So it's surprising to see that Bush is hosting a fundraiser for Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage today in Kennebunkport, the tony seaside town where George H.W. Bush has long kept a summer estate.

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As the Republican House leaders consider the way forward, they would do well to consider the decisions of the past two generations of top Republican legislators, without whom the Voting Rights Act would never have existed.

Most students of history know that President Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of the legislative process – and his huge Democratic majorities – were key to the bill’s original passage. But few know that the final bill was written in the office of the Republican minority leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois.

President Lyndon Johnson feared a Southern filibuster might defeat the bill. To prevent a filibuster, two-thirds of the Senate would have to move to the bill to a final vote, and achieving this would require Republican votes. So Johnson turned to Dirksen. “…[ Y]ou come with me on this bill,” Johnson told him, “and two hundred years from now school children will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.”

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But today, Treasury Department Inspector General Russell George explained in a letter to lawmakers that while some liberal groups got extra scrutiny, they weren't systematically targeted like conservative ones were. "We found no indication in any of these other materials that 'Progressives' was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention," the IG wrote. While 100 percent of applications for groups with "Tea Party," "Patriot" or "9/12" in their name were processed as "potential political cases," just 30 percent of progressive ones were.

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In the immediate wake of the Supreme Court's rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 in California, the right-wing media remained relatively silent. At around 11 this morning, National Review led with a piece on President Obama's "radical climate agenda." Over at the Weekly Standard Bill Kristol was on the news with "Comprehensive immigration reform? Just say no."

The National Organization for Marriage didn't appear to have updated its site, focusing instead on suing the IRS and a "major victory" for marriage supporters" in Illinois, a comparably minor incident that happened last month. The professional homophobes over at the Family Research Council were similarly mum. [Ed.: They've now responded. See below.]

It's almost as if the right collectively realized that fighting marriage equality is not a winning issue in the 21st century. If so we wouldn't have anything to post. But they didn't completely disappoint.

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As were, it turns out, groups that labeled themselves "open source software."

Geek alert! Why would the IRS care that software programming organizations producing code free for all to share or modify as they see fit might want to seek nonprofit, tax exempt status? What part of "free" doesn't the tax man understand? Other branches of the U.S. government actually contribute to open source projects.

In the 2010 internal IRS document listing keywords for examiners to watch out for, the explanation is simple. Open source isn't always what it seems:

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How wrong we were. Now it's clear Issa played us this whole time, thanks to new documents that show the IRS also targeted "progressive" and "Occupy" groups, in addition to Tea Party ones. And if it targeted groups on both sides, it wasn't really singling anyone out (the only group actually denied tax-exempt status was a progressive one, after all) and the whole scandal falls apart.

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Well, as it turns out, that whole scandal is entirely bogus. False. A fiction. The entire notion that the agency singled out groups with "Tea Party" in their name in simply wrong, we learn today, thanks to new documents revealed by the Associated Press. The documents, and confirmation from officials, show the IRS targeted groups with other keywords in their names, including "Progressive” and “Occupy.”

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Who is John Galt?

John Galt (as written in said novel) is a deeply flawed, sociopathic ideal of the perfect human. John Galt does not recognize the societal structure surrounding him that allows him to exist. John Galt, to be frank, is a turd.

However, John Galt is also very close to greatness. The only thing he is missing, the only thing Ayn Rand forgot to take into account when writing "Atlas Shrugged," is empathy.

John Galt talks about intelligence and education without discussing who will pay for the schools, who will teach the teachers. John Galt has no thought for his children, or their children, or what kind of world they will have to occupy when the mines run out and the streams dry up. John Galt expects an army to protect him but has no concern about how it’s funded or staffed. John Galt spends his time in a valley where no disasters occur, no accidents happen, and no real life takes place.

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One never knows when a politician will get sick of it all and move on, but until that happens keep your money on more stories about Boehner’s speakership at risk, more stories of floor fiascoes such as the farm bill debacle this week – and more instances of Boehner surviving all of it.

