[EL] Do Tea Party Donors Need Socialist Workers?

[Steve Hoersting]

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/05/flashback-irs-commissioner-shulman-tells-congress-irs-is-not-targeting-conservatives-video/

As I have said before on questions of compelled disclosure for independent
(and  therefore non-corrupting) speech and the judicial standard for
exemptions for the same: citizen-on-citizen retribution may be one thing,
but government-on-citizen retribution is another.

It is an appeal to martyrdom, not "civic courage," to ask citizens a) to
take on the IRS, so they may b) engage in political speech, as c) their
only remedy to economic deprivations, because d) the Court prefers the
political-question doctrine to protecting economic actors or returning to
demarcated limits on federal power.

Many experts are speaking today of legislative and regulatory fixes to the
IRS scandal. Political incentives being what they are, however, these fixes
are not for odd-numbered administrative agencies or legislatures to make;
at least not to make effectively. They are matters for Courts. First, to
make the disclosure exemption for donors to harassed speakers meaningful.
Second, to reclaim some measure of a limiting principle on congressional
and executive power.

The winner-take-absolutely-everything stakes of today's politics that the
Court has brought us by repeated acquiescence means the political branches
ought not be expected to cure the means and ever-increasing incentive to
hobble their competition.

Unless the Court engages on the disclosure-exemption and economic-liberty
fronts, the tantalizing chance of one political party or the other to run
the auto industry, banking industry, education lending, energy and
healthcare industries simply by capturing the House, White House and Senate
will all but ensure more scandals like the one being admitted by the IRS in
advance of its IG's report, not fewer.

-- 
Stephen M. Hoersting
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