Hard to muster any empathy for Lois Lerner

She was, you'll recall, the head of the IRS department at its Cincinnati office in charge of monitoring filings by nonprofit organizations. In that capacity, she knew some of her staff were harassing and intimidating conservative groups. Now she's trying to keep the records of her communications from those days sealed.

The LITD position: Make 'em public.

Get this: she and her assistant, Holly Paz, want to make the harassed groups the threatening party in this scenario:

During the course of the Ohio case, the tea party groups filed thousands of pages of documents, but testimony from Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz was left out of the public record because of their earlier request for privacy.

Now Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz say that since the case has been settled, there is no reason for their testimony to ever become public.

“The voluminous record of harassment and physical threats to Mss. Lerner and Paz and their families during the pendency of this litigation provides a compelling reason to seal the materials,” the women’s attorneys said.

They particularly blamed Mark Meckler, a tea party leader whose organization helped fund the class-action lawsuit, saying he helped stoke the threats against them by calling IRS agents “criminal thugs.”

“These words matter. They have created a fertile environment where threats and harassment against Mss. Lerner and Paz have flourished,” the lawyers said.

Mr. Meckler laughed when he learned about the filing.

“Four years of harassing innocent American citizens for their political beliefs, and she’s scared of a guy in a cowboy hat talking to a bunch of little old ladies at a tea party event?” he said, recounting the speech where he called IRSagents “thugs.”

He said if the depositions didn’t show any bad action on her part, then Ms. Lerner should have nothing to fear from their release to the public.

“The reality is because she knows she is guilty as the day is long and she doesn’t want people to know what she actually did,” he said.

“It’s hard to have any sympathy for the women. And frankly, I don’t believe she’s genuinely scared,” Mr. Meckler said.

I suppose comparisons to Elena Ceaucescu pleading, "We loved you like our own children!" are a bit strong, but there is certainly a whiff of the irony that accompanies any comeuppance of fallen and cornered totalitarians. And that's what Lerner, Paz and the anti-free-market-and-low-tax thugs on their staff really are.

Everything about a shameful episode like this needs to be public knowledge. It's the only way to prevent a possible recurrence.

The agency that, among all federal-government bodies, is the encapsulation of government's role as the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the agency charged with using that force to take the money of citizens using a variety of means (income tax, capital-gains tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, etc.) had in its employ a number of people who held in utter contempt those who, quite civilly, argued for Madisonian restraint in the exercise of that power.

That is chilling.

Making the records public would be a significant step in eradicating this kind of mindset from the leviathan state.