Why? Because Boehner is actually doing his job well. It’s just that it’s an impossible job right now. The basic structure for why it’s impossible is well known. Boehner’s Republicans have a relatively slim majority; on any particular vote, it’s likely that either a group of moderates or a group of radical conservatives will want to dissent; and in a polarized House it’s unlikely that Democrats will furnish many votes without substantive concessions – and cutting deals with Democrats is almost impossible when Republican activists consider any compromise a betrayal. And, meanwhile, some bills simply have to be passed, meaning that 218 votes have to be found somehow. It all means that fiascoes such as the farm bill debacle this week are extremely likely.

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Citing his AEI colleague Stan Veuger’s research finding that the Tea Party generated 3 to 6 million additional GOP votes in House races in the 2010 midterms, Pethokoukis suggests that it might have added an additional 5 to 8 million GOP votes in the 2012 election, “if the groups had continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010.” Which they didn’t, Veuger claims,  due to the extra IRS scrutiny to the movement’s claiming tax-exempt status for its “social welfare” activities.

Since that would have overcome the 5 million vote margin won by President Obama, Pethokoukis writes, “right around now, Mitt Romney would be pushing hard his tax reform plan, and #44 would be launching the Obama Global Initiative.”

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For the current coalition of mostly-Democratic-but-some-Republican backers as a whole, this is mixed news: The cost estimate checks out -- better than expected, even -- but the relatively small decrease in future illegal immigration raises some concerns about their claims that this will resolve the border issue conclusively, forever.

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Until today. For one day only, the Capitol has been consumed by what feels a bit like a single-night stand reunion tour for a band that had one good album that mostly gets played for nostalgic reasons today. The event was billed as "the largest demonstration of Tea Party support since 2010," and while it may have succeeded on that count, it also underscores how much the movement has slipped since that year of its glory.

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From the Huffington Post:

Van Hollen said he and watchdog groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 would sue to clarify an IRS regulation that he said was at odds with the law, which requires certain groups to "exclusively" engage in social welfare to earn nonprofit status. The IRS regulation permitting groups “primarily” engaged in social welfare allows the organizations to participate in an undefined amount of political activity, said the congressman, a leading advocate of campaign finance reform and ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

"We have now exhausted the administrative remedies and we do now plan to move forward," Van Hollen said at a recent event on campaign finance hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice. "I plan to move forward with these groups to file a lawsuit against the IRS to enforce the plain meaning of the law, and frankly get the IRS out of the business of trying to draw these fine distinctions between whether something is 49 percent or 48 percent, or whatever it may be, political activity."

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From CNN:

Fifty-one percent of those questioned said the IRS controversy is a very important issue to the nation, compared to 55% who felt that way in May. In the past week and a half, the IRS story has been put a bit on the backburner, as the controversy over the federal government's massive surveillance program has dominated the spotlight.

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Luckily or not, Rubio’s wimpy reply was overshadowed by reaction to a deeply reported New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza that placed the Florida Republican at the center of the "Gang of Eight" negotiations. It featured a choice quote dissing American workers from an anonymous Rubio aide, explaining why his boss backed the Chamber of Commerce over the AFL-CIO when it came to a guest worker agreement (they eventually compromised): “There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it. There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.”

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According to the Associated Press, Holly Paz told investigators from the House Oversight Committee that she reviewed 20-30 cases, though she did not connect the practice to top officials in the agency or to the Obama administration.

From the AP:

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Reuters, citing anonymous sources, reports:

Ousted IRS acting commissioner, Steven Miller, has received such threats, according to a source familiar with his situation. The source declined to elaborate on the nature or the source of the threats.

And the head of the tax-exempt unit at the agency, Lois Lerner, who has been put on administrative leave as investigations into the controversy continue, has had telephone and email messages from unknown sources that "threaten physical violence," according to her attorney William Taylor.

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"He is a conservative Republican working for the IRS. I think this interview and these statements go a long way toward showing that the White House was not involved in this," Cummings sain CNN's "State of the Union," adding: "Based upon everything I've seen, the case is solved. And if it were me, I would wrap this case up and move on."

Reuters reports:

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The governor made a name for herself on Fox News and at national gatherings of conservatives like CPAC as a kind of uber-Tea Partyer, who eats scorpions for breakfast, wags her finger in the president's face at lunchtime, signs strict anti-immigration bills into law in the afternoon, and gives the Tea Party flag the same legal protections as the Star-Spangled Banner by bedtime.

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