The IRS Commissioner Really Ought to Go

The news today that the IRS never bothered to look for Lois Lerner's supposedly "missing" emails in response to requests from Congress means that the IRS Commissioner ought to be fired or impeached. Once again, it was an inspector general (this one for the Treasury Department) who blew the whistle.  The IG told Congress that of six possible locations where the Lerner email could be, the IRS looked, at most, at only one which was Lerner's hard drive.  The IRS never looked at the backup taped, the servers, the backup to the servers, the loaner computers used when others had problems or Lerner's phone which had email storage.  Remember, the main requests of the IRS Commissioner for a search for Lerner's email came after the IRS disclosed that Lerner's hard drive had crashed and had then been destroyed.  Simply put, the IRS did nothing, NOTHING, in response to a Congressional request for Lerner's emails.  That is bad enough, but the Commissioner than went before Congress and testified under oath that the IRS had made enormous efforts to find Lerner's emails.  It was a blatant lie in view of what the inspector general had to say.

Let's forget Lerner and the IRS misconduct with regard to the conservative and Christian groups seeking tax exemptions.  We need focus only on the response by the IRS Commissioner to a direct and repeated request by Congress for information.  That response was to ignore the request by Congress and then to lie about what was being done.  It is exactly the sort of conduct that ought to lead to the firing of the IRS Commissioner.  If president Obama won't fire the Commissioner, then the House ought to start proceedings to remove the Commissioner.  It's just that simple.