"Promise me ..."

In case you missed it. George Will on the "Scowling face of the state"

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, which was most of his money, into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners.

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 Election 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.

After losing to Durbin, Salvi spent four years and $100,000 fighting the FEC, on whose behalf FBI agents visited his elderly mother demanding to know, concerning her $2,000 contribution to her son’s campaign, where she got “that kind of money.” When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner.

More recently, she has been head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, which has used its powers of delay, harassment and extortion to suppress political participation....

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Joseph Heller -- who assured his place among the immortals when he gave us the phrase (and the book) "Catch-22" -- said "Bureaucracies are the anonymous 'they,' the enigmatic 'they,' who are in charge. Who is 'they'? I don't know. Nobody knows. Not even 'they' know." George Will's "scowling face of the state" is what you get when millions of anonymous "theys" are turned loose on the populace. Nobody knows which of these millions of anonymities is truly in charge -- or even what they're supposed to be in charge of. All we know for sure is that the "giant mechanism operated by pygmies" (Balzac's definition of bureaucracy) grinds on and on, grinding up human lives in the process. If Kafka were here, he'd probably smile wanly and say, "I told you so."