Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Last week saw the passage of a grim milestone in government corruption: Pepperdine University Law Professor Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog marked the 1000th day of the scandal involving the IRS’s deliberate political targeting of conservative “Tea Party” groups. There are some lessons in this, and they’re mostly bad news.

The first sad lesson is that the notion of an impartial, professional civil service is a fiction. The big government designs of Democrats and the federal bureaucracy are aligned, and the bureaucracy often deploys its powers in ways calculated to frustrate Republican presidents and to protect Democratic ones.

This is an open secret in Washington, leading Bloomberg View writer Megan McArdle to comment that even if elected, a President Trump wouldn’t change much because the bureaucracy wouldn’t go along:

“Anything that gets done by Washington must be done by the civil service. These folks are lifers. You can’t fire them. Because of the abovementioned legislative compromises required, you also can’t push a bill through that will let you fire them. And they — not the president, and not the cabinet secretaries — are the folks who do most of what government does. The president can wave his hands like Jean-Luc Picard and say, ‘Make it so.’ But if they don’t wanna, they ain’t gonna.”

This should be infuriating to anyone who actually believes in democratic governance, but on the other hand, since most political ideas are half-baked, anything that slows them down is probably a good idea.

But what happened in the IRS scandal wasn’t a case of bureaucrats slow-walking ideas they think are dumb. It was, instead, a case of bureaucrats targeting people because of their political views.

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Ohio Tea Party activist Justin Binik-Thomas noticed in 2012 that the IRS was asking Tea Party organizations if they knew him. The IRS denied that it was targeting people based on their political views, then admitted that it was doing so but blamed low-level employees in the Cincinnati office.

Then it turned out that, as the Treasury Inspector General found, there was much more going on. The next day, the acting IRS commissioner resigned.

There was much talk about accountability, even from President Obama, but, in the end, we got something that looked more like a whitewash. As Caron wrote:

"On May 22, 2013, the IRS director (of exempt organizations) asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify before a House committee. She was placed on administrative leave . The following month, it was revealed that she received a $42,000 bonus. She retired in September.

"On Jan. 9, 2014 , it was revealed that the Department of Justice attorney leading the investigation was a donor to the president's campaigns. A week later, the Justice Department revealed it would not bring any criminal charges. Attorneys for many of the targeted political groups complained that they had never been contacted in the investigation.

"On Feb. 2, 2014, the president stated in a televised interview before the Super Bowl that although there 'were some bone-headed decisions out of a local (IRS) office ... (there was) not even a smidgen of corruption.'

"On May 7, 2014, the House voted 231-187 to hold the former IRS director in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in its investigation ( six members of the president's party voted with the majority). The House also voted 250-168 to request the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate ( 26 members of the president's party voted with the majority)."

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Of course, nothing happened. Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that the U.S. Attorney was using "prosecutorial discretion.” That discretion protected Lerner from the grand jury.

As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized, this sets an ugly precedent. Under the Obama administration, officials are above the law — at least so long as they’re targeting Obama’s political opponents. Accountability? Rule of Law? That’s just for the little people.

And that’s the worst outcome of all. It’s not just that evidence overwhelmingly points to the IRS having been weaponized in an effort to neutralize Obama’s Tea Party opposition. It’s that ordinary Americans can look at this and conclude that there’s no reason to follow the law if they can get away with breaking it since the people in charge of enforcing the law clearly regard it with contempt.

In an influential essay several years back, Gonzalo Lira warned of the coming middle-class anarchy, when ordinary Americans decide to be no more lawful than they have to be.

There are plenty of nations that work that way — where both the ruling class and the ruled view the law with contempt and obey it only when forced to. Such places are, generally, not as nice as places where the rule of law pertains. But avoiding that kind of outcome requires principles and self-discipline on the part of the ruling class, something that contemporary America conspicuously lacks. Welcome to the era of hope and change.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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