Now watch the Right-wing spin machine and conspiracy theory generator go to work. The first victim, the truth. IRS scandal is a tale of irony and ineptitude May 14, 2013 By Dick Polman The Internal Revenue Service scandal is catnip for conservatives who claim that President Obama's leftish leviathan is out to get them. But the reality of what happened is far more nuanced and complicated. I'm well aware, in this era of ideological warfare, that nuance is the first casuality. But I'll give it a try anyway, because the IRS' targeting of small-fry conservative groups was not a conspiratoral socialist plot. It was knuckleheaded, ill-supervised bureaucratic ineptitude. That in no way diminishes the IRS' disgraceful behavior, or excuses the inexcusable. Beginning in 2010, the tax agency's Cincinnati office singled out for extra scrutiny a disproportionate number of non-profit groups with "tea party" and "patriot" in their titles. In remarks yesterday, Obama rightly assailed the scandal as "outrageous," and said: "You don't want the IRS ever being perceived to be biased, and anything less than neutral in terms of how they operate. I've got no patience for it. I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure we find out exactly what happened on this." Conservatives have every right to be ticked off - just as liberals would've been infuriated if the Bush-era IRS had singled out non-profit groups with words like "progressive" in their titles. But now let's go to the nuance. Just for starters, let's dispense with the predictable right-wing hyperbole about how the IRS scandal is proof that Obama is "Nixonian." The people slinging that bull don't know their history. There isn't a shred of proof that Obama personally ordered the IRS to target those conservative groups; by contrast, here's Nixon on the White House tapes - Sept. 8, 1971 - plotting to use the IRS to harass his likeliest 1972 Democratic opponents: "Are we going after their tax returns? I - you know what I mean? There's a lot of gold in them thar hills....I can only hope that we are, frankly, doing a little persecuting. Right? We out to persecute them...Are we looking into Muskie's returns? Does he have any?....Hubert's been in a lot of funny deals....Who knows about the Kennedy's? Shouldn't they be investigated?" Anyone today who carelessly invokes "Watergate," or who denounces the current IRS scandal as "a new low in illegal government activity" (to quote an ahistorical spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots), should be required to read the Nixon transcripts. And then take a shower. Thank you, Citizens United Today's IRS scandal needs to be put in contemporary context. Here's the context, and how ironic it is: The whole thing happened because the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court issued their disastrous Citizens United ruling. The court opened the floodgates for virtually unlimited political spending. The ruling was an historic victory for special interests and fat cats. The ruling also inspired hundreds of political groups to take advantage of an IRS loophole; by setting up shop as 501(c)4 non-profits - "social welfare" organizations - they wouldn't have to disclose their donors. They could finance their politicking with secret money. But social welfare organizations are not supposed to spend most of their time politicking; under the loose IRS rules, such groups shall not be "primarily engaged" in election work. The IRS Cincinnati office, which monitors non-profits, was therefore stuck with the thankless task of weeding out the overtly political groups. Thanks to Citizens United, the number of non-profits quickly doubled. The court ruling was issued in January 2010. The IRS' enhanced scrutinization began in March 2010. That timing was not coincidental. So the Cincinnati office started to scrutinize - with great ineptitude. It flagged "tea party" and "patriot" groups because that was a short cut, an easy lazy way to get a handle on the burgeoning workload. Was this flagging process orchestrated by Obama lefties in Washington? Nope. The Cincinnati scutinizers were mostly left to their own devices, with scant guidance from HQ. And the scrutinizers are civil servants, not political appointees. Only two IRS officials, the commissioner and the chief counsel, are political appointees - and when the conservative groups were flagged in 2010, the commissioner was a George W. Bush appointee. As for Lois Lerner, the lawyer who heads the non-profit division (and who says the IRS flaggings were "insensitive" and "inappropriate"), she served in the IRS for eight years under Bush, and she got her start in the Justice Deparment under Ronald Reagan. And if the administration was really conspiring to break the power of conservative groups, why did the IRS pick on small fry (non-profit tea party groups that barely spend a penny on politics) - and virtually ignore the big fish? Case in point: Karl Rove's American Crossroads GPS is officially listed as a "social welfare" organization, yet it spent $70 million on political ads in 2012, all the while leveraging the non-profit loophole to hide the identity of its donors. But we all know that nuance can't compete with shorthand buzz. The shorthand ("Obama Goes After Conservative Groups") will be wielded by Republicans as a talking point, fundraising tool, and grist for inevitable House hearings. As a panicked (fictional) White House guy remarked on Veep the other night, when faced with the latest scandal du jour, "For the next 13 months, we're gonna play who-knew-what-when." Reel life and real life, what's the difference.
