The Obama administration's first term was remarkably free of scandals. The second term is making up for lost time. Some of the President Barack Obama's harshest critics have even begun comparing him to President Richard Nixon, a byword for corruption, secrecy and abuse of power.
That's a reach. Before any such damning indictment, we need hard evidence and lots of it, not tendentious political ads by Karl Rove. The current scandals need to be investigated thoroughly, and the White House needs to assist by providing documents and witnesses. Only a thorough investigation can restore public confidence.
The Obama administration is already seriously damaged. It has been caught using the full weight of state power to help the president's friends and punish his enemies, financially as well as politically. It has been caught hiding adverse information from the public and, after the Benghazi killings, mangling the truth or perhaps worse.
The fundamental issues are honesty and abuse of power. Sometimes, that power is the ability to help political friends, at the taxpayer's expense. That was the point of funneling money to Solyndra and all the other green energy "investments." They were run by the administration's friends, pursuing its pet projects.
That was the point of the GM and Chrysler bailouts, which helped the unions, punished the bondholders, trampled basic contractual rights and won crucial votes in Michigan and Ohio. That's the point of all those Obamacare waivers, given to friends through some opaque process. That's the point of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius leaning on the companies she regulates for "voluntary donations," a practice reminiscent of former Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration securing large donations for his wife Maggie's (worthy) charities from companies reliant on city business. This atmosphere of pervasive political leverage, using every budgetary and regulatory tool, surely seeped through to the IRS, even if White House political operatives did not give explicit instructions.
Sometimes, the government's awesome power is the power to harm opponents, as the IRS did to charities with the temerity to use the words "patriot," "tea party" or "constitution." The IRS kept these nonprofits waiting for years to receive tax-deductible status. Some are still waiting. Their letters and pleas have gone unanswered. When one of them (Z Street, a pro-Israel charity) finally sued, the IRS said the suit itself was reason enough to postpone any tax exemption. That's government by fiat, not government by the people, under the rule of law.
Beyond the scandals now roiling this administration, the uproar over government corruption and coercion illustrate why a gigantic state is inherently dangerous.
First, it is powerful enough to crush the incumbents' enemies, suppress their liberties and chill those of others. It vests enormous power in the hands of elected officials and anonymous bureaucrats, often quite low-level officials. Heaven help you if some functionary decides your farm is a wetland. You are several hundred thousand dollars in attorney's fees away from ever farming again. Second, the bigger the government, the bigger the grab-bag of public money and regulatory relief to distribute to political friends. That was the message of Solyndra, the health care waivers and the targeted bailouts. In that sense, this administration is the very picture of big-government favoritism, on a scale unimagined by the Chicago Democratic machine or Tammany Hall. Indeed, Obama and his supporters are trying to build an irreversible, ever-larger government that, for structural reasons, will inevitably encourage more rent-seeking and abuses of discretionary power.
These problems are built into the very fabric of huge governments, with their multitrillion-dollar budgets and complex regulatory schemes, shaped by hordes of lobbyists and campaign bundlers, carried out by nameless, midlevel functionaries, wielding extraordinary power.
That is why constitutional democracies have always focused on constraining the discretionary power of political leaders and limiting the power of government. That is why the core concept of the U.S. Constitution is that the federal government has only well-defined powers. That is why any powers not specifically enumerated by the Constitution revert to individual citizens or the states, not to the central government.
I only hope that typing the key words "U.S. Constitution" doesn't open a file on me.
Charles Lipson is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.