The IRS Scandal -- a Basic Primer

[_Droopy]

All emphasis mine.

Confusion about the IRS scandal is distracting from its importance, so that thinking conservatives should be prepared to debate the issue. Some basics matter. Conservatives may need to share a summary such as this article to help convince moderate friends.

Callers to C-SPAN badly misunderstood these details when Jenny Beth Martin, Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, appeared on C-SPAN television last week. I interviewed Keli Carender of Tea Party Patriots on the radio on May15, who helped clarify some of the pushback and distractions from liberals.

First, don't let people forget: the IRS scandal is not about conservative accusations. The Inspector General of the U.S. Treasury issued a report finding that the Internal Revenue Service sharply discriminated against conservative organizations. This is confirmed by Treasury's Inspector General.

Second, a group's political beliefs and positions ought to be totally irrelevant. Tax exemption must be based on what an organization does, not what it believes or what positions it supports. Whether a group teaches the Constitution or teaches union tactics doesn't matter, it is educating either way. Therefore, the IRS should not have been looking at the name of the organization, whether liberal or conservative, but on the substance of the organization.

Third, many people don't realize that nearly all liberal political organizations are tax exempt. There has been a lot of distraction and diversion focused on whether or not the IRS should have scrutinized tea party groups. However, MoveOn.org, NARAL Pro-Choice America, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood (which has been active in partisan election campaigns), Media Matters, etc., are all tax exempt. Organizations on the Left similar to tea party groups have had tax exempt status forever.

Fourth, don't allow people to wander away from the central point that the scandal is about a double standard -- not whether people believe political organizations should be tax exempt. Conservatives seeking tax exempt status were treated very differently from similarly-situated liberal organizations. Sure, some liberal groups were scrutinized. But conservatives were treated differently.

IRS official Lois Lerner fast-walked the tax-exempt application of Barack Obama's half-brother, the best man at President Obama's wedding. Abon'go "Roy' Malik Obama got tax-exempt status in a bureaucratic breakneck speed, in only 30 days, in May 2011, even though it is unclear what if anything the Barack H. Obama Foundation actually does or has done since being approved.

When a conservative organization Media Trackers couldn't get approved after 8 months, it changed its project to the liberal-sounding name "Greenhouse Solutions." With the new name, the exact same project was approved within 3 weeks.

Liberal groups -- even with very political activities -- were systematically approved, and quickly, with relatively little burden or scrutiny, as reported by USA Today.


Groups supporting Israel were discriminated against. In August 2010, a pro-Israel group "Z Street" filed a Federal lawsuit when an IRS staff member admitted that all Israel-related groups were singled out by the IRS for extra scrutiny. There will be a hearing this July 2013, after the case was transferred to the Federal district in Washington, D.C.

The IRS demanded that a Pro-Life group promote abortion in order to get tax-exempt status. No liberal group has such a requirement. NARAL and Planned Parenthood are not required to promote abstinence, adoption, or Pro-Life Crisis Pregnancy Centers.

It is the law that the IRS must answer within 270 days for 501(c)(3) organizations, yet the IRS delayed conservative organizations for more than 540 days.

Fifth, there are many different types of tea party organizations. Some tea party organizations are Political Action Committees (PAC's) which are directly involved in election campaigns. Others focus purely on training tea party organizers and members on how to be effective in organizing events and lobbying on legislation. Some purely educate about the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers, etc. Others lobby on pending legislation.

So when the public hears about tea party organizations applying for tax exempt status, they often imagine only campaigning for or against a candidate. That is not tax exempt. Some tea party groups qualify. Some don't.

Sixth, many have questioned whether the IRS wasn't doing the job it should have done by asking questions of tea party groups seeking tax exempt status. No one objects to the IRS obtaining basic information and asking reasonable questions. The problem is that the IRS bombarded tea party and conservative groups with multiple waves of a huge number of very intrusive questions. And the wave after wave of questions seemed aimed at never getting around to finishing the process or persuading groups to simply give up and abandon their application.

Seventh, many don't recognize what 'tax exempt' means. It means that if someone donates to a tea party group, the donations are not taxed as income. Otherwise, any political organization would have to pay income taxes on donations.

A tax-exempt organization may still have to pay taxes on other income, such as sales of products or services. Some C-SPAN callers imagined that people in such groups don't pay income taxes. Of course, people running or working in tax-exempt groups pay income taxes on their salary the same as everyone else.

There are four important categories:

1. A 501(c)(4) organization is tax-exempt (they don't pay income taxes on donations). A 501(c)(4) organization is allowed to lobby for or against legislation, but is not allowed to advocate for or against a candidate. A 501(c)(4) also can do anything a 501(c)(3) can do.

