The administrative state is an open invitation to high-handedness. My colleague Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a piece for Bloomberg View on Obama’s lawlessness. Most of the examples have to do with the administration ignoring or distorting the laws via the bureaucracy. Obamacare says that states have to set up exchanges before the subsidies and penalties in the law apply? No matter. The IRS says it will pay out subsidies and impose penalties regardless of whether states set up exchanges.

We have immigration laws such that providing an amnesty for so-called DREAM kids would require a new statute? Not to worry. The president simply directed his agencies to ignore the law and institute a version of the DREAM Act.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the IRS scandal is organically connected to the president’s signature initiative, Obamacare. Sarah Hall Ingram had been commissioner of the tax exempt and government entities division of the IRS, and now is in charge of the Obamacare office at the IRS. Looked at from one angle, Obamacare is less a health-care law than an expansion of IRS power.

The IRS needs about 2,000 additional full-time equivalent employees to undertake what one agency official calls “the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history.”