The Hill:
The IRS hoped to have turned the corner on its Tea Party controversy by now.
Not by a long shot.
In fact, the agency will face no shortage of severe challenges over the next six months, as it stares down another potential budget cut and serves as a punching bag for GOP presidential candidates.
And that’s not even getting into the House Republicans now pushing to remove the agency’s commissioner from office, insisting that John Koskinen didn’t give them the truth about Lois Lerner’s missing emails.
“John Koskinen needs to go. Plain and simple,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of the IRS’s most strident critics, said Friday.
The difficult autumn that looms for the IRS comes after the agency’s brass had hoped that a Senate Finance Committee report, released early this month, would have eased some of the pressure after 27 months of congressional investigations.
But the Finance Committee — long viewed as the best chance for a true bipartisan conclusion — deadlocked on the questions at the center of the IRS’s singling out of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status: Was there intentional targeting of conservative organizations because of their political beliefs? And did the White House have any influence over the IRS’s actions?
That stalemate means that the partisan views over the IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups are basically fixed in place, making it more difficult for Koskinen to make progress on two of his stated goals — reversing the agency’s budget slide, and helping put the Tea Party matter to bed.