Ethics Violations

Open Email to Congress:

Dear Members of Congress,
For those who have not kept up with the shenanigans of the Obama Administration, this concerns the investigation of the Internal Revenue Service by Rep. Darrell E Issa. The basic issue is a matter of tax exemption for certain organizations. Rep. Issa is investigating a claim that the IRS has discriminated against the Tea Party in allowing tax exemptions.
The Washington Times now says IRS employees were “acutely” aware in 2010 that President Obama wanted to crack down on conservative organizations, such as Tea Party groups. That conclusion comes from the Issa investigation, which found two IRS officials as saying the Tea Party applications were singled out in the targeting program.
The report also said that the investigators did not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the Tea Party and other agency officials deny overt bias or political motives. But, the report also says that the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review Tea Party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters. 
In any government or private organization, middle management employees know what the boss wants, without receiving specific orders. If a middle management employee does not pick up on the boss's hints and cues and give specific carry-out orders to underlings, he is considered by the boss to be insensitive and must be terminated  or at least transferred to a lower paying job. Notice that the smart boss always shields himself by never giving direct orders, but all subsequent employees fall in line, because they want to hold their jobs.
In the IRS/Tea Party situation, the boss is Pres. Obama; one middle management employee is Lois Lerner; and the underlings are those persons who actually designed the special policies to review Tea Party applications.
Is this process illegal? The answer is "no", not in itself. However, if a law is broken in the subsequent operation, only the underlings and the middle management person are susceptible to prosecution. The boss is almost invariably untouched, because he has given no direct orders.
Will Lois Lerner and the persons  who designed the special policies be prosecuted? Not likely, because no specific law has been broken. What about Pres. Obama? He will go untouched, as is usually the case with the boss, and no law has been broken.
Does that mean that the whole IRS targeting operation was perfectly legitimate. *Yes", from a legal point of view, but "no" from an ethics point of view. Then we are back to Obama Administration shenanigans, which continue to reduce the public's perception of him as a person of quality unfit to be President. Remember Pres. Nixon? What about Lois Lerner and the underlings? Lois will be considered as a political hack. The underlings will be considered as cogs in a machine that is doing something wrong.  Is that quality government? The public will decide.
Why have I directed this message to Congress? For the simple reason that Congress is a part of the United States government and any negative reflection on any part of government is disadvantageous to the public esteem of Congress.
Then Rep. Issa's investigation has merit in that it tends to differentiate Congress from the Obama Administration, and this and others like it such as Benghazi need to be continued. Perhaps those investigations will tend to improve public appreciation for Congress, which is now at a low level. If also in these investigations Congress can uncover any illegal operation or find enough ethics violations, combined with a reduced number of Democrats in the Congress, impeachment of Pres. Obama before his term of office expires is not without possibility, as slight as it may be.