Conservative groups deserved the extra IRS scrutiny.

As pointed out here more than a week ago, there was more than enough evidence, history and common sense to justify Tea Party and other conservative groups getting extra scrutiny from the IRS and that comments from president Obama and congressional Democrats as well as the press, was  the usual non fact based knee jerk reaction that defines the press, Obama, and congress.

 

Now the New York Times, a week after the fact, is reporting much the same thing as presented here but in their usual understated lets not offend anybody way, citing interviews with tax experts and former IRS agents and officials who pointed out that these groups pushed the legal limits of what was permissible and so figured to attract greater scrutiny by the IRS. 

Given that there was no evidence that the extra scrutiny given conservative groups was politically motivated or designed  to put them at a disadvantage or keep them from expressing their views in an election year,  there had to be a reason why IRS agents decided to give conservative groups applying for tax exempt status extra scrutiny. And no one besides this space and today's article in the New York Times  wanted to talk about what that reason might be. Which is that based on history and past performance conservative groups deserved it.

 

Given  the long Republican and conservative history of breaking campaign finance laws, engaging in election fraud,  dishonesty, misuse of campaign funds and outrght illegal activity for which there can be found no counterpart among Democrats and liberals, and given the conservative penchant and their history for trying to find ways to circumvent the law, why wouldn't the IRS give them extra scrutiny?

 

If someone is caught cheating on their tax returns and pays a fine do they have a right to complain in the future if their tax returns are subject to greater scrutiny than the average citizen? That's the case with conservatives and Republicans. And it's the case that Obama and Democrats have so far wanted to duck. Tom Delay,no less a personage than the  former Republican majority whip in the U.S. House is currently in federal prison after being convicted of charges of misuse of campaign funds,fraud and money laundering. He is the highest ranking Republican to go to prison since the Watergate scandals.

 

 In 2005 the chairman of the state Republican party in New Hampshire was convicted and sent to prison for voter fraud during the 2004 presidential election when he hired volunteers to  jam the phone banks of Democratic Party workers offering rides to the polls to Democratic voters who didn't have transportation making it impossible to get through thereby illegally trying to suppress the Democratic vote.

 

Duke Cunningham,former Republican member of the House is currently in prison for taking bribes. James O'Keefe, a conservative hero who made an undercover video posing as a pimp with his real life political prostitute accomplice Hanna Giles posing as a hooker, agreed to pay an Acorn worker $150,000 in damages in an out of court settlement  after he dishonestly edited and submitted for airing a video he shot surrepticiously that made it  look like the Acorn worker was trying to help them break the law when the unedited raw footage showed  the opposite was true.

 

And it was only a few months ago that conservative web site, The Daily Caller, edited by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, published completely false accusations against Democratic senator Robert Menendez right before the 2012 election accusing him of having sex with underage prostitutes. Not only was the story completely false, but the accusations were made by two prostitutes in the Dominican Republic who were bribed to make the allegations by a conservative political operative to smear Menendez right before the election,  as reported by the police who investigated the allegations.
 

The bigger scandal which the press and Democrats in congress ( and obviously Republicans) are ignoring, is how some of these groups qualified for their 501(c)4 status in the first place. That status given by the IRS is for groups who by law are exclusively engaged in "social welfare" advocacy and NOT  advocating for the election or defeat of any political party or candidate. Congress was so lax in writing the law, they didn't just leave loopholes, they left sink holes in the law perhaps intentionally, and it is conservatives more than anyone who try and find these loopholes and look for ways to abuse the law.

 Karl Rove's political action group Crossroads, was qualified by the IRS for tax exempt status based on the social welfare exemption. Can anyone actually say what kind of social welfare Karl Rove is engaged in? Does anyone actually believe his group is not political and not engaged in any activity involving the election of Republican candidates and the defeat of Democratic ones?

