Would President Obama have gotten his second term if the IRS had not targeted the tea party conservatives leading up to the 2012 election?

In a new book entitled End the IRS Before It Ends Us, which is being released today, Grover Norquist makes a good case for that. He asserts that the machinations of the IRS “shut down the movement in time to save President Obama's reelection and starve Republican Mitt Romney of the 4,262,296 votes needed to take the White House.”

According to a report on the new book in the Examiner, Norquist argues that if the tea party, the dynamic force for the 2010 midterm shellacking of President Obama, had remained as active leading up to 2012, the results of the election might have been different. But the tea party went strangely quiet. Why?

But, [Norquist] adds, “The tea party didn’t fall down the stairs. It was pushed.”

Norquist isn’t the first to make the charge that the tea party was done in to save President Obama. But he does deduce some interesting evidence:

First, [Norquist] cited a study on the Tea Party movement that found it pushed up to 5.8 million extra Republican voters to the polls in 2010 when the GOP took control of the House, essentially shutting down Obama's agenda.

Then he cites comments in official reports from former IRS executive Lois Lerner, the key figure in the scandal, who said that she received orders in advance of Obama's reelection to "do something" to shut off conservative funding in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

He cited a speech she gave at Duke University in October 2010 in which she said the IRS was under pressure. "Everyone is up in arms because they don't like it," she said of the Citizens United case opening up the donor floodgates for conservatives. "The Federal Election Commission can't do anything about it. They want the IRS to fix the problem. The IRS laws are not set up to fix the problem … so everyone is screaming at us right now: fix it now before the election," he quotes her saying.

Norquist charges that the IRS went to work after huge Democratic House losses in 2010 and helped end Tea Party expansion and stop the growth of motivated voters for Romney.

"In our modern kneecapping, President Obama was Tonya Harding," scoffed Norquist. "The American people who had voted strongly in 2010 and threatened the president's chances of winning in 2010 were Nancy Kerrigan," he added.

If you read this blog, you already know that Grover is a leading critic of the IRS and that his famous Grover Meetings on Wednesdays are a magnet for those who advocate lower taxes and spending.