2. A 501(c)(3) organization is both tax-exempt and tax-deductible. That is, contributors can deduct their donations from their income taxes. It is much more difficult to qualify for 501(c)(3) status. A 501(c)(3) cannot lobby for or against legislation (except to an insignificant extent) and may not engage in any partisan' (campaign) activity. A 501(c)(3) can educate the public on policy, issues, the advantages and disadvantages of various political policies and topics like the Constitution, concepts of our Founding Fathers, etc. or train citizens.

3. A Political Action Committee (PAC or Super-PAC) intervenes directly in partisan campaigns and does not qualify as tax exempt.

4. A 527 organization is a recent development, which also intervenes directly in partisan campaigns and does not qualify as tax exempt.

Eighth, many are not aware of the difference between 'political' and 'partisan.' Tax exempt organizations are allowed to engage in public discussion and lobbying of 'political' issues affecting society. That is very different from 'partisan' activity. 'Partisan' means influencing a campaign -- that is, advocating for or against a candidate in an election (not necessarily just discussing policy or issues).

An example is the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). CREW is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, tax deductible foundation. Its head Melanie Sloan earns $230,000 per year. CREW does nothing but slander conservative Republicans and a few Democrats who get out of line with mostly false accusations.

Christine O'Donnell won the Republican primary for United States Senate from Delaware. This was learned at 8:00 PM on September 14, 2010. By about 11:00 AM on September 15, 2010, CREW started attacking Christine O'Donnell and publicly declaring that Christine belongs in jail not in the Senate.

Advocating for or against a candidate is the test of 'partisan' (campaign) activity that is prohibited for a tax-exempt organization. CREW ignored Christine until she won the GOP Primary. But within hours CREW started attacking her. CREW explicitly referenced her status as a candidate, and specifically that she does not belong in the Senate. Melanie Sloan explicitly said that the voters should know all this when they go to vote in November 2010.

I noticed this pattern and conceived, developed, planned, and drafted the complaint against CREW to the IRS, which ChristinePAC later filed with the IRS in July 2011. Yet two years later, the IRS has done nothing. Melanie Sloan's parents are big donors to former Delaware Senator Joe Biden and CREW attacks conservatives. Don't expect the IRS to hold liberals responsible for anything.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpag ... rimer.html

[_Res Ipsa]

Here's what's missing from the "primer": did conservative groups actually receive disparate treatment? If anyone were interested in finding the answer to that question, it would be easy to do: subpoena the lists of groups that applied, the ones that were granted status, and the ones subject to requirements for additional investigation. Compare the percentages for each. Do you think Congressional republicans will do this? Any bets?

[_Kevin Graham]

When the IRS targeted liberals

While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups, there are two critical pieces of context missing from the conventional wisdom on the “scandal.” First, at least from what we know so far, the groups were not targeted in a political vendetta — but rather were executing a makeshift enforcement test (an ugly one, mind you) for IRS employees tasked with separating political groups not allowed to claim tax-exempt status, from bona fide social welfare organizations. Employees are given almost zero official guidance on how to do that, so they went after Tea Party groups because those seemed like they might be political. Keep in mind, the commissioner of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee.

The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it’s not the first time such activity has occurred.

“I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. “I found only one Republican, [North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I’m glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern.”

The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. “Jesus [would say], ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,’” rector George Regas said from the dais.

The church, which said progressive activism was in its “DNA,” hired a powerful Washington lawyer and enlisted the help of Schiff, who met with the commissioner of the IRS twice and called for a Government Accountability Office investigation, saying the IRS audit violated the First Amendment and was unduly targeting a political opponent of the Bush administration. “My client is very concerned that the close coordination undertaken by the IRS allowed partisan political concerns to direct the course of the All Saints examination,” church attorney Marcus Owens, who is widely considered one of the country’s leading experts on this area of the law, said at the time. In 2007, the IRS closed the case, decreeing that the church violated rules preventing political intervention, but it did not revoke its nonprofit status.

And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight. In 2006, citing the precedent of All Saints, “a group of religious leaders accused the Internal Revenue Service yesterday of playing politics by ignoring its complaint that two large churches in Ohio are engaging in what it says are political activities, in violation of the tax code,” the New York Times reported at the time. The churches essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, they alleged, and even flew him on one of their planes.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Ethics in Washington filed two ethics complaints against a church in Minnesota. “You know we can’t publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate, but I can tell you personally that I’m going to vote for Michele Bachmann,” pastor Mac Hammond of the Living Word Christian Center in Minnesota said in 2006 before welcoming her to the church. The IRS opened an audit into the church, but it went nowhere after the church appealed the audit on a technicality.

