Reagan biographer and conservative political guru Craig Shirley has made a powerful case on Breitbart’s Big Government for our position that the Tea Party victims of IRS discrimination must be made whole.



You can read the entire article here.



In our estimation, Shirley’s key point is this:

“Conspiracy is not too tough a word to use or to say in polite company that the Tea Parties were denied their civil rights to political participation by their own government and outside agitators.



Many questions are begged. Did outside liberal groups conspire with the IRS against the Tea Party? Did Republican Establishment types conspire with the IRS to censor the Tea Party? If so, how high up did the conspiracy go inside the two major parties, both of which had something to gain with the marginalization and/or destruction of the Tea Party movement?”

Craig Shirley is exactly right to ask these questions, because as he pointed out elsewhere in the op-ed, it wasn’t ALL political opponents of President Obama who were the subject of IRS discrimination.



It was chiefly those who were not part of the Washington establishment, and not part of the Big Business-dominated inside-the-Beltway GOP.



The real IRS vendetta was aimed at the Tea Party movement and not, as Craig Shirley observed, at the myriad GOP inside-the-beltway groups like American Crossroads or Americans for Job Security or any of the other interlocking GOP seen as front groups for corporate America.



Why was this?



One answer Shirley posited in a May 16 post to Townhall is that, “that the IRS did not think them worthy of harassing, or even worse, [they are] on the same side as the IRS. In other words, the IRS saw the GOP as too feckless to worry about. Either explanation is not very appealing for the national Republicans.”



And what “side” are the IRS, Democrats and establishment Republicans all on?



The side of Big Government and more power for inside-the-Beltway Washington bureaucrats and the professional political class, that’s which side.



The unmistakable targeting by the IRS of those who are working to shrink the power and size of the federal government is one reason investigators, such as The American Spectator’s Jeffery Lord, have begun to ask a lot of questions about the possible role of the National Treasury Employees Union, and its anti-Tea Party President Colleen Kelley, in the scandal.



The common denominator in this scandal is that the organizations targeted were not just opponents of President Obama, they were groups motivated by non-establishment or anti-establishment principles -- especially the idea of shrinking the size and power of the federal government.



Once you begin to look at the IRS political targeting scandal from that perspective, the Obama administration’s “we were merely incompetent, not evil” excuse quickly dissolves and the likelihood of the spoken or unspoken conspiracy Craig Shirley suggests leaves the realm of barroom speculation and enters the realm of a possibility demanding serious investigation.