Rachel Maddow had Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post on her show last night to talk about some very strange maneuverings in Congress. It seems that Republicans are demanding the IRS stop investigating their “dark money” ad blitz machine if the White House wants their support for sanctions against Moscow. Here is the segment:

The conservative movement has spent years building a media noise machine out of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations for the tacit purposes of winning elections and driving public discussion of legislation. These are clearly not the uses that Congress foresaw when it wrote the laws governing nonprofits. The entire contrived IRS scandal was an effort by right wing political organizers to prevent disclosure and accountability for what goes on in this dark money machine. The same Republicans in Washington who pursued that fake scandal are currently fighting new IRS rules that would bring the agency’s regulations more in line with the original intent of Congress. In Wisconsin, state Republicans are trying to change the definition of “issue ads” in order to forestall the damage if new IRS rules do go into effect. This is actually an existential battle for the GOP, so it is no surprise to see them place party over country again.

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