'A Thick Questionnaire from the IRS is a 'Behavior Changer''

Is this little-noticed quote by Lois Lerner the reason that she took the Fifth in the IRS abuse scandal?

Lois Lerner, the IRS’s director of tax-exempt organizations who is overseeing the investigation, says many schools are rethinking how and what they report to the government. Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a “behavior changer.”

Lerner gave that quote to Business Week in November 2011. She was speaking about a different matter than the IRS abuse of Tea Party groups, but the quote speaks eloquently to her attitude on the use of her government power. At the time she gave that quote, the IRS had been abusing Tea Party groups with thick questionnaires for more than a year. And Lerner was well aware of it, and of her own abuses when she worked at the Federal Election Commission.

Her attitude also lines up very well with the attitude we’ve seen from the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama. Recall former EPA honcho Al Armendariz and his Roman moment.

EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariaz: “I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said:

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean.  They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.

“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

The only presidential responsibility that Barack Obama has been willing to accept lately is setting the tone. Well, here’s the tone he set through personnel. It seems that the Obama administration is infested with people who want to punish and manage the American people, not serve us. They want a government not of the people, by the people and for the people, but directed at the people.

h/t Powerline, Patterico