World Mag - House Votes To Hold Lois Lerner In Contempt
By Edward Lee Pitts, WorldMag.com
Arguing that the American people deserve answers on the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, House Republicans on Wednesday night voted to hold a former senior IRS manager in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify at two hearings about the scandal.
Six Democrats joined all voting House Republicans in the 231 to 187 vote to hold Lois Lerner in contempt. Lerner, the former director of the division within the IRS that processes tax-exempt applications, twice invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate herself at House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings. But Republicans claim Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment right when she offered a statement declaring her innocence before refusing to answer questions.
The House also approved on Wednesday a nonbinding resolution instructing the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate the IRS. . . .
But Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel for The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), said Lerner should be held accountable for deceiving both Congress and the American people. Lerner, Sekulow argued, tried to downplay the extent of the problem and attempted to blame the scheme on a few rogue employees out of a single IRS office.
“In the past year, we have learned that Lerner and others … employed a strategy to delay these applications—effectively silencing these conservative organizations—putting them on the sideline in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election,” Sekulow said. . . .