A Few Thoughts on the IRS Targeting Scandal

A few thoughts on this recent development that the White House had nothing to do with the alleged targeting of conservative groups by the IRS.

We know that people engage in motivated reasoning when making decisions, and Chairman Issa’s failure to prove the White House was behind the scandal suggests motivated reasoning was at play here. This is the second time something like this has happened to Chairman Issa, both with this situation and with Benghazi. What I mean is that the Chairman asserted bad behavior by the President with very little evidence ahead of time, and the administration was later cleared by his own committee. A lot of political science assumes that elites are more or less rational and acutely aware of the political environment they exist within. The failure of Issa’s committee to choose the right issues to investigate is also a failure of Issa’s political awareness, and suggests to me that he wasn’t viewing the landscape objectively but instead through his own partisan lens — disregarding information that disagreed with his views and giving more weight to favorable information. That happens to regular folks, but I wouldn’t expect it from an elite like Issa.
A pretty famous paper argues that oversight committees really only exercise their oversight power when “the building is burning down.” What seems more accurate, at least in the modern era, is that oversight committees will harass the administration with subpoenas and document requests when the President is from a different party than the chamber majority. Instead of caring much about oversight for its own sake, oversight committees are more concerned with their electoral incentives and scoring political points.
Doesn’t it seem like Henry Waxman was a more effective chairman of this committee when he was going after President Bush? Here’s an example. Waxman never put all his eggs in one basket, and went after the President on a “dozen fronts.” If any of them flamed out, it didn’t matter as much, because he had other pokers in the fire. Issa has had two high-profile issues this Congress, and they’ve both failed. The Waxman strategy seems like the better one to me.