The GOP goes all Scientology on us
by digby
After I watched the documentary “Going Clear” a few weeks back, I noted that their strategy of using lawsuits to harass the government seemed like a likely right wing tactic with Lois Lerner being a good example of how they might be going that direction. It turns out to be the case. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:
It’s important to note here that the right’s loathing of the federal government is actually quite narrowly focused on certain areas of interest. They are fully behind the neoconservatives’ imperial project — flag waving and martial strutting are fundamental to American conservatism. (Small government is a very imprecise term; they have no problem with a big military and police apparatus. In fact, those bureaucracies have a blank check.) But within that narrow anti-government focus of low taxes is their extreme hostility to government regulations.
So now we see the conservative movement — which, not for nothing, has historically regarded the profession of “trial lawyer” as something only slightly above “mafia hitman” in terms of social disapprobation — considering the idea of flooding the courts with frivolous suits. But perhaps an even more remarkable feature of this plan is that it’s being floated by none other than the man who brought us the racist right wing tract “The Bell Curve,” Charles Murray.
Murray has a new book coming out that is poised to take the conservative and libertarian world by storm. It’s called “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” and in it Murray proclaims, “the government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.” His book proposes to create “a private-sector counterweight that pulls back the curtain and exposes the Wizard’s weakness.” The private sector counterweight, in this case, will be a billionaire-funded institution that will bankroll thousands of lawsuits against the government, which Murray fatuously names “The Madison Institute.”
Many of us who watched the recent HBO documentary “Going Clear” about the Church of Scientology and its long battle against the IRS — to win tax-exempt status as a religious organization — will recognize this strategy. Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch did:
Scientology besieged the IRS with 200 lawsuits from the church and more than 2,300 lawsuits on behalf of individual parishioners in every jurisdiction in the country, “overwhelming government lawyers, running up fantastic expenses, and causing an immense amount of havoc inside the IRS.” [Scientology leader David] Miscavige boasted that church lawyers had so exhausted the IRS’s legal budget that the agency couldn’t afford to send its lawyers to an American Bar Association conference.
That is what Murray wants to do to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
If conservatives follow the Scientology strategy to the letter, they will file lawsuits against individual federal employees as well, making their lives miserable and putting them into personal financial jeopardy. Read on…
Oh, and here’s the GOP’s new theme song: