You might say that March 10, 2013 was the day that the “second term curse” officially kicked in for President Barack Obama — no matter what the final detailing of the facts proves. First came ABC News’ “bombshell” bad news for the administration on some Benghazi, which will ensure that the issue will have “legs” for some time to come. And now there’s this about the Internal Revenue Service — an always touchy subject since the one thing ANY administration does not want to be accused of is having the IRS seem political on its watch:
The Internal Revenue Service on Friday apologized for targeting groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, confirming long-standing accusations by some conservatives that their applications for tax-exempt status were being improperly delayed and scrutinized.
Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.
Rather, Lerner said, they were a misguided effort to come up with an efficient means of dealing with a flood of applications from organizations seeking tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012.
During that period, about 75 groups were selected for extra inquiry — including burdensome questionnaires and, in some cases, improper requests for the names of their donors — simply because of the words in their names, she said in a conference call with reporters.
They constituted about one-quarter of the 300 groups who were flagged for additional analysis by employees of the IRS tax-exempt unit’s main office in Cincinnati.
It was not clear whether the IRS had anticipated the firestorm that it would ignite with its disclosure. Indeed, it appeared to have happened by chance, when Lerner, appearing Friday at a conference held by the American Bar Association, responded to a question about the allegations by conservative groups.
And here is another reason why this story will be pitchforked into the headlines: reporters, blogger and Republicans have now been literally gifted a great quote:The IRS’s subsequent conference call with reporters was clumsily handled. At one point, Lerner attempted to do arithmetic on the phone and blurted out: “I’m not good at math.” That admission was understandable, given that her training is as an attorney, but it produced a quote that is likely to come back and haunt the agency that handles the nation’s tax returns.
Meanwhile, Tea Party.net issued a statement rejecting the apology which reads in full:
TheTeaParty.net to IRS: “Apology not accepted”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In response to IRS officials today admitting that its agents actively targeted Tea Party groups for increased scrutiny during the 2012 election, the nation’s largest Tea Party group and a subject of IRS inquiries over the past year, issued the following statement:
“What we’ve long suspected to be the case is now confirmed to be true. The Obama administration has used the IRS as a political weapon. The IRS may claim that it is ‘sorry.’ But given the damage that has been done, their apology is not accepted,” said Niger Innis, Chief Strategist for TheTeaParty.net.
“What would Democrats have done if the Nixon administration ordered the IRS to actively target the National Organization of Women or the American Civil Liberties Union? Nixon had his own enemies list and resigned. These activities are eerily similar, and yet Obama remains in office even in light of Fast and Furious, the Benghazi tragedy, and now the active targeting of his political opposition. We demand a thorough independent investigation into who did what, when, why, and how far up into the administration this scandal goes. We would expect intimidation like this from third-world, tin-pot dictators, not our own US government.”
All in all, a frankly lousy day for the Obama administration — a day that will generate lots of questions, blog posts, news stories, and partisan skirmishing for days to come.
Or weeks?
And it’ll also be a day when these two controversies will keep Republican ad makers very busy on ads that will most assuredly go big-time during the 2014 Congressional elections, no matter what the actual explanation turns out to be.
In 21st century America, how the facts eventually shake down means little. It’s really about an issue suddenly arising that can pitchfork into the headlines, pressure, put one side on the defensive, and be used as a political bludgeon to assume the worst case explanation is established even though it may not be yet it may not be yet.
You could say in these kinds of scandals that “the jury is not out” — but partisan juries seldom are out long; it’s the general populace that may not be ready to rush to judgment to defend or berate the other side.
BUT:
These two bits of negativity for the Obama administration suggest one thing: it is now in a new era and will likely be on the defensive. Will more wrinkles start to appear?
A BIT OF REACTION:
—Greg Sargent:
Mitch McConnell is calling for an investigation. In purely political terms, this is right in the conservative sweet spot — the IRS, bullying, intimidation, political thuggery, etc. We hear that stuff regularly from the conservative media, of course, and the thundering about this one will be epic. But this time, it seems entirely justified. There should be an investigation – a real one – and we should all want to follow it wherever it goes.
If you happen to be a conservative, or part of a conservative group targeted for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service, they want you to know that they’re really, really sorry. They promise it won’t happen again…“Not politically motivated.” Yeah right, and I’m the Tooth Fairy.
For the life of me I can’t imagine why the IRS would pay special attention to groups comprised of common-sense moms with no non-profit experience and various other grifters who know an easy mark when they see one, particularly when the whole basis of the Tea Party is to get out of paying taxes for fear that those tax dollars might be spent on Poors and Blahs and Youngs.