And it wasn’t just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. “They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” then-chairman Julian Bond said. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”

In a letter to the IRS, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel, Pete Stark and John Conyers wrote: “It is obvious that the timing of this IRS examination is nothing more than an effort to intimidate the members of the NAACP, and the communities the organization represents, in their get-out-the-vote effort nationwide.”

Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the “No. 1 climate criminal.” The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace’s tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.

As the Journal reporter, Steve Stecklow, later said in an interview, “This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. There have been a number of conservative groups in Washington who have been quite critical.”

Indeed, the year before that, the Senate held a hearing on nonprofits’ political activity. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the IRS needed better enforcement, but also “legislative changes” to better define the lines between politics and social welfare, since they had not been updated in “a generation.” Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the IRS has defined 501(c)4′s sufficiently to this day, leaving the door open for IRS auditors to make up their own, discriminatory rules.

Those cases mostly involved 501(c)3 organizations, which live in a different section of the tax code for real charities like hospitals and schools. The rules are much stronger and better developed for (c)3′s, in part because they’ve been around longer. But with “social welfare” (c)4 groups, the kind of political activity we saw in 2010 and 2012 is so unprecedented that you get cases like Emerge America, a progressive nonprofit that trains Democratic female candidates for public office. The group has chapters across the country, but in 2011, chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada were denied 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Leaders called the situation “bizarre” because in the five years Nevada had waited for approval, the Kentucky chapter was approved, only for the other three to be denied.

A former IRS official told the New York Times that probably meant the applications were sent to different offices, which use slightly different standards. Different offices within the same organization that are supposed to impose the exact same rules in a consistent manner have such uneven conceptions of where to draw the line at a political group, that they can approve one organization and then deny its twin in a different state.

All of these stories suggest that while concern with the IRS posture toward conservative groups now may be merited, to fully understand the situation requires a bit of context and history.

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The lesson by Droopy and his fellow idiot bloggers is perfectly clear now. The IRS is an evil organization only when it targets conservative groups, but it is God's tool in the hands of wise men when it goes after those who hold political views that differ from their own.

This is why it should be impossible to take their righteous indignation over these issues seriously.

After all, where was all the outrage before?

[_Droopy]

The lesson by Droopy and his fellow idiot bloggers is perfectly clear now. The IRS is an evil organization only when it targets conservative groups, but it is God's tool in the hands of wise men when it goes after those who hold political views that differ from their own.

The disproportion is massive, as we have and now know, and no serious conservatives want to send the IRS out against liberal groups. They'd rather hash it out on Firing Ling, but the Left is long past the point of civil, critical philosophical debate. The IRS is evil period, should not exist, and should never have existed.

OPPS! I shouldn't have said that, should I?

[_Bret Ripley]

Here's what's missing from the "primer"

This is just the "Basic Primer", Brad. No doubt the missing stuff will all be covered in the Advanced Primer.

[_Res Ipsa]

Here's what's missing from the "primer"

This is just the "Basic Primer", Brad. No doubt the missing stuff will all be covered in the Advanced Primer.

The Advanced Primer. But isn't that what the Justice Department obtained phone records from? I'm getting so confused.

[_Droopy]

The Advanced Primer. But isn't that what the Justice Department obtained phone records from? I'm getting so confused.

Its just the facts and evidence as we now have them, with other aspects of the story in development.

Bow - and bow low - before your messiah.

[_Darth J]

Droopy, even if conservative groups received disparate treatment, so what? What in the text of the Constitution prohibits that?

[_Kevin Graham]

I'm still waiting for Droopy to show us when, where and how he was once outraged at the IRS when Republicans used it against Liberal groups.

10 Examples of Bush and the Republicans Using Government Power to Target Critics


1. Planned Parenthood. After a hoax video was produced by James O'Keefe and released by a professional clown-wrangler, the late Andrew Breitbart, the Republican Party has engaged in a years-long effort to strip the organization, which offers cancer screenings and other affordable medical services for women, of critical funding from the government. The votes in the House as well as in state legislatures from Arizona to New Jersey to Texas and New Hampshire -- to the tune of at least $60 million -- are nothing more than assault against a political enemy.

2. ACORN. The government attack on ACORN, traditionally a left-leaning organization, might be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. As with Planned Parenthood, the Republican inquisition against ACORN was nothing more than a politically motivated witch hunt based on, once again, a selectively-edited prank video by a scam artist, O'Keefe, who's been convicted of wiretapping a sitting U.S. Senator and forced in court to pay $100,000 in restitution to a fired ACORN employee. Yet the entire Republican congressional delegation lined up behind Breitbart and O'Keefe and destroyed ACORN, which entirely shut down in 2010. But that hasn't stopped the Republicans from continuing to vote on at least several occasions to defund the nonexistent group. In fact, last week the chairman House Appropriations Committee Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) introduced a section into a spending bill that reads: "None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors."