The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/14/Progressive-Group-Says-IRS-Gave-Them-Confidential-Docs-On-Conservative-Groups
For doubters who don't like Breitbart here it is in the WASHINGTON POST In january of 2014 the IRS becomes the policing agency for ObamaCare, and all our medical information will be at their complete access.
The point isn't that the IRS targeted conservative groups. The point is that they were targeted at all. I wonder what the liberals would say had this been a Republican administration and the IRS was targeting THEM. They would probably want to burn something. Oh Urbs, just so you'll know, the liberals here won't read anything from Breitbart.com. If they could put the website into book form, they would burn it.
If you look at the Articles of Impeachment for Nixon you will find out just what they thought of it when it happened to them.
Yeah, ask Hillary what she thought of impeaching a president. Watergate didn't involve the IRS targeting specific groups for audits, however. This is a whole, brand-new can of worms that isn't going away anytime soon (as Obama will certainly find out).
I've got a bit of enlightenment for you: "even steven" doesn't apply with liberals because Republicans are assumed to be criminals from the bget-go; thus when Diingy Harry Reid refers to "shadowey" groups he means Republicans or Republican agents. It's ok to do whatever's needed to bring down Republicans. Btw; the "friend" Harry referred to during the election was his friend in the IRS, who gave him details from Romney's tax returns. He made charges standing in the well of the senate, far in excess of what he knew was in Romney's tax returns, if only to get him to go public with the full forms, schedules, and work sheets.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 11:32 AM CDT When the IRS targeted liberals Under George W. Bush, it went after the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a liberal church By Alex Seitz-Wald (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak) 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. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/singleton/
If I follow that correctly, you have 4 audits in 8 years. Isn't that what the IRS is supposed to do - audit a few out of the whole? You have zero evidence that anyone was targeted. Now under Obama, the IG's report proves targeting and the IRS has admitted it.
Just like Watergate...trace it right back to the committee to re-elect. Now, I guess, they are looking into how Harry Reid had so much first-hand knowledge of Mitt Romney's tax filings. Reid is claiming he got the info from a Romney "insider" but Romney is adament that info was never shared. Hmmmm
Lots of innuendo but no link to an administration. At least not this administration. Apparently two senior people overseeing the offices in question were both Bush Appointees. Hum? There isn't a shred of evidence linking the current administration to any of this. Not one shred. The IRS turned itself in. We know thanks to the Bush Administration what using the IRS to attack your political foes looks like, however, this is the first time we have seen Republican outrage over something like this even though it doesn't come close to what the Bush Administration did. Hum?
Not even innuendo but no link to an administration. At least not the Bush administration. BTW, the IRS did not t"turn itself in". You can thank either Congress or the IG.
What a goomba! The Treasury IG IS the IRS. Congress only reacted to the revelation once it was already known.
You need to enlighten yourself as to who the Inspector Generals are and where they are drawn from. I. G.s make the rounds of federal agencies all the time, and their skill sets and credentials relate in type to the type agencies they inspect. They are not a part of the specific bureau their inspection is focused on. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_General
Steven Miller, the "Acting" Commissioner has been asked for and tendered his resignation. He wasn't A/Commish when the problem began, he only occupied the position as a place holder, and he was a career IRS employee. Having said that, if he's a Republican then tough-titty. If he's a Democrat there'll be a "job" for him over at Fannie Mae, where out of office liberals go to cool their heels and get staked for future ventures with big annual bonuses. Fannie's not a part of the federal bureaucracy, you see, as a Government Sponsored Entity [GSE] which has unlimited draws on the treasury because it's TBTF [too big to fail].
