Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Taking the Fifth

Yesterday I was struck listening to Louis Learner invoking her Fifth Amendment rights before a congressional committee. First however, she read from a prepared statement saying she was innocent of all wrongdoing, and had broken no law or IRS Regulations.

The reason a person invokes these rights is because they fear they have broken the law and don’t want to elaborate on their illegal behavior because it might get them hoisted on their own petard. However, it wasn’t just the statutes she was trying to avoid, which is a rather low standard. She is also trying to hide behind a higher moral standard of “Wrongdoing.”

We are raised in families, go to church and have it instilled in us that the goal of a quality citizen is the Golden Rule. Naturally that rule is a high standard and one that it is difficult to meet all the time. A much lower standard, like way down in the cellar, is the law. The standard of law is a low rung on the spectrum of human behavior below which society will not suffer a citizen to operate. When we fall below this low hurdle society is required to impose sanctions in order to remind the wrong doers, what the minimum expectations are. So, when somebody hides behind their rights and refuses to answer questions, the reason is because they fear the sanctions of the law and believe they are open to prosecution. So Mrs. Lerner can‘t have it both ways, saying she is innocent and still invoke her right to silence. It is hugely inconsistent and defies all belief.

I am reminded of the case involving Lieutenant Calley in the aftermath of the Mei Lai massacre. The parallels and analogies are remarkably similar.

At Mei Lai, suddenly a large number of civilian casualties turned up dead at the same time Lieutenant Calley’s platoon was in the area. At the IRS a large stack of files turned up that weren’t being acted upon. Not only were they being stone walled but also the groups that submitted them did not share the same political ideology of the administration in power. These are analogous to the pile of dead civilians, which everybody agreed was “Outrageous."

Calley contended that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. In the heat of contact, he contended, the dead civilians were the result of collateral damage--- that they had not been murdered with coldblooded premeditation but rather something to be expected in the fog of war. It was just one of those things, so the argument went, that happens when soldiers become hardened to the conditions, and descend Maslow’s scale into a pit of uncivilized savagery. Is this was happened to Ms. Learner? Was she so hardened to the political infighting that she saw herself as a blameless partisan hero, innocent of all blame and wrongoing?

We don’t know the answer to that and hopefully the truth will begin to emerge in the months ahead as the investigators smoke out the truth. Before that we will get to see plenty of stonewalling as everybody tries to cover their political fannies.

Like a platoon in combat you can draw the analogy of Ms. Lerner to her oversight of the branch of the IRS that approved tax exemption waivers. Here are some of the scenarios that can be expected.

Scenario #1: I inherited the culture and conditions under which the office was operating and feared that if I tried to change things I would be demoted.

Scenario#2: The people in my branch were out of control and as soon as I tried to fix one thing some other abuse would rear it’s ugly head. My workers knew and were willing to go over my head knowing that my superiors would not support any effort on my part to make redress. Finally I gave up and looked the other way.

Scenario#3: In the culture in which I work the pathway to success and promotion rests in meeting the boss’s expectations. I wanted to show that I was a team player and shared their unwritten agenda. It so doing I expected to be promoted as I had been in the past even though historically my slanted efforts did not meet the “Weight of Law” test. The case, which I brought against the Christian Coalition, cost them many hundred thousand of dollars and turned out to be a losing effort. Still in the eyes of the current administration it was seen as a good impediment, and served as both a warning to others and as a graduate course in how to use government power to stymie and intimidate citizens with a different point of view .