Next thing you know, the ATF will start throwing shade at rural sovereign man-forts….
Of cooooourse it was “low-level workers” who will never be named or held accountable.
Kudos to the Tea Party activists who first blew the whistle and to Mark Levin and the Landmark Legal Foundation, who pushed back against the Bully Brigade.
I’m really curious to hear more about this. When I first saw this, I wondered whether it was maybe a politic but unmerited apology in response to mau-mauing from conservative groups. But the article says that “low-level workers” in the Cincinnati office of the IRS were flagging organizations with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names for additional review. If it’s as simple as that, that’s pretty bad.
While it unclear whether the IRS workers intentionally targeted conservative groups — an agency spokesman did not immediately respond to a ThinkProgress request for the complete list of keywords used — the office revealed that two of the terms on the list were “Tea Party” and “patriot.” As such, about 75 Tea Party groups were singled out for additional scrutiny.
The spike in 501(c)(4) groups comes after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision that outside groups may make unlimited political expenditures. Since then, some 501(c)(4) organizations have begun abusing the system. Though groups engaged in some political activity may qualify as “social welfare groups” and receive tax-exempt status under this section of the tax code, electioneering cannot be their predominant activity.
Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, for example, told the IRS that any political ads run by the group would be “limited in amount” and “would not constitute the group’s primary purpose.” Campaign finance reform advocates have argued that, in light of more than $70 million in “independent expenditure” ad spending, the group’s primary purpose is clearly campaign activity. But rather than register with the Federal Election Commission as a political committee, Crossroads GPS continues to claim that it is not such a group and need not publicly identify its funders.
Fortunately, this happened under Obama. If something similar happened under Bush, the sidewalks would be unsafe due to leaping Libs descending from above.
Tea Party leaders and Republican members of Congress complained loudly last year that the IRS was demanding thousands of pages of paperwork related to their non-profit status and in some cases even asking for donor lists.
Now that those fears have been proven true, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin said the IRS apology wasn’t going to cut it. So far there’s no evidence connecting the IRS misbehavior to political appointees or the White House. The IRS is an independent agency that until November was led by a commissioner appointed by George W. Bush. The commissioner, David Schulman, told Congress last year there was no special targeting of conservative groups.
Nevertheless, Martin said Congress needs to investigate the scandal, and demanded “the immediate resignation of all complicit in this activity.”
The White House did not respond on the record for a request for comment.
Update: I want to know why the word “patriot” in particular triggered some sort of extra scrutiny. That smells like something you’d see on “Hardball,” treating tea partiers as if they’re some sort of nascent domestic terrorists simply because McVeigh-type nuts often use the word “patriot” too. Is that what happened here, smearing tea party groups with guilt by rhetorical association? Or was this more straightforward harassment of a political opponent?
Hey, guess what? Conservatives now have a real scandal to tout! They’ve been complaining for a while that the IRS singled out tea party groups for audits, and it turns out they were right. Today, the IRS fessed up…
In this case, conservatives will undoubtedly demand more information about how this happened, who was involved, and when top officials found out about it. And this time, they’ll be right to.
—The Daily Beast’s John Avlon:
This imposition of political impulses into IRS inquiries is completely out of line —and given the Nixon administration’s record of using audits for political purposes, the feeling of persecution has some roots in reality. But the inevitable rhetorical rush to the ramparts—that this was part of a concerted effort by the Obama administration to investigate its political enemies—is not rooted in fact, to date. Beyond the fact that the White House and the IRS now keep each other at arm’s length because of past abuses, the larger slumber scandal at the IRS is actually a reluctance to aggressively investigate the systemic abuse of tax-exempt status by nonprofit groups in the wake of the Citizens United decision.
As The Daily Beast and the Center for Responsive Politics reported in our “SuperPAC Economy” series over the summer of 2012, the use and abuse of 501(c)(4) status by nakedly partisan political organizations over the past two election cycles in particular has flooded the system with money and very little oversight, especially given the pathetic partisan deadlock of the Federal Elections Commission….
….The IRS actions out of their Ohio branch are indefensible. But there’s a reason that the number of applications for 501(c)(4) status doubled between 2010 and 2012—and it isn’t that we became twice as charitable.
The larger, systemic scandal is the reluctance of the IRS to weigh in more aggressively and enforce the weak laws that allow massive profiteering and manipulation of our political process by partisan political groups masquerading as nonpartisan, nonprofit entities devoted only to the public welfare—and collecting the tax benefits that come with this pose.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.