[EL] Yes, Virginia, there was (and is) a real IRS scandal Was: Re: Republican Nirvana

[bzall at aol.com]

Sigh. I know I shouldn't feed trolls, but Plum Line's Paul Waldman's column was, in fact, repeating erroneous assertions. Don't have time to go through them all, so let's just look at one simple easy one:


The IRS scandal was caused by "a dramatic increase in the number of applications they had to process after the 2010 Citizens United decision threw open the doors of campaign finance."  That was, in fact, Lois Lerner's first claim in May 2013, when she blamed low-level employees for the IRS Tea Party scandal. But .... um, no. There was an increase in c4 applications, but in the words of Politifact: 



The earliest that there might have been a jump in applications would have been in October 2010. That is well after the IRS began its effort to give selective treatment to tea party groups.
The IRS is correct in saying that the number of applications doubled, but that happened later -- from 2011 to 2012. We contacted the IRS and nothing we learned changes the numbers or the sequence of events.
Reporters for the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Washington Post have sifted the facts, too, and reached the same conclusion: The rise in applications for 501(c)(4) status came after the IRS began treating tea party-type groups differently.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/07/tim-griffin/no-rise-applications-triggered-irs-actions-says-ti/


OK, here's another: liberal groups were targeted too. Well, yes. Some were, but the vast majority were not liberal. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/irs-scrutinized-liberal-groups-94556.html. And, not to be too "inside baseball," but tea party and similar groups were subject to a new "Be On the Look Out" list test, based on their names and perceived ideologies, while many of the liberal organizations were subject to an older "Touch and Go" program that looked for things like whether the applicant had applied before (ACORN successors, for example). Just the names -- BOLO and TAG -- suggest the different levels of scrutiny. 


And, yes, a third: all of the groups were just politically-active shams. Well, gee, that certainly must apply to "Break the Bonds," a Palestinian-rights organization, or CASH Music, which intended to help musicians on the Internet. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/us/politics/irs-scrutiny-went-beyond-the-political.html I had a client that was a purely research organization that got caught up in the scandal. The whole point of the BOLO list was to grab and stop groups based on their names, not on whether they were shams in operation or intention. And these were not untrained, incompetent IRS employees; they were told what to look for by management. "But a closer look at the I.R.S. operation suggests that the problem was less about ideology and more about how a process instructing reviewers to “be on the lookout” for selected terms was applied to any group that mentioned certain words in its application." Id. 
 
I could go on, but the point is that the IRS, led by Lois Lerner, over-reacted to Citizens United, blamed low-level employees when it was really edicts from Lois and others, lied to people (including me, repeatedly) about what was going on, refused to obey court-ordered FOIA orders, and basically made a mess of an operation that had been working pretty well for many years. Not Republican or Democrat, not White House-led, but surely a disgrace and a failure of management. If the IRS, at least, is hobbled, it is more because people don't trust it to do a proper job any more than because of any GOP ascendancy. 


So blast away at failures of the campaign finance system, but don't try to whitewash the IRS scandal. 


Barnaby Zall 
Of Counsel 
Weinberg, Jacobs & Tolani, LLP 
10411 Motor City Drive, Suite 500
Bethesda, MD 20817
301-231-6943 (direct dial) 
bzall at aol.com 
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-----Original Message-----
From: info <info at arizonaspolitics.com>
To: jboppjr <jboppjr at aol.com>; Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu>; law-election at UCI.edu <law-election at uci.edu>
Sent: Wed, Jul 8, 2015 1:17 am
Subject: Re: [EL] Republican Nirvana


   
   
  
  
I'm looking at the    column through the eyes of a free speech Republican.  Even if I accept that "absurdly low contribution limits are the wellspring", I am having trouble bopping Waldman for other distortions/misrepresentations.    
  
   
  
  
Could it be the comments about many 501(c)(4)'s being thinly-veiled campaign orgs? The comments about the defanged IRS and FEC?    
  
   
  
  
I'd like to see the bases for the key set-up remark in Mr. Bopp's attack.  
  
   
  
  
_____________________   
   
   Mitch Martinson

www.ArizonasPolitics.com

602-799-7025
  
  
   




 
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