What are we up to now? 18 if my count is right.
One week ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Republican officials, led by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, used the Treasury Department to orchestrate GOP talking points on John Kerry’s economic plan.
The Treasury tapped civil servants to calculate the cost of Sen. John Kerry’s tax plan and then posted the analysis on the Treasury Web site. A federal law bars career government officials from working on political campaigns.
The Treasury analysis doesn’t mention Mr. Kerry by name. Rather it sketches out the potential cost of a tax plan that rolls back tax reductions for taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 — the nub of the Democratic presidential candidate’s plan. The result, the Treasury said in the analysis posted March 22, would be a tax increase of as much as $477 billion over 10 years on “hardworking individuals and married couples.” The same day, the Republican National Committee issued a press release in which it unveiled what it called its “John Kerry $pendometer,” and cited the same $477 billion figure as the cost of “raising taxes on the top income bracket.”
This kind of abuse undermines the credibility and reputation of the Treasury Department and challenges the objectivity of career public officials who aren’t supposed to be playing any role in partisan politics.
Apparently the Treasury Department’s inspector general’s office agrees. He announced yesterday that a “preliminary” investigation is being launched.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general is looking into the agency’s decision to analyze presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s tax proposals. “We’re going to do a preliminary inquiry into what was produced,” Richard Delmar, counsel in the Office of Inspector General, said Tuesday.
Kudos to New Jersey’s Sen. Frank Lautenberg for keeping the pressure on.
The department’s analysis of Kerry’s plan had ignited criticism from some Democrats, including Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who wanted Treasury’s inspector general to determine whether any laws were broken.
“This ‘preliminary inquiry’ should be a full-blown investigation into whether or not administration officials violated laws by using federal property and taxpayer dollars to finance the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Lautenberg said Tuesday.
Kerry’s campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, welcomed the inquiry. “The use of government employees to analyze John Kerry’s economic plan is an illegal use of resources,” she said.
Another GOP abuse, another scandal, another probe into Republican malfeasance. These guys never learn.