IRS targeted conservative groups

Tools    





Did the Commissioner know? Did the decislon start with him?
He says no, but then, that's what people usually say in that sort of position.

The head of the Union? What does he have to do with it? Is he involved?
She. And we don't know. We know that their union members give overwhelmingly to Democrats, and that the head of the Union met with the President the day before the targeting started. And we actually have a long record of the Obama campaign and administration calling for investigations into numerous conservative groups before this came to light, when they didn't like what they were doing.

I can see what's already happening here, though. You're just going to blithely dismiss all shady circumstantial evidence. It's the same Smoking-Gun-Or-Nothing, Watergate-Or-Bust mentality that you use to dismiss every scandal that besets this administration.



Strike a big blow against the "it was just a couple of rogue underlings" excuse:

Additional scrutiny of conservative organizations’ activities by the IRS did not solely originate in the agency’s Cincinnati office, with requests for information coming from other offices and often bearing the signatures of higher-ups at the agency, according to attorneys representing some of the targeted groups. At least one letter requesting information about one of the groups bears the signature of Lois Lerner, the suspended director of the IRS Exempt Organizations department in Washington.



The head of the IRS visited the White House more often than the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Direct of the CIA.

Combined.




I just saw this thread. I have to say that this situation really is outrageous. I am all for President Obama and support many of his policies, but the idea that the IRS is targeting people for being conservative and seeking to intimidate them using our tax agencies is frightening and a flagrant abuse of power. Like many here, I don't think President Obama was involved with this, and without evidence to the contrary, it's pretty irresponsible to accuse him of a Watergate-style conspiracy effort as some on the right are doing, but that doesn't absolve President Obama and his administration from engaging in a full and open, transparent process, and it doesn't excuse them from their responsibility to fully explain the errors that were made by the administration. Yoda is right that when you believe in a larger, more centralized federal government that should have a greater role in helping to deliver services to our society, when that government apparatus you are pushing to expand breaks down you have a greater responsibility to explain what happened and to punish those responsible. None of these things have as yet been done. The Obama administration needs to immediately act to ensure that the administration they claimed would be the most transparent in history resolves these problems and institutes safeguards so this does not happen again.



Well said. People being able to have confidence that the law is being enforced equitably is one of government's most sacred obligations. That makes this way more sensitive than even much more seemingly salacious scandals.

The transparency thing is one of the few things that genuinely surprised me. Obviously, I didn't vote for the President, but I still genuinely thought he'd at least enact some moderate transparency reforms. I definitely thought he'd follow through on the Obamacare negotiations being on C-SPAN, given that he mentioned it something like two dozen times on the campaign trail. I definitely didn't expect him to go backwards on the issue.



I do think that this whole controversy over politically motivated targeting by the IRS has obscured the central problem though, and it is this: None of these organizations, be it Crossroads GPS, Organizing for America, or the Tea Party Patriots, should be receiving tax exempt status. This idea that overtly political organizations like these that spend millions of dollars on political activities should be receiving tax exempt status under the guise of posing as non-political organizations is pretty ludicrous. In an age where our government is battling an economic crisis and our deficit continues to climb, there needs to be much stricter oversight of all of these groups, on both sides of the aisle. Only true social welfare organizations should be granted this status.



Well, "non-political" in this case means focused on specific issues, and not specific candidates or parties. And the problem with making any further distinction than that is that it entails government declaring what issues are "public good" issues and which ones aren't. Nearly all political activism is done for what its proponents feel is the public good, and it's a bit dangerous to be picking and choosing which issues qualify.



I respect your point of view on this, but I don't think these distinctions are as difficult to draw as you are making it seem. If you are running a soup kitchen or a church or a hospital which gives care to the uninsured, you are a social welfare organization. If you spend millions of dollars working to elect Republicans, or defeat Obamacare, as Crossroads GPS did, or spend millions of dollars promoting President Obama's agenda, which was what Organizing for Action did, you are not a "social welfare organization." You are a political organization, and should be classified as such. Political organizations also believe that the candidates that they run are in service of the public good, but they don't get tax exempt status. Perhaps the whole category of a 501c4 "social welfare" organization should be abolished entirely, as all the organizations that I hear that are granted this status are not non-partisan issue-oriented advocacy outfits. I think drawing that distinction is not dangerous at all. It's common sense to me.



Those distinctions aren't too difficult to draw, because nobody's against soup kitchens. But what about increased funding for schools? Public good, or politics? What about wanting more public money for solar power? What about advocating for more/less regulation, or more/less funding for any public works project? What about social issues that are considered highly political today, but might not be later?

Perhaps, as you suggest, the entire designation should be abolished. I nearly mentioned this in my last reply. I don't know if I like the idea or not, but I like it a lot more than making value judgments about the social benefits of individual organizations.



