It’s going to be interesting to see what reaction if any comes from the liberal camp in the tax case announced yesterday in Washington. The Treasury Department and the IRS served a summons on a law firm, Jenkens & Gilchrist, in an attempt to pry from the firm a list of its clients in what the Treasury, in a press release, called “potentially abusive transactions organized or sold by the firm’s Chicago office.” A federal judge in Chicago, John Darrah, approved this summons, which the law firm is resisting, the Associated Press reports.

The nation’s tax laws are plenty onerous, but they should be followed. We’re not making excuses for anyone who breaks them. The Internal Revenue Service has a process — an audit — for identifying tax cheats. If a tax return raises questions, the IRS can take a more careful look. If the tax shelters are illegal, the violators should be dealt with, either in a civil fashion or, if the finagling rises to a criminal standard, criminally. But all of this should be possible to pursue without compelling lawyers to disclose confidential client information. The whole episode smacks of a misguided effort by the Bush administration to deal with the backlash about tax cuts for the rich by making scapegoats of an unlucky few. This is compounded by the fact that the administration called a press conference in Washington to announce the summons.

It’ll be illuminating to see whether those on the left who have been complaining ceaselessly about the Bush administration’s so-called violations of the rights of terrorist detainees will protest now that those whose rights are being trampled are not Al Qaeda sympathizers but rather wealthy Americans and their lawyers. Somehow, we’re not particularly hopeful.