While the nation is focused on presidential bumbling over red lines, the media are collectively ignoring the scandal at the Internal Revenue Service. It is now clearer than ever that the nation's most feared agency took sides in the last presidential election. When (God willing) the nation gets through the unnecessary crisis President Obama has created in the Middle East, it will be time to get to the root of this ugly reality reported by IBD's editorial page:

At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats.

This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president.

But that same year, top officials with both the IRS and Justice Department - including the IRS commissioner and attorney general - met in Washington with several dozen prominent black church ministers representing millions of voters to brief them on how to get their flocks out to vote without breaking federal tax laws.

The "summit" on energizing the black vote in houses of worship was hosted by the Democrat-controlled Congressional Black Caucus inside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2012.

The day before the special IRS training session, then-Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver predicted Obama would get 95% of the African-American vote - but only if black pastors "encourage" them to get to the polls. (He ended up getting over 93% of the black vote.)

The GOP must continue hearings and start considring options for tax reform that abolish the IRS, which is now discredited. This is an agenda item for the 2014 and 2016 elections.

Hat tip: Instapundit