Category Archives: tax law and election law

Here.

See the Update at the bottom of this Pro Publica story.

Bloomberg View:

Until Congress passes the Disclose Act, which would end the practice of anonymous political spending, the IRS will continue to oversee groups that spend millions to influence the political process. What’s more, well-financed, powerful groups with deep political connections and access to first-rate legal advice will continue to whiz through the IRS express lane while genuine citizen organizations, Tea-Party-inspired and otherwise, will endure long waits to have their applications approved. The inspector general found one hapless applicant waiting 1,138 days for approval. We don’t know the victim’s name. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t “Rove.”

I make the pitch for DISCLOSE II to solve the broader IRS problem here.

Must-read Pro Publica deep dive.

Jonathan Bernstein wants unlimited disclosed contributions to candidates.

Here.

NYT on today’s hearing.

WaPo reports.

Andy Kroll reports for Mother Jones.

Important item in the Chronicle of Philanthropy (via Jonathan Adler).

Whether or not the total number of c4 applications were going up, c4 political spending was exploding, beginning with WRTL and continuing into Citizens United.  See my charts here from last year’s presentation at Stanford PACs, based upon data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

WaPo went to talk to the Cincinnati office workers.

A picture’s worth a 1000 words.

Following up on this post, it turns out that not only was Lerner going in prepared to bring up the tea party targeting; the question was planted too.  Watch.

Apparently the Lerner response on Friday (to a question, not in her prepared remarks) on Tea Party targeting was planned.  {Update: It’s even worse than we thought: the question was planted too}

Look: the IRS should have revealed its targeting of Tea Party groups much sooner, and it should not have had officials fail to report it (or perhaps even lie about it) when asked by Members of Congress.

But simply as a matter of PR, if the IRS decided it needed to get out in front of the damning upcoming TIGTA report, this was not the way to do it.  It should have issued a press release later that day on Friday, ahead of the weekend.  But it did it this way, in an offhanded, almost cavalier way (look at the exact text of what Lerner said: “So I guess my bottom line here is that we at the IRS should apologize for that, it was not intentional, and as soon as we found out what was going on, we took steps to make it better and I don’t expect that to reoccur.”) as part of the answer at a tax meeting where word was sure to leak out; it then was unprepared for questions at the press call afterwards (including the Lerner line that she was not good at math—true she’s a lawyer, not an accountant, but the optics) and then no formal response for a few days, and then apparently posting further private information about who was approved and put through this process on its website.

The bumbling nature of this seems to demonstrate that Lerner and others did not realize, at all, the extent to which this was politically radioactive and damaging.  The IRS probably isn’t an agency used to interacting often with the national press, and it shows, very starkly, in this incident.

More about today’s hearings later.

Andy Kroll writes for Mother Jones.

Watch Bloomberg (via Political Wire)

Politics, money and power: Inside the IRS’ targeting of conservative social welfare groups

The Problem of IRS’s Dwindling Credibility

Gary Bass and Beth Kingsley have written this oped for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

‘Tea party’ nonprofits rarely endorsed political candidates

Do nonprofits’ names imply political activity? Most social welfare nonprofits don’t have politically charged names

Matea Gold, soon of WaPo, writes this article for the LA Times.

WaPo reports. [corrected link]

Here.

Important Peter Overby report for NPR.

Roll Call:

Tea party conservatives may never fully trust Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, but the Kentucky Republican was talking about the dangers of limiting political speech long before the tea party movement existed.

An expansive view of the First Amendment when it comes to political speech has been a signature issue in McConnell’s Senate career. He led the crusade against the 2002 campaign finance overhaul championed by Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin even after enactment, taking the case to the Supreme Court.

Here.

Steven Rattner for NYT Opinionator.

Yes, yes, we are at the point that it everything has been said but not by everybody.

Here at Democracy Now!.

CRP: “Conservative nonprofits that received tax-exempt status since the beginning of 2010 and also filed election spending reports with the Federal Election Commission overwhelmed liberal groups in terms of money spent on politics, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service and FEC records shows.”

Jessica Levinson writes.

Yet another real scandal piece, this one in Chicago Business.

Fred Wertheimer Politico oped.

Yet another oped with this name, this one in the New York Times by Sheila Krumholz and Robert Weinberger of CRP.

Also in the NYT opinion section, a Room for Debate section, Should 501c4′s Be Eliminated?, and an editorial, Take Politics Away from the IRS. The editorial is similar to the position I take in my Slate piece.

WaPo:

Some groups, including several interviewed by The Washington Post, were asked to provide names of donors or membership lists, which experts say the IRS cannot legally do. The agency also demanded names of board members, copies of meeting minutes and résumés, details of community organizing efforts and numerous other details, according to questionnaires obtained by The Post.

“It was pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe,” said Karen L. Kenney, the coordinator for the San Fernando Valley Patriots, a tea party group in Southern California that was sent an IRS questionnaire with more than 100 questions on it.

The San Fernando group first submitted its application for nonprofit status in the fall of 2010, which was after the IRS’s Cincinnati-based “determination unit” had implemented its politically charged screening criteria. The group wrote the agency a $400 check to fast-track the process, but 19 months went by before the group heard anything, Kenney said.

Sounds like a real scandal to me, and not just a distraction from the disclosure problems which also exist as to c4s.

See here at Nonprofit Quarterly.

UPDATE: This is a very smart take on the IRS mess.

NYT: “President Obama announced Wednesday night that the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service had been fired, and he pledged that his administration would cooperate with Congressional investigations into the targeting of conservative groups.”

HuffPo reports.

Politico reports.

Michael Hiltzik column.

I renew my objection. Saying that what happened to conservative groups is not a “real” scandal is a way of denigrating what the IRS has done, and I am quite sure that many of these liberal critics would have been absolutely OUTRAGED if the Bush IRS had targeted “progressive” groups for special scrutiny and sat for a very long time on their applications for tax exempt status.

Yahoo! News reports.

Melanie Sloan of CREW: “Everyone can agree it is unacceptable for the IRS to target particular organizations based on political ideology. If that’s what agents at the IRS were up to, they were wrong and there should be consequences. The real problem, however, is not that the IRS is overly aggressive but that it has sat by idly while an ever-increasing number of groups blatantly violate the laws governing 501(c)(4) organizations. Where is the outrage over that?”

CNN reports.

NYT: “he Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday that its chief counsel did not tell Treasury superiors of I.R.S. efforts to target conservative groups for special scrutiny, nor did he participate in a 2011 meeting when the issue was discussed with the I.R.S. chief counsel’s office.”

BuzzFeed reports, with a subhead using the word “ennui.”

NPR.

PR Watch reports.

Here.

Phillip Hackney at TaxProf.

Interesting perspective from Bob Bauer.