Obama 'Legalizes' IRS Abuse of Tea Party Groups

Attorney Cleta Mitchell, who represents several conservative organizations abused by the IRS, told attendees at the Institute's 2013 summer DC Intern Seminar:

I'm not surprised that the agents in the IRS decided it was completely appropriate to single out and target, terrorize, and harass conservative organizations. I think we will learn — because I've had enough conversations with conservative and tea party leaders around the country who were visited by the FBI ... I think it will come out at some point that the FBI classified the tea party groups as domestic terrorists, or at least were investigating them to see if they were domestic terrorists.

Yesterday, in an article titled IRS Targeting, Round Two, Kim Strassel @ Wall Street Journal wrote that the Obama "Treasury and IRS are back at it — this time in broad daylight."

In the media blackout of Thanksgiving week, the Treasury Department dumped a new proposal to govern the political activity of 501(c)(4) groups. The administration claims this rule is needed to clarify confusing tax laws. Hardly. The rule is the IRS's new targeting program—only this time systematic, more effective, and with the force of law.

That this rule was meant to crack down on the White House's political opponents was never in doubt. What is new is the growing concern by House Ways and Means Committee investigators that the regulation was reverse-engineered—designed to isolate and shut down the same tea party groups victimized in the first targeting round. Treasury appears to have combed through those tea party applications, compiled all the groups' main activities, and then restricted those activities in the new rule.

Strassel explains how this works against tea party groups:

To get or keep tax-exempt status, 501(c)(4) organizations must devote a majority of their work to their "primary" social-welfare purpose. Most tea party groups were set up with a primary purpose of educating Americans on pressing problems—the size of government, the erosion of the Constitution—and did so mainly via nonpartisan voter guides, speakers forums, pamphlets or voter-registration drives.

What the proposed Treasury/IRS regulation would do is to re-categorize all these efforts as "political activity"—thereby making it all but impossible for tea party groups to qualify for 501(c)(4) status.

Strassel then contrasts tea party treatment to IRS's treatment of liberal groups like unions and the "ultra-liberal League of Women Voters."

What makes this targeting more obvious is that the Obama Treasury rule only applies to 501(c)(4) groups. The ultra-liberal League of Women Voters Education Fund is registered as a 501(c)(3)—one of those "charities" supposedly held to the strictest IRS standards on politicking. Yet it brags on its website that it holds "candidate debates and forums," and that its "educational activities" include "understanding candidate views and ballot initiatives."

The League will continue to be able to do its voter guides and registrations and candidate forums. Yet under this new rule, any conservative social-welfare organization that attempts to do the same will likely lose its tax-exempt status. Nor does the new rule apply [to] the biggest spenders of all in politics—unions, which are registered as 501(c)(5)s. The only category muzzled is the one recently flooded by conservative groups that Democrats fear in the 2014 election.

Mitchell's suspicions may well be proven correct, but Americans will have to wait for an honorable, law-abiding administration to take office before discovering the extreme ways in which the Obama Administration has corrupted executive power to benefit its political allies and harm its political opponents.