How you gonna cry victim now?

I wrote about this a while back. The IRS received applications from 298 groups for tax exempt status and a quick look at the approved groups sure looked like the majority were conservative. Now Kevin Drum found an intrepid soul who did the real work.

However, the IRS does publish the names of groups that have received special scrutiny and been approved for tax-exempt status. They recently released a list of 176 organizations that have been approved since 2010, so Martin Sullivan checked each one to figure out if it was liberal or conservative. Here's what he found:

122 conservative
48 liberal/nonconservative
6 unknown

Sure makes their whining about being suppressed ridiculous. Not that it will stop them from crying about it. [graphic via]

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Tea Party launches lawsuit against IRS

This is too precious. The biggest grifter born of the original Tea Party uprising is suing the IRS for making them wait too long and work too hard to get their for tax-exempt status.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, the NorCal Tea Party Patriots accused the IRS of violating its constitutional rights due to the "intensive and intrusive scrutiny" it received while seeking tax-exempt status. [...]

The lawsuit has the backing of a group calling itself Citizens for Self-Governance, a group launched by the co-founder the Tea Party Patriots, Mark Meckler.

"We stand shoulder to shoulder with all those known and unknown who have been abused by a federal government run amok," Meckler said in a statement.

Well maybe not everyone. Meckler is seeking "class action status on behalf of all conservative and libertarian groups" who were asked to prove they deserved the exemption. Apparently the liberal groups who were actually denied the status, need not apply. And nothing says small government conservative like running to the federal courts for relief.

You may recall Meckler was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots back in the days of the "proud angry mobs." He parlayed that slot into a big grift culminating in the publication of a book. He polished his bonafides with the rubes by railing against the GOP operatives who he accused of co-opting other Tea Party organizations. Of course he didn't mention his own failed attempt to get cozy with the GOP himself.

That aside, I say please proceed Tea Party. Can't wait to see this issue adjudicated. Fact is, these Tea Party groups are primarily political. Meckler's Patriots gave a cool million to political candidates, sponsored a political debate and actively campaigned to kill state legislation. Claiming "social welfare" status devoted to public education is the biggest fraud going. If there's any justice every one of the damn Tea Party groups will lose the tax exempt status they were wrongfully awarded in the last year or two.

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Grasping at strawmen - Updated

There's no doubt the IRS was ham-handed in its handling of the tax-exempt applications after Citizen United. I've yet to see that they did anything against the law. Which is a problem to be sure. It suggests maybe we should be agitating to change the damn laws. Not that that's going to happen. Instead we have everyone looking to grind their own axe against the sharp edge of this pseudoscandal. That of course includes the "Obama has failed me" crowd of the left. Garance jumps in with this damning bit of evidence. On noes, there was no surge in applications in 2010. Quick fire more people. Heads must roll.

That's fine with me. Fire the whole lot. I seem to be the only one who remembers how George W Bush loaded the bureaucracy with GOP loyalists during his reign. Incompetent loyalists at that. Small wonder they screwed it all up. I've yet to see a high level official here who was hired under Obama.

Furthermore, as Steve M. points out, if the goal here was to suppress Tea Party influence on the election, they did a damn poor job of it. The chart showing the monthly approvals speaks for itself.



Oh and that bureaucrat who was in the tax exempt branch and is now in charge of IRS Obamacare enforcement? Hired under Reagan and promoted by none other than President George W. Bush, who also awarded her a hefty bonus in 2004 for distinguished service.

Our government agencies are riddled with GOP loyalists. Don't recall Obama doing any big purges like President Codpiece did. And let's not forget, the IRS admitted they outed themselves. I don't see any political advantage to Obama in engineering something so blatantly obvious. But looks like a helluva good way to invent a pseudo-scandal to help the GOP.

Update: Here's a list of all applications in that category which were approved in 2012. Just going by the obvious ones, looks like more conservative orgs were approved than liberal ones.

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Off with their heads

Yet another ritualistic resignation at the IRS, as required by the optics under what passes for civil society these days.

