time now for hits and misses of the time for hits and misses of the week. collin, first to you. it looks like the i.r.s. is feeling pretty great about the performance for taxpayers between 2012 and 2020, 2800 i.r.s. employees recently disciplined got performance bonuses totaling $2.8 million. so, you know, the media has been pretty busy about lois lerner s roll, but we should give the i.r.s. for being consistent. she won t be held responsible for her conduct, why should any of her colleagues? bonuses all around. paul, this is a miss for
upheld a 2006 michigan voter referendum banning racial preferences in admissions to its public university. preserving the status quo in that state and seven others that have ended affirmative action since 1996. the 6-2 decision produced five different opinions including a 58-page decent by justice soto mayor who compared michigan s reference dumb to jim crow laws in the south and writing that a majority of the michigan electorate changed the basic rules of the political process in that state in a matter that uniquely disadvantaged racial minorities. the political diary editor, jason riley, and senior editorial writer, collin leavy. colin, you wrote about this for us. the opinion was splintered with a lot of different points of view, what should be the main takeaway from the opinion?
upheld a 2006 michigan voter referendum banning racial preferences in admissions to its public university. preserving the status quo in that state and seven others that have ended affirmative action since 1996. the 6-2 decision produced five different opinions including a 58-page decent by justice soto mayor who compared michigan s reference dumb to jim crow laws in the south and writing that a majority of the michigan electorate changed the basic rules of the political process in that state in a matter that uniquely disadvantaged racial minorities. the political diary editor, jason riley, and senior editorial writer, collin leavy. colin, you wrote about this for us. the opinion was splintered with a lot of different points of view, what should be the main takeaway from the opinion? right, paul, the main takeaway is that the justices got to the right answer but they were most incredibilityal. they can ban those privileges without the constitution. but it took them 105 pages
emotional statements made by the nonprofits seeking tax exempt status. collin leavy joins us with more. this has been percolating behind the scenes as we ve been all talking about syria and the shutdowns and everything else. what are we learning about that we didn t know before? paul, i think what we got this week was a much fuller account of exactly which groups were targeted and why. and i think we re also getting a very good sense now of what the irs internal process was. this document that you re referring to is basically a list that washington irs officials were keeping in 2011 that looked specifically at tea party groups and a lot of other conservative groups and made specific notes about whether or not those groups were engaged on quote unquote propaganda, what kind of status they were seeking, other areas of concern, you mentioned the emotional statements, also
issues of specific comments about whether or not their websites had comments about president obama. by the way, none of those made any reference to comments about conservative candidates. there is a sense they were looking for rhetoric. and this was reported by usa today, correct? correct. and we don t know who the source was for this. but presumably somehow got there through the investigators. so, collin, what s your sense of what this means? does this really show once and for all that the washington headquarters knew about this from the beginning? i think it s absolutely clear that s what was going on here. and when you look at it, too, you see the numbers, some of the numbers that were out of the house ways and means committee. they showed that 83% of these groups overall that were targeted were republican or conservative leaning groups. only 10% or less leaning groups.