The Senate opens a new round of hearings today on alleged misconduct by the Internal Revenue Service. That makes the White House’s pre-emptive announcement yesterday that it will conduct its own inquiry into the tax agency the second most cynical maneuver in what should be a matter of non-partisan public interest.

The first? That would be the Republican manipulation of a newly mined vein of taxpayer ire into a fund-raising bonanza.

And they’re getting away with it. Following the Senate Finance Committee’s highly publicized and explosive IRS hearings last September, Republican leadership and the National Republican Senatorial Committee mailed out money-wheedling, taxman-bashing letters and the response was well worth the postage.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey reports a jump in contributions from $5,100 in September to nearly $37,000 in October. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott went from $8,450 to $78,550. The GOP’s Senatorial Committee estimates, proudly, that its 350,000-letter IRS attack campaign reeled in $3.6 million.

The gist of the hate mail, of course, is that the Democrats, who ruled Washington and all its bureaucracies for far too long, created a gang of IRS outlaws to rustle the public’s hard-earned money. Nowhere, not even in the smallest print postscript, does it mention that Republicans occupied the White House from 1981 until 1993 and have controlled Congress since 1994.

“Recent revelations about gross mismanagement, wasteful spending and flagrant abuse of taxpayers’ rights by the the IRS are even worse than I’ve ever imagined,” wrote Lott to his potential donors. The majority leader is a bit slow to catch on — it’s been 10 years since he hopped that turnip truck out of Mississippi and he’s just now spotted the tax collectors lying in ambush.

To his credit, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware, is appalled by the GOP’s tactics and has refused to participate in the holdup. “Using these hearings as a fund-raising tool certainly is unfortunate,” he says. “It was never the intention to have them used for political purposes.” It also certainly is unfortunate that Roth’s sense of right and wrong has not bubbled to the top of his party’s leadership.

Perhaps he’s being a trifle partisan, but Sen. Bob Kerry, Democrat of Nebraska and a longtime IRS reformer, correctly notes that if the IRS is bad, Congress itself has aided and abetted by writing increasingly complex, loophole-ridden tax laws that invite error, fraud and overly zealous enforcement. “We continue to see people speak out of both sides of their mouths,” says Kerry. “It deepens the American cynicism and skepticism about the Congress.”

But Kerry’s own leadership helped with that deepening. The Clinton administration has been running things for more than five years, yet it just now is noticing something amiss at IRS — seven months after the first round of hearings delved into IRS abuses, on the eve of the resumption of that delving.

From the standpoint of pure power politics, it’s even worse for the Democrats. Both parties helped create this hatred Americans have for their taxation system, but the Democrats let the Republicans stake claim to the resulting mother lode of campaign cash. GOP leadership might be no-good varmints, but at least they’re not claim-jumping, day late and $3.6 million short varmints.