ANALYSIS/OPINION:

As Donald Trump finishes the first year of his presidency, the greatest political scandal story of the last generation is being mostly ignored.

In May 2013, then-IRS official Lois Lerner admitted the Internal Revenue Service had been targeting conservative groups in general, and Tea Party groups in particular. Mrs. Lerner was not trying to clear her conscience. The Treasury Department’s Inspector General was about to release a damning reporting on the politicization of the IRS and how that agency was targeting political opponents of the Obama regime.

Mrs. Lerner’s actions did not happen in a vacuum. Ninety-four percent of political contributions from IRS employees went to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Over at the Department of Justice, things were worse. Ninety-seven percent of the contributions from the Department of Justice went to Hillary Clinton and 3 percent went to Donald Trump.

But the Department of Justice’s contributions to the Hillary Clinton were not just limited to the cash employees donated. FBI agent Peter Strzok did everything he could to help the Clinton campaign. The married agent was not satisfied with simply sending derogatory texts about Donald Trump to his mistress. He changed the language in then-FBI Director James Comey’s memo about classified information being stored on Hillary Clinton’s homemade email server.

Mr. Strzok changed the wording describing Mrs. Clinton’s actions from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” The significance of that is that the grossly negligent handing of classified information is a crime. Had that language stayed in Mr. Comey’s memo, it would have been all but an indictment of the Democrat nominee.

This is more than a few people engaged in political activities. This is the complete weaponization of the government bureaucracy.

Every Republican should be screaming about this from the tallest building in the nation. America is a constitutional republic. In banana republics, the ruling parties use the government bureaucracy to shut down opposition parties. This happens in such wonderful places as Venezuela and Cuba.

While Republicans are sitting on the sidelines, sucking their thumbs on this issue, the Democrats are embracing this. For liberals, government and the power of government, is just another arm of their political power.

This is a battle Republicans cannot afford to lose.

President Trump announced his goal to drain the D.C. swap. The swamp cannot be drained and liberty will not be guaranteed until, to paraphrase Grover Norquist, we make the government so small, it can be dragged upstairs and drowned in a bathtub.

Ronald Reagan once said, “Government isn’t the solution, it is the problem.” Government that is nothing more than an arm of one political party is not a problem. It is a nightmare.

The amount of freedom and the size of government are a zero sum game. Any expansion in government must come at the cost of liberty.

If Republicans are serious about their commitment to liberty and freedom, there is only one option. The swamp must be drained. There must be a wholesale elimination of government departments and agencies. Civil service must be abolished and a lot of government workers need to be told to find other jobs.

If the Republican Party once again, haul up their freshly laundered white flag of surrender on the issue of a weaponized government that can be used against the enemies of the Democrats, America’s days as a free nation are over.

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