An internal IRS memo says Joseph Grant, commissioner of the agency’s tax exempt and government entities division, will retire June 3. Grant joins Steven Miller, who was forced to resign as acting IRS commissioner on Wednesday.

Grant joined the IRS in 2005.

But Booman is right. In a sane society, this is what should have happened to Tea Party group tax exemptions.

I am infuriated by these stories about Tea Party groups who are complaining that seeking tax-exempt status was like having a proctology exam. While I acknowledge that the IRS made unreasonable requests and caused unreasonable delays, I am even more outraged that they did not deny tax-exempt status to even one Tea Party group. Not one.

There isn't a single Tea Party group in the country that isn't primarily concerned with political matters. None of them should have qualified for tax-exempt status. None.

If this had been liberal groups organizing during the Bush administrations, not only would their tax exemptions have been denied, the leaders of the groups most probably would have been arrested. Hell, in those days they were arresting people for wearing tshirts and carrying signs even mildly critical of the government.

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Tea Party not a victim of IRS vendetta after all

Here's the first non-hysterical piece I've seen on the IRS mess. Tea Party groups were not the only ones singled out by the IRS. Some "471 groups received additional scrutiny, a total that indicates a crackdown on politically active nonprofit groups that extends beyond the Tea Party outfits." Liberal groups were targeted for additional scrutiny too and at least one had their status denied. So far no Tea Party group has claimed their applications wasn't approved. No doubt more of them were targeted but only because they filed many more applications than anyone else. And this is still true:

“The real problem is that phony 501(c)(4) groups are exploiting the tax laws to protect donors who don’t want to be held accountable for vicious, deceitful political ads,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The good news about this pseudo-scandal is it spurred some action on Capitol Hill to address the larger issues.

Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which is conducting its own IRS investigation, has introduced legislation with Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to require all groups spending money on politics to disclose their donors.

“These problems will continue as long as there is an absence of clear and enforceable rules,” Wyden told reporters yesterday. “In the absence of clear and enforceable rules the bureaucracy pretty much makes it up as they go along.”

This would help. The deep pocket funders of the dark money groups don't care so much about the tax break as they do about keeping their donors secret. Force them to disclose their donors and they may lose interest in forming these groups at all. At worst, they couldn't hide behind fake grassroots front groups anymore. That would help some.

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Nobody loves the IRS

Personally I prefer to call it a ginned up psuedo-scandal, but Josh is right about the politics of the IRS mess. GOP will be dining out on this one through 2014 and probably longer. This is Grade A prime rib for the angry base. No investigation, no irrefutable hard evidence will ever convince them they haven't been persecuted by the evel soshulist fascist liberal Dimmocrats to steal their First Amendment rights.

God save us if somehow this gets tied directly to the White House for real. Everybody loves a scandal and hates the IRS. The mass outrage will drown out everything else for months. Maybe years.

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Blame Congress for the IRS mess - Updated

Once you cut through the self-serving noise over the IRS psuedo-scandal, a few things become clear. Tea Party groups weren't really being targeted for their political beliefs. They were being asked to prove why they deserved a big tax exemption. And let's be real, if the name of your group stands for Taxed Enough Already, you're begging to be tied up in paperwork.

As I said before, I think most of the smaller groups were run by grifters who saw a prime opportunity to profit personally from the fear and anger of misinformed conservatives. More than one of them has been exposed as a fraud since the Kochs laid down that astroturf.

Also, I've seen no evidence President Obama had anything to do with it. He's not checking in with the IRS daily to give them a list of targets. He has no knowledge of their day to day operations. Anybody really think the CEO of a major corporation knows the intimate details of every manager's work day? It defies logic.

IRS was doing its job under the rules that Congress gave them, which were not at all clear. This is the smartest thing I've read about this so far. The real IRS scandal is in who was allowed to operate without challenge:

If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky. Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work. For example, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the Koch Brothers, was an instrumental force in helping the Republicans hold the House of Representatives. In every meaningful sense, groups like Americans for Prosperity were operating as units of the Republican Party. Democrats organized similar operations, but on a much smaller scale. (They undoubtedly would have done more, but they lacked the Republican base for funding such efforts.)