 

That is the real scandal, and that is what has to be addressed  --  enforcing the law that requires a 501(c)4 group to engage exclusively  in social welfare advocy  instead of the fiasco that exists now  with commericals like "call Democrat Joe Blow and tell him you oppose higher taxes to educate children". This is how these groups get around the law and pretend they are not advocating for a candidate when the clear message is, don't call Joe Blow just vote against him.

 

A Republican congressman from Oklahoma, James Lankford,  exhibited stupefying  ignorance of the law  in his questioning during the congressional hearings which only re-enforces the validity of the IRS scrutinizing conservative groups. He found it "remarkable" and "inappropriate" that the IRS, in responding to an application from a Tea Party group in Oklahoma City asked if the group had any associations with political candidates, if any political candidate had spoken at their meetings and if so, requested transcripts of the remarks. These are exactly the kind of questions the IRS should have been asking of these groups applying for tax exempt status.  Mr. Lankford seemed to think those questions were out of line. Mr. Lankford is so ignorant of the law at the heart of the hearings he should be disqualified from any further participation since he didn't know the law requires that groups applying for tax exempt status may NOT  engage in the activities that the IRS questionairre was addressing.  Instead Mr. Lankford wanted to grandstand so he could express his mock horror.

 

 Republicans at the hearing used words like "injured" and "abused" to describe the conservative groups that were given the extra scrutiny. The truth is its been conservatives and Republicans who have repeatedly abused and injured the electoral process and campaign finance law in the underhanded and sometimes illegal way they go about their business. And the IRS knows it.  Given that none of these groups in the end were denied their tax exempt status there was no abuse. There was also testimony  that these groups had the right to operate as a tax exempt group without IRS approval and then, after the fact, could have filed an IRS form claiming tax exempt status. So in reality no conservative group was "injured" or "abused" as Republicans preposterously and dishonestly allege, and no one was prevented from exercising any right of free bought and paid for  speech.

None of this was reported in the press who kept talking about the IRS "targeting" Republicans and conservatives because the press loves a scandal even when there's no basis for it,  and none of this was brought up by Democrats who did what they seem to do best in the face of controversy -- fold, capitulate and show no backbone, following the leader of their party, the capitulater-in-chief, president Obama. (A reminder about Obama's "outrage". He said he was "outraged" a few years ago when mulit-million dollar bonuses given  AIG executives after the tax payer bailout became public.  What we learned later was that Obama personally approved those bonuses weeks before his "outrage". And lets not forget the foot he put his mouth over the incident involving professor Henry Louis Gates when he criticized the police officer who had arrested Gates for disorderly conduct without knowing the facts and then had to eat his words.)

 

The nine person IRS tax exempt enforcement section, in seeking to make sure the most likely offenders were given proper scrutiny, used words like "Tea Party" and other conservative related criteria as a short cut to help them narrow the search for the most likely offenders since they had over 3,000 applications.  That seems to be the Republican ox that's being gored and the mistake the IRS made, if that's what someone wants to call it, was one of  semantics, not substance.  They could have given the same scrutiny on a case by case basis using alphabetical order and no one could have said a word. On the other hand knowing conservatives and Tea Party activists are the ones who have demonstrated the greatest dishonesty and circumvention of the law, and a willingness to abuse the law,  it makes sense that they'd try and shorten the process and use key words. None of whch stopped Obama from demanding the resignation of the head of the IRS, putting his head on a platter to try and mollify Republicans. Again without knowing any of the facts.

 

Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio made statements during his questioning during the hearings that this was  all was directed by higher ups and that people will go to jail. Naturally Turner did not present a shred of evidence to even point in that direction. His statement was in fact itself a fraud. Which is more evidence of why conservative groups were scrutinized in the first place. And right now, Turner should keep in mind, the only people who are actually in jail for election and campaign fraud are conservative and Republican. And while there may very well people who go to jail, it might not be the people Turner had in mind.

NOTE: As if to further make the point it was announced today that Tea Party darling, Representative Michelle Bachmann has announced she is not running for re-election for her House seat. This coincides with the revelation as reported in the New York Times that she is about to investigated for her former presidential campaign's fund raising.