You're a literal idiot.
Azelma may be a please-everybody optimist who is susceptible to peer pressure, but he has a point. You start out comparing some people misusing their official position to covertly undermine people they regard as political enemies to both a proper exercise of power to investigate groups that violated laws regarding their tax exempt status and the legitimate, if disagreeable, fully transparent and open-to-scrutiny legislative process. It's a shitty apple-to-oranges comparison. Basically, some person or group working for the benefit of the party you most closely align with has done something uber-sketchy (actually, we're up to three possible scandals in the news this week), and your only counter-point is "well, republicans do stuff I don't like," never mind that none of that "stuff" is a misuse of power, illegal, unethical, or hidden from public view. You're exactly the bitter partisan Azelma describes.
The IRS's Nonprofit HelperA tax-exempt charity disseminated confidential tax information.
By JAMES TARANTO
The Internal Revenue Service last year supplied a left-leaning nonprofit charity with confidential information about conservative organizations, which the charity disseminated to the public,
ProPublica reported yesterday.
The charity in question was ProPublica itself. We should acknowledge that "left-leaning" is our characterization; ProPublica describes itself in
its own tax filings as "entirely non-partisan and non-ideological." ProPublica is legally obliged to be nonpartisan, for it enjoys tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, which means that contributions to it are tax-deductible. By contrast, the organizations the IRS has acknowledged targeting on ideological grounds are 501(c)(4)s, meaning that they are permitted to engage in some political activity and only their operations are exempt from taxes.
According to yesterday's report, the IRS provided ProPublica with nine confidential applications from organizations seeking 501(c)(4) status, all of them conservative, of which ProPublica published six.
ProPublica reported Dec. 14 on one of the improperly supplied applications. It was from Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, which ProPublica characterized as a "dark money group." That December report, which portrayed Crossroads as deceptive about its intentions, turns out to have buried the lead. The real story was the IRS, which the story finally got to in the 11th paragraph:
ProPublica wrote:
The IRS sent Crossroads' application to ProPublica in response to a public-records request. The document sent to ProPublica didn't include an official IRS recognition letter, which is typically attached to applications of nonprofits that have been recognized. The IRS is only required to give out applications of groups recognized as tax-exempt.
In an email Thursday, an IRS spokeswoman said the agency had no record of an approved application for Crossroads GPS, meaning that the group's application was still in limbo.
"It has come to our attention that you are in receipt of application materials of organizations that have not been recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt," wrote the spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge. She cited a law saying that publishing unauthorized returns or return information was a felony punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to five years, or both. The IRS would not comment further on the Crossroads application.
"ProPublica believes that the information we are publishing is not barred by the statute cited by the IRS, and it is clear to us that there is a strong First Amendment interest in its publication," said Richard Tofel, ProPublica's general manager.
What is one to make of this? We're with Tofel in thinking ProPublica's decision to publish the document is all but unassailable on First Amendment grounds. In fact, it seems to us that if you work at a government agency and want to make sure a confidential document gets published, a very effective tactic is to release it to a news organization, then warn it against publication.
Which raises the question: Did the IRS carelessly release the documents to ProPublica and then attempt to control the damage by threatening to prosecute? Or was the prosecution threat a case of reverse psychology, intended to goad ProPublica into publishing the documents? Occam's razor suggests the former, but either way, it doesn't do much to bolster one's confidence in the IRS's impartiality and competence.
This is not the only case in which tax-exempt nonprofit organizations have disseminated confidential information about disfavored conservative nonprofits.
Yesterday's column noted that the Human Rights Campaign, a 501(c)(4) that advocates for same-sex marriage, supplied the Puffington Host with the National Organization for Marriage's donor list, which NOM says has to have come from the IRS.
But there's something especially rich about the IRS's use of a 501(c)(3), an organization that is supposed to be above politics altogether, to violate the confidentiality of a 501(c)(4), which is permitted to engage in some political activity.
Meanwhile,
The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin claims that "the real scandal" is "that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way":
Jeffrey Toobin wrote:
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."
Toobin is wrong even if there is a case to be made for stricter policing of political activity by 501(c)(4)s. It is far more of a scandal that the IRS, which unlike Crossroads GPS or even Organizing for Action wields awesome coercive power, has been engaged in political activity, enforcing the law selectively at the expense of challengers to the party in power. That calls into question the very legitimacy of the government.
Furthermore, Toobin doesn't really believe what he writes about 501(c)(4)s, at least not consistently. If he did, he would have warned us about Fred Wertheimer. That's right, in describing Democracy 21 as "a government-ethics watchdog group," Toobin leaves out that it too is a 501(c)(4).
has some glaring lies of omission, every president from Gerald Ford to George H. W. Bush managed to avoid any of these types of scandals, probably in part due to laws passed in the wake of Nixon's abuse of the organization. That means that while there's a long and storied history of abusing the IRS for political purposes, you can't legitimately say every president engaged in that type of abuse.