So the scandal—the real scandal—is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way. As Fred Wertheimer, the President of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, put it, “it is clear that a number of groups have improperly claimed tax-exempt status as section 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ organizations in order to hide the donors who financed their campaign activities in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections.”

The real problem is the IRS was wasting time chasing the small fry while the big fish were allowed to freely cheat the system. President Obama can't fix that. Only Congress can, by making the rules clearer.

Update: Charlie Pierce has more on why the blame for this IRS mess is on Congress.

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Rubio plays the fool - Updated

Well, I suppose Rubio's ridiculous demand will play well with the rubes:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Monday called on the IRS commisioner to resign in the wake of the agency's admission that staffers in the Cincinatti branch targeted conservative non-profit groups for extra scrutiny in the run-up to the 2012 elections.

You see, the well deluded base probably won't hear this on Fox News.

Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman, who was appointed by President Bush in 2008 and held by President Obama, left the agency in Nov. 9, 2012. Any pre-election misconduct would have had to occur on his watch. The current acting commissioner is Steven T. Miller -- a permanent replacement has not been nominated.

When quizzed on this small fact, Rubio's office responded that of course Shulman couldn't be responsible, he was just the actual commissioner. Clearly, Miller is still responsible because he was the deputy the whole time.

Pretty sure Rubio won't be blaming this highly placed bureaucrat either. [Via Steve M]

Lois G. Lerner has been selected as the director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service.

Chosen in December of 2005. Another Bush era appointee, so not guilty. I've also been wondering how many applications this division has to review in a year. Still not sure, but probably more than the 75 that were reviewed during the two years in question.

In this position, she will be responsible for administering and enforcing the tax laws that apply to more than 1.8 million organizations recognized by the IRS as exempt from tax.

Of course, not all of those are political front groups, but it does give us another clue about why the worker drones in that division may have been tempted to take shortcuts.

Update: Ed Kilgore has a good overview of psuedo-scandal fever and reminds BigMedia what their job is supposed to be.

So it would be nice if we could have a serious discussion of the abuse of tax exemptions to make it easier to pour obscene amounts of anonymous money into vicious and stupid campaign ads aimed at boosting the profits of the anonymous sources paying for them.

Of course, that will never happen because the same guys that should be investigated pour millions into their advertising revenue.

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The taxman cometh

No longer having any trust in the first 12-24 hours of Twitter/Facebook/Media coverage of any breaking story, I'm reserving my outrage until I figure out what's going on with this IRS mini-scandal. I'm not at all comfortable with IRS scrutiny based on political beliefs but I'm not entirely sure that is what's happening here. I'm sure this is true.

She said that between 2010 and 2012, about 75 of these groups were selected for extra screening as part of a broader review of political advocacy organizations that were seeking tax-exempt status. Front-line IRS employees working in the tax-exempt unit in Cincinnati selected groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, she said, as a shorthand because of the proliferation of these groups in recent years.

I'm also remembering the IRS has been hit by austerity fever same as every other federally funded agency. Also, the applications for this particular status by politically motivated individuals has exploded in that time frame. So you have fewer workers reviewing umpteenth more applications and they took a shortcut to meet their quotas.

Have to agree with Think Progress here. The real problem is they used the wrong keywords. While it's true a lot of these Tea Party groups are fleecing the gullible rubes, they're just the grifters. It's the deep pocket front groups who are cheating on the codes.

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, for example, told the IRS that any political ads run by the group would be “limited in amount” and “would not constitute the group’s primary purpose.” Campaign finance reform advocates have argued that, in light of more than $70 million in “independent expenditure” ad spending, the group’s primary purpose is clearly campaign activity. But rather than register with the Federal Election Commission as a political committee, Crossroads GPS continues to claim that it is not such a group and need not publicly identify its funders.

Far as I know he's still getting away with it. The overworked IRS guys would have been better off plugging in the names of the big money NGOs and seeing how many media buys pop up.

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