Other than "downplaying federal crimes committed by the president," the modern Republican Party cherishes nothing more than finding innovative ways to lighten the financial burdens of the millionaires and billionaires who support it. This is most evident, of course, in its signature accomplishment of the 115th Congress: a $1.5 trillion tax cut for very wealthy people, propped up by the usual gamut of vague, Reaganomics-type assurances that the gaping new hole in the federal deficit would "pay for itself." During campaign season, after it became clear that this promise was a lie, Paul Ryan and company promptly pivoted to running ads about MS-13 instead.

An astonishing new report from The Atlantic and ProPublica, however, reveals that the party's most prominent display of corporate generosity is not necessarily the most lucrative one. Thanks to the GOP's decades-long war on the Internal Revenue Service, the federal government's ability to collect legally-owed taxes has reached a historical nadir, as deep budget cuts have hamstrung efforts to fulfill basic responsibilities—like, among many others, hiring professionals to catch people who might be good at evading taxes.

And guess who stands to benefit the most from the agency's slow-motion failure?

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme—and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.

Investigations of nonfilers—people who skip submitting their returns altogether—have plummeted, from 2.4 million in 2011 to just 362,000 last year, and untold billions of dollars in uncollected tax debts expire each year after the ten-year statue of limitations runs its course. Nearly every statistic reeks of good old-fashioned American inequality: Audits are down across all income brackets, but the drop has been most precipitous among the wealthy, from 8 percent of those making more than a half-million dollars in 2011 to just 2.5 percent in 2017. During that period, audits of filers making less than $25,000 per year fell by just one-half a point, from 1.2 percent to 0.7 percent. Current and former IRS employees interviewed for the piece fear that the country could be on the verge of an era of brazen tax cheating from which it cannot recover.

This is, by any objective metric, bad: a catastrophic failure of law enforcement that deprives an already cash-strapped government of, at the very least, hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year. (A properly-funded IRS, the article notes, is one of the few federal agencies that could actually operate in the black.) But as my colleague Drew Magary wrote earlier this year, conservatism is, at its core, a tool used to justify the continued exploitation of poor people. For Republicans, these strategic omissions are as important to their constituencies as the affirmative act of passing the tax reform bill. In public, the GOP delivers another long-awaited discount to the privileged; behind the scenes, it grins and winks—a reminder that for them, in America, even paying that meager amount is optional.

The fact that a minority of Americans favor this fundamentally unjust arrangement is what drives literally everything the modern Republican Party does. Racists, bigots, and anodyne-sounding "social conservatives" have no inherent interest in kleptocracy, and vice versa. But the need to cobble together a coalition capable of winning elections has compelled the fiscal conservative establishment to make those groups' pet issues into key components of its political platform. The Venn diagram of climate change truthers and angry right-wingers consists of two concentric circles, because acknowledging science would create an undeniable moral obligation to do things that corporate benefactors do not want.

Even the aforementioned criminality denial is a pragmatic choice, because allowing a sitting president to break the law without consequences is, to Republicans, a less odious outcome than jeopardizing their power to enrich rich people, now and in 2020 and forever. The party of law and order always finds a way to forget about those things whenever remembering them might one day result in its donor class being held the tiniest bit accountable.