To me, these distinctions are not difficult to draw either. If you are for improving schools, or promoting clean energy, etc. that is issue-oriented and broadly applicable. If as an organization you move beyond advocating generally for certain principles, and instead move into campaigning for or against specific candidates or pieces of legislation, than in my opinion you move into the political sphere. To me, you can be a Democrat or a Republican and be supportive of clean energy or more funding for schools. It's when the advocacy organization becomes tied to candidates or parties that it begins to get political.



To me, these distinctions are not difficult to draw either. If you are for improving schools, or promoting clean energy, etc. that is issue-oriented and broadly applicable. If as an organization you move beyond advocating generally for certain principles, and instead move into campaigning for or against specific candidates or pieces of legislation, than in my opinion you move into the political sphere.
So saying you're for funding clean energy is fine, but saying you're for a bill that funds clean energy isn't? And by that same principle, it'd be okay to say you're against something just like Obamacare provided you don't mention it by name?

To me, you can be a Democrat or a Republican and be supportive of clean energy or more funding for schools. It's when the advocacy organization becomes tied to candidates or parties that it begins to get political.
This is even less tenable, I think, because now you're tying it to the ideological scope of each party, which is constantly changing and would be impossible to quantify empirically even if it were static. If the party suddenly rejects something, can an organization suddenly lose its status? How do you measure that? And doesn't tying it to the ideological scope of the party give that party an incentive to undermine its more moderate elements, since the more they have, the more their opposition is funded?

And while we're at it, why just those two? Socialists and libertarians don't get the same tax benefits unless they supplant one of the two parties?



I think that you raise some worthy points, so I hope you'll allow me to clarify my position. I don't fundamentally have a problem with organizations supporting bills that advocate for the interests of their organization as long as they do so in a way that focuses on the issue and not on the candidates themselves. By political parties, I didn't intend for Republican and Democrat to be an exhaustive list. I merely cited them because they are the most common parties and they were the parties that these organizations which I referenced were promoting. It's one thing to support broad principles and say, our advocacy organization supports a free market approach to health care and health savings accounts, and another thing entirely to use your organization to defeat President Obama and run negative ads because you don't like Obamacare, while at the same time funneling tens of millions of dollars to Governor Romney's campaign. It's one thing to say generally, we don't support the principles of the Affordable Care Act and another thing to run ads that are dedicated almost exclusively to tearing down its architect and misleading the American people about what Obamacare does and does not do. I think one is okay, the other, in my opinion, is not, because it is not consistent with being a social welfare organization. It's consistent with being a political organization, and political organizations shouldn't be entitled to game the system by masquerading as social welfare organizations when it suits them and morph into political appendages of campaigns when it does not.



Thanks for clarifying. I guess my question then is: where do you propose we draw the line? And wherever you propose we draw it, won't that just make the exact same organizations reword a few things and achieve roughly the same result?



will.15's Avatar
Semper Fooey
Don't tax exempt any of them.
__________________
It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula



I think the line can be drawn fairly. Since I am not an expert on tax law, I will have to leave it to others who have more experience to draw these lines, but I do think that distinctions ca be made. If it is determined that this is too unwieldy, as I stated before, I would also be totally fine with eliminating this classification altogether and leaving tax exempt status to organizations that don't engage in political activity at all.



will.15's Avatar
Semper Fooey
Why should any of them get tax exemption?

Except for charities and churches tax them ALL.



I think the line can be drawn fairly. Since I am not an expert on tax law, I will have to leave it to others who have more experience to draw these lines, but I do think that distinctions ca be made. If it is determined that this is too unwieldy, as I stated before, I would also be totally fine with eliminating this classification altogether and leaving tax exempt status to organizations that don't engage in political activity at all.
Well, if you won't draw such a line I guess we'll just have to disagree about how plausible it would be. But abolishing the designation would definitely be preferable to picking and choosing.



Anyway, that's beside the thread topic. This story just gets worse and worse. Obviously we get the kneejerk defenses from everyone about how it was just some rogue agents, but we've already found out that it can't be dismissed so glibly. And the number of trips the Commissioner made to the White House is pretty incredible.



what irritates me the most currently is how people like Maddow and a lot of the liberal press, keep bringing up that this is just a GOP running point for 2016. Like, really? It wasn't the Republican or Tea Party groups who were choosing to be targeted. This wasn't a plot to get votes 5 years later. I think it's shameful on how many are shrugging this whole thing off. Could you imagine if instead of targeting by political ideologies the IRS targeted by religion? If someone tried to say, oh this is just another way for evangelicals to get more followers.
__________________
Yeah, there's no body mutilation in it



what irritates me the most currently is how people like Maddow and a lot of the liberal press, keep bringing up that this is just a GOP running point for 2016. Like, really? It wasn't the Republican or Tea Party groups who were choosing to be targeted. This wasn't a plot to get votes 5 years later. I think it's shameful on how many are shrugging this whole thing off. Could you imagine if instead of targeting by political ideologies the IRS targeted by religion? If someone tried to say, oh this is just another way for evangelicals to get more followers.
Lets just call it profiling. And last I checked, profiling was wrong.