are not unionized. Their students usually outscore their counterparts at conventional public schools on state tests. Success Academy does particularly well. Last year 82% of its students passed citywide math exams. Citywide the figure was 30%.

"These are schools that work. They are something to be proud of and encourage. 

"The very existence of charter schools is an implicit rebuke to the public schools. It means they are not succeeding, and something new must be tried. That something new won't be perfect — no charter school is, and some are more imperfect than others — but people still line up to get into them. And there's something to the wisdom of crowds. When a school exists for the students, you can tell. When it exists for the unions, you can tell that too."

"A new poll by the Washington Post shows that amnesty is a vote-loser for GOP legislators. 

"The poll of 1,002 adults shows that pluralities of independents and moderates oppose candidates who support amnesty, which was euphemistically dubbed 'a path to citizenship' by the poll designers. 

"The poll showed that 41 percent of independents and 37 percent of moderates were less likely to vote for an amnesty-backer. 

"Only 28 percent of independents and moderates said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who backs amnesty.  ...

"The poll also showed that the GOP’s opposition to amnesty doesn’t lower their one-in-four support among Latinos."

"After dozens of delays of various aspects of ObamaCare, Democrats are still facing a tsunami of voter anger this fall in midterm elections that are looking more and more like a disaster for the president’s party. The administration’s answer to their plight is simple: delay more implementation of the president’s unpopular and misnamed Affordable Care Act. ... 

"The political motivations for this move are obvious. Prior to the rollout of ObamaCare last fall, Democrats drew a line in the sand on any delay of the president’s signature health care law. Rather than push back the implementation of the legislation a single day, they allowed the government to be shut down for weeks causing untold suffering to the American people. That was a political masterstroke. The mainstream media blamed the GOP for the fiasco since their demands for delaying or defunding the law seen as unreasonable and unrealistic. What a difference a few months makes."

"Americans still awaiting the full truth about the Obama administration's IRS targeting tea party groups for excessive scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle should applaud House Republicans' efforts to compel testimony from a woman at the center of that scandal. ... 

"With the Obama administration still defending the indefensible, recalling Lerner to testify shows that Mr. Issa and his committee aren't backing down in their efforts to document the full extent of politically motivated IRS abuses — which the American people have every right to know."

"The United States already has a rather good regulation regarding government oversight of political speech, which is that there isn’t to be any. The First Amendment ought to be the last word on the subject. ... Congress has the authority to rewrite the rules about who qualifies as a tax-exempt nonprofit, should it choose to do so, but the IRS plainly does not have the power to regulate away political speech where it is explicitly authorized. 

"The IRS has willfully and intentionally misled Congress and the American people about the scope and nature of its actions targeting political opponents of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. ... 

"The IRS does not inspire confidence as a practitioner of self-regulation, much less as a regulator of political speech."

“The rule proposed by the Department of Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service would effect a stunning and unprecedented restriction on core political speech by thousands of nonprofit organizations.  The proposed rule would sweep broad categories of previously exempt activities into a newly-created category called ‘candidate-related political activity’ (‘CRPA’), which would not be considered tax exempt ‘social welfare’ activity.  By this one bold stroke, the proposal would flout the mandate of Congress in numerous respects, effect an inappropriate partisan agenda, and impose restrictions on protected First Amendment activities more pervasive and intrusive than ever considered, to our knowledge, by any Congress or any federal agency.  The apparent assumption that ‘anything goes’ in restricting political speech in exchange for a tax exemption is seriously mistaken.  The proposed rule must be withdrawn and abandoned.”

"The mainstream press has justified its lack of coverage over the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups because there's been no 'smoking gun' tying President Obama to the scandal. This betrays a remarkable, if not willful, failure to understand abuse of power. The political pressure on the IRS to delay or deny tax-exempt status for conservative groups has been obvious to anyone who cares to open his eyes. It did not come from a direct order from the White House, but it didn't have to. ... 

"In 1170, King Henry II is said to have cried out, on hearing of the latest actions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?' Four knights then murdered the archbishop. Many in the U.S. media still willfully refuse to see anything connecting the murder of the archbishop to any actions or abuse of power by the king."

"In a colossal 'oh by the way' revelation, last Friday afternoon the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency under the United States Department of Health and Human Services (that would be the executive branch run by President Obama), quietly released a report exposing the fact that under Obamacare, two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see their insurance premiums increase. So this report – which is more than two years late – says over 11 million American workers will have higher health insurance premiums because of Obamacare. ... 

"When you want to hide something in Washington, you release it on a Friday afternoon – but this latest Obamacare revelation is too big to ignore."

"Losing a job is freedom from job lock. A budget deficit larger than in any previous administration is austerity. A mean right-wing video caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda was long ago washed up. The Muslim Brotherhood is secular. Jihad is a personal journey. Shooting people while screaming Allahu akbar! is workplace violence. Unaffordable higher premiums and deductibles are the result of an Affordable Care Act. Losing your doctor and your health-insurance plan prove you will never lose your doctor and your health-insurance plan — period! Being a constitutional lawyer means you know how to turn the IRS and the FCC on your enemies. Failure is success; lies are truth. 

"President Obama’s polls are creeping back up again. They do that every time the latest in the series of scandals — the IRS, AP, NSA, Benghazi, and Obamacare messes — recedes into the media memory hole. The once-outrageous IRS scandal was rebranded as psychodramatic journalists being outraged. The monitoring of AP reporters and of James Rosen is mostly 'Stuff happens.'  The NSA octopus was Bush’s creation. You can keep your doctor and your health plan — period — begat liberation from 'job lock' and the ability to write poetry because you don’t have to work. 

"There will be more momentary outrages on the horizon, as a president who would fundamentally transform America continues to circumvent the Constitution to do it."