This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 14th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Dozens of conservative or Tea Party groups were singled out for particularly high levels of scrutiny

before the IRS would give them special tax status.

David Keating is president of the Center for Competitive Politics.

He talks about the implications of this latest revelation.

What do you find most problematic in this revelation that the IRS has targeted conservative groups

for special scrutiny?

Well, we don't know why they did it if it was a matter of conscious decision by someone who didn't

like conservative groups or just sheer incompetence, but it doesn't really matter.

The problem is the IRS decided to target a particular political philosophy.

It happened to be conservative, but it could just as easily been libertarian or liberal or something else.

And look at these groups for a special examination.

Now in this case it was deciding whether to grant tax exempt status, but it just as easily could have been an audit

program. And the IRS has a history, a pretty sorry history of being used by presidents from Roosevelt through

Nixon to go after enemies the administration. Now there's no evidence here that

someone in the Obama White House ordered this. Nevertheless, given

the IRS's history, it should be extremely careful about how it goes about its business. And I think this shows that the efforts

that are being made in Congress and by others outside the Congress to put the IRS

in a more active role in monitoring nonprofit groups on campaigns

would be a serious mistake.

The IRS clearly doesn't understand the sensitivities of the First Amendment

...