3. Voter ID Laws and Voter Purges. Whether it's Governor Rick Scott of Florida purging voter rolls of minority voters who are likely to vote for Democratic candidates or states like Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Tennessee passing restrictive Voter ID laws, the Republicans are making sure that fewer and fewer Democrats will be able to freely cast a ballot -- our most sacred right as citizens in a representative democracy.

What about the Bush years?

4. The Bush Justice Department Targeted Democrats for Prosecution. Back in 2007, the House Judiciary Committee investigated charges that attorney general Alberto Gonzales singled out prominent Democrats for prosecution, specifically Pennsylvania Democrats -- an assertion that was backed up by Dick Thornburgh, the attorney general under Reagan and Bush 41.

5. The Attorney Firing Scandal. Of course there was the attorney firing scandal in which the Bush Justice Department fired a slate of U.S. attorneys for strictly partisan reasons, either because the attorneys were prosecuting too many Republicans or because they weren't prosecuting enough Democrats.

6. The Bush IRS Audited Greenpeace and the NAACP. Not only was the NAACP suspiciously audited during Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, but high-profile Republicans like Joe Scarborough had previously supported an audit of the organization even though he's suddenly shocked by the current IRS audit story. Also in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS audited the hyper-liberal group Greenpeace at the request of Public Interest Watch, a group that's funded by Exxon-Mobil.

7. The Bush IRS Collected Political Affiliation Data on Taxpayers. In 2006, a contractor hired by the IRS collected party affiliation via a search of voter registration roles in a laundry list of states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. This begs the obvious question: why? Why would the IRS need voter registration and party affiliation information?

8. The Bush FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force Targeted Civil Rights / Anti-war Activists. In 2005, an ACLU investigation revealed that both the FBI and the JTTF surveilled and gathered intelligence about a variety of liberal groups including PETA and the Catholic Workers, along with other groups that it hyperbolically referred to as having "semi-communistic ideology."

9. The Bush Pentagon Spied on Dozens of Anti-war Meetings. Also in 2005, the Department of Defense tracked 1,500 "suspicious incidents" and spied on four dozen meetings involving, for example, anti-war Quaker groups and the like. Yes, really. The Bush administration actually kept track of who was attending these meetings down to descriptions of the vehicles used by the attendees, calling to mind the pre-Watergate era when the government investigated 100,000 Americans during the Vietnam War.

10. The Bush FBI Targeted Journalists with the New York Times and the Washington Post. By now, we're all familiar with the AP situation in which U.S. attorney Ronald Machen subpoenaed and confiscated phone records from the AP as part of a leak investigation into an article about a CIA operation that took place in Yemen to thwart a terrorist attack on the anniversary of Bin Laden's death. Well, this story pales in comparison with the Bush administration's inquisition against the reporters who broke the story about the NSA wiretapping program. In fact, the Justice Department considered invoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the archaic sequel to the John Adams-era Alien and Sedition Acts. The Bush FBI seized phone records -- without subpoena -- from four American journalists, including Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez. How do we know this for sure? Former FBI Director Robert Mueller apologized to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Adding... Bush White House Warns Bill Maher After 9/11. Congressional Republicans Condemn Moveon.org. I've coupled these two instances into one simply because they each underscore the Republican penchant for bullying dissenters. Shortly after 9/11, Bill Maher committed the mortal sin of suggesting that terrorists weren't "cowards" (he was merely agreeing with conservative fire-eater Dinesh D'Souza). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, speaking from the White House, warned Maher: "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do." Maher's show at the time, Politically Incorrect, was cancelled shortly thereafter. Years later, Moveon.org criticized conservative superhero David Petraeus with a full-page ad featuring the awkward play-on-words "General Betray Us." George W. Bush himself pilloried MoveOn and the Senate voted to condemn the ad while lionizing Petraeus (a love affair that came to an end last year).

With the IRS and AP stories, any cursory glimpse at the news will prove that Democrats -- even liberal bloggers -- have been critical of the Obama administration's actions, just as they had been with the actions of the Bush White House and the Republican Party. But Republicans? No such fairness or honesty. Of course. And it's also important to note the distinction between these recent stories and what's obviously a Republican textbook strategy of employing any means necessary in suppressing its opposition -- from the ballot box to the pages of our top-shelf newspapers. This is what they do: they intimidate, bully, prosecute and silence their critics as a matter of routine. And they rarely apologize or accept responsibility for it.

[_Darth J]

This "basic primer" has been brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.