“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” - quote attributed to Peruvian General Oscar Benvanides
It is said that there are so many laws on the books that just about anyone, at any time, could be arrested for *something.* Another way of putting this is that the law is always being selectively enforced. It’s impossible to cite, arrest or otherwise intervene in every instance in which someone might have engaged in conduct contrary to existing civil and criminal statutes. I was once pulled over because the light illuminating my license plate in the back of my car had gone out. Not my tail lights, mind you. But a light that I did not know existed until I was stopped by a cop (I was let off with a friendly warning).
(Imperfect transition here…)
As you all know, the FBI executed a search warrant last night at Donald Trump’s house in Mar-a-Lago. The raid, reports say, is related to Trump’s allegedly having taken from the White House a large number of documents that he was not lawfully allowed to take. It’s a momentous decision to launch a criminal investigation against a former President, and doubly so when that individual will likely run again against the sitting President, whose government the FBI is a part of. Personally, I assume that Justice Department officials would not have taken such a momentous step lightly and has done so because they believe major crimes have been committed. But about that, we know little and will have to wait to find out.
Not surprisingly, many of Trump’s key allies - a lot of the same folks who relished the “lock her up” chants that Trump egged on repeatedly at his rallies in 2016 and after - have been screaming bloody murder since last night, warning darkly that America is now descending into authoritarianism.
There’s nothing useful to say about these pleadings, in and of themselves. Trump’s supporters quite clearly do not care about lawbreaking per se, only about who deserves to be punished for it. On that score, the furor over last night’s FBI raid was merely the second big anti-law enforcement grievance the right wing was nursing yesterday. The first was about the bill that passed the Senate on Sunday. In addition to its climate provisions, the legislation allocates tens of billions of dollars over the next ten years to modernize IRS systems and allow it to hire thousands of new agents and other personnel. This is meant to reverse the kneecapping of IRS budgets and staffing in the previous decade, which has hamstrung the agency’s ability to collect the taxes the government is owed. Charles Rettig, the Trump-appointed commissioner of the IRS, told Congress in April of 2021 that deficient staffing had contributed to a tax collection shortfall of as much as one trillion dollars a year. By far the biggest beneficiaries of this lax enforcement are, of course, wealthy people and corporations, who have the most to lose and have the means to hire armies of accountants to help them avoid paying taxes. The beefed up staff that the new legislation calls for will enable increased audits essentially exclusively targeting high net worth individuals as well as business entities that have significant foreign earnings or otherwise have concocted sophisticated schemes for hiding income.
Many Republicans, whose usual approach to complaints about law enforcement abuses is “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about” were claiming yesterday that the thousands of new agents the IRS will hire portends an ominous new threat to ordinary Americans’ freedom. Some even went so far as to argue that the newly fortified IRS would also target poor people, through greater scrutiny of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
That sound you just heard was me scoffing. A few facts are in order here. After Republicans took back control of Congress in 2010 and launched an aggressive new attack on the IRS, audits of wealthy people plummeted. Between 2010 and 2018, according to a detailed report by Pro Publica, the percentage of people in the top one percent of income (those making $500K or more) who were subject to audits dropped by two thirds, from 8% to 2.5%. Among those making between 200K-500K, there was a 75% reduction in audits, to under one percent. Indeed, by the end of the period Pro Publica studied, poor taxpayers, those whose annual incomes were $25,000 or less, were as likely to be audited as those making ten to twenty times that amount.
What accounts for the relative interest in auditing such low-income households? One answer lies in tax changes that took place in the 1990s. During the Clinton years, Democrats pushed for an expansion of the EITC, which would bolster the household finances of poor, working people as a way to offset the crackdown on welfare that Clinton himself had championed. But after Republicans recaptured Congress in 1994, they pushed for greater scrutiny of misfiled EITC claims, contending that such cheating was costing the federal government a lot of money. There was more to it than that, of course. Republicans have been complaining about welfare “cheats” for a long time including, famously, Ronald Reagan’s racially inflammatory stories about “welfare queens” living high on the hog at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.1
The result of this push by the Gingrich Congress was increased scrutiny of poor Americans who’d claimed EITC credits. When asked why he robbed banks, the famous outlaw Willie Sutton reputedly said, “because that’s where the money is.” But auditing EITC filers was not where the money was. According to a 1998 report, an estimated five percent of uncollected IRS tax revenues (five billion out of 100 billion at the time) came from those filers. Then, as now, most of the owed taxes the IRS fails to collect come from rich people and big companies, not those who get an extra thousand or two a year from the EITC.
Governments make choices about what problems to prioritize, including which laws they choose to enforce, and justify those choices by crafting narratives about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, who threatens society’s fabric and who ensures that it stays intact. Republicans who were loudly complaining yesterday about how dangerous and unfair it would be for the IRS to have greater enforcement capabilities are operating according to very particular notions of anger and fairness. According to those notions, there is nothing more threatening to the social fabric than those at the bottom not knowing their place, and nothing less fair than targeting those at the top who have earned the right to be above the law. In that regard, the right’s two-part outrage yesterday over the prospect that law enforcement might do its job are of a piece.2
The individual Reagan referred to many times on the stump over the years was real. But the claim he made repeatedly, that she represented a pervasive problem, was false. And his intention in telling the story wasn’t merely to make people mad that government money was being misallocated. His intention was to stoke resentment at an “underclass” he would wage war on once president. Carol Anderson’s White Rage documents that war in detail.
I have written over the years about abuses of power by American law enforcement - state and federal. Here are some examples. So, this is not a brief for taking at face value the integrity or purity of motive of every law enforcement action. But it is a fact that when the government’s policing powers are to be deployed in cases involving the well-to-do and well-connected, law enforcement tends to proceed with a caution that it is simply not constrained to do when targeting the poor and disconnected.
Another great piece as usual. However, I do take issue with one sentence: "Trump’s supporters quite clearly do not care about lawbreaking per se, only about who deserves to be punished for it." I disagree. I think they do care about breaking the law. What is scary is that they are convinced that Trump has done nothing wrong, whereas they believe that Democrats like Hillary Clinton are corrupt but too clever to get caught. I have personally experienced this attitude. GOP politicians are another thing. They do know better. But I think it is important not to attack his supporters with sweeping generalizations.