A Comprehensive Distrust of Government

The Foundation

"Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction" --John Witherspoon

For the Record

Lois Lerner: The face of bureaucracy?
"As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money ... into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. ... He lost his campaign. Today, however, he should be invited to Congress to testify about what happened 10 years later when he was a prosperous lawyer and won the Republican Senate nomination to run against a Democratic congressman named Dick Durbin. In the fall of 1996, at the campaign's climax, Democrats filed with the Federal Elections Commission charges against Salvi's campaign, alleging campaign finance violations. These charges dominated the campaign's closing days. Salvi spoke by telephone with the head of the FEC's Enforcement Division, who he remembers saying: 'Promise me you will never run for office again, and we'll drop this case.' He was speaking to Lois Lerner. ... When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner. ... In 2010, Durbin wrote a letter urging Lerner's IRS division to pay special attention to a political advocacy group supporting conservatives. Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan. Now she also is a national security problem because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government." --columnist George Will

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