i L i n d

Bill Moyers website, Moyers & Company, is well worth regular visits. Lots of good stuff here.

Here’s an informative one from a couple of weeks ago: “Slideshow: Six Whistleblowers Charged Under the Espionage Act.” This adds important substance to criticisms of the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of “leaks,” up to and including the secret surveillance of Associated Press phone lines.

There’s also a good overview article on the IRS scandalmongering, “The Taxman and the Tea Party.” It draws heavily on a widely cited New Yorker column by Jeffrey Toobin, “The Real I.R.S. Scandal.”

Toobin writes:

It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates.

If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky. Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work. For example, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the Koch Brothers, was an instrumental force in helping the Republicans hold the House of Representatives. In every meaningful sense, groups like Americans for Prosperity were operating as units of the Republican Party. Democrats organized similar operations, but on a much smaller scale. (They undoubtedly would have done more, but they lacked the Republican base for funding such efforts.)

So the scandal—the real scandal—is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way.

Both cite the comments of former Common Cause President Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21, which focuses on campaign finance issues.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog published the transcript of a good interview with Wertheimer, also worth reading for additional perspective on this issue.

What is clear, in my view, is that the IRS got this wrong twice. They got it wrong in targeting conservative groups for review based on their names and their identified interests, and they got it wrong in not investigating and acting against groups that in our view were blatantly abusing the tax laws by improperly claiming to be 501(c)(4) groups so they could keep the donors paying for their campaign activities secret from the American people.

Happy reading.