WASHINGTON — When the House Judiciary Committee convenes on Tuesday to consider the alleged misdeeds of the IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, it will contemplate an action that has not been taken in more than 140 years.
Tuesday’s hearing on accusations by House Republicans that Koskinen lied under oath to Congress and defied a congressional subpoena will be a remarkable moment, even for a Washington long fractured by partisanship.
Not since Secretary of War William W. Belknap in 1876 has the House impeached an administration official other than the president, said Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and an expert on the federal impeachment process.
And an official below the president’s Cabinet has never been impeached.
“This is unprecedented in many respects,’’ Gerhardt said.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, has made clear that the Senate would not convict Koskinen, which would require a nearly impossible two-thirds vote.
But the effort in the House highlights the extent to which the IRS has become a symbol for House Republicans of everything they despise about the federal bureaucracy, and their outrage about what they view as a pattern of obstruction by the Obama administration.
“We can have our disagreements with him, but that doesn’t mean there’s an impeachable offense,’’ Hatch said last week.
Koskinen was not even in government when the IRS admitted to singling out the tax-exemption applications of Tea Party groups for scrutiny. Organizations on the IRS’ “lookout lists’’ went beyond conservative groups to include other groups like Palestinian rights activists and open-software developers, but the scrutiny of hundreds of Tea Party applicants infuriated congressional Republicans.
President Obama turned to Koskinen in 2013 to lead the IRS because of his reputation in the public and private sectors as a go-to manager of troubled enterprises. Koskinen, who was 74 at the time, agreed.
“He is one of the truly dedicated public servants who has been respected as a top government manager for years,’’ said G. William Hoagland, who was a longtime staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders.
But amid the mishandling of e-mail messages sought as evidence by House investigators, that fury turned on him.
Koskinen will not appear at the Tuesday hearing, the IRS said on Monday, because he has just returned from a multinational tax conference in China and has had little time to prepare given the committee’s recent invitation.
“He provided, I think, a whole series of false testimony,’’ said US Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who is one of the leaders of the push for impeachment. “You can’t be under a duly issued subpoena and mislead Congress, and when you provide false testimony there has to be a consequence.’’
“We’re left with no other remedy,’’ Chaffetz added. “The FBI is not going to take action. The president is not going to take action, but clearly he provided false testimony.’’
Congressional Democrats and the White House have characterized the criticism as part of a broader effort by Republicans bent on destroying the IRS by slashing its budget and impeding its work.
“Instead of taking real action on critical issues that involve the security and well-being of Americans, House Republicans are busy engaging in political witch hunts,’’ said Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.
The case against Koskinen focuses on testimony that he gave to Congress as part of inquiries into whether the IRS improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by conservative political groups. The IRS admitted the improper conduct and apologized, but the Justice Department ultimately said it had found mismanagement but no crime, and it did not bring any charges.
Koskinen started as commissioner of the IRS in December 2013, well after the scrutiny was exposed.
But House Republicans continued their investigations, and say the new commissioner lied during testimony in the winter and spring of 2014.
Koskinen was unavailable for comment last week, but in an interview in April he called the House impeachment resolution, which was introduced in the fall, “groundless.’’
“We testified truthfully and completely on the basis of what we knew at the time,’’ he said. He attributed the loss of some of Lerner’s e-mails to “the inadvertent destruction of very old tapes.’’
