Generally speaking, I have stopped blogging and radically increased the amount of time I spend on political message boards. Here's an example--I posted this a few days ago after several references to the IRS scandal.
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The 2013 IRS Scandal: Who's Guilty of What Now?
Let me begin by assuring you that I do not wish to downplay the
significant of what actually happened. The IRS under the Obama
administration instituted a procedure of de facto discrimination against
organization from an emerging far-right movement. That happened.
However, as you have all heard me say before, context matters. There is a
need, at least on this board, to begin to to separate the reality of
the 2013 IRS Scandal from the mythology of the 2013 IRS Scandal.
I am very sorry to your attention-spans, but to do that, I'm going to have to start from the beginning.
[In The Beginning... 501]
Not so well hidden within the infinite bookshelf that holds the federal
tax laws of the United States is a troublesome provision—Section 501
(c)(4), a hive of scum and villainy—that exempts non-profits working
“exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” from paying income
tax. It is essentially an incentive codified into law for us to create
organizations for not personal gain, but for the good of the people. It
is actually a perfectly reasonable and well-intended provision with just
one unforeseeable catch: no two of the people in this country can seem
to agree what’s good for them. To bridge that gap, we invented the forum
politic.
Access to “the people” in the U.S. sometimes requires
at least some interaction with the people’s noble stewards,
politicians. All sarcasm aside, this is a feature of democracy, not a
bug. Most anyone running any significant, charitable non-profit will
occasionally have to contact a politician to ask for help, make
suggestions, or raise and collect money. Collectively, we call these
interactions “lobbying” and “campaign activities.” Section 501 (c)(4)
was never intended for use by political organizations, but insofar as
all organizations are political to some small extent, exceptions are
generally made provided such political interactions are not the
organization's primary operation.
This allowed these social
welfare groups to participate in the political process with under a
number of conditions. That is, until 2010. In 2010, Citizens United vs.
the Federal Elections Commission ruled unconstitutional many of the
restrictions of U.S. campaign finance, officially allowing any
organization not directly affiliated with a political campaign to spend
unlimited amounts of anonymous money to influence elections.
[Until the Game Changes]
The Citizens United decision was in January 2010, a year for midterm elections. Leaders of the still-politically-hypothetical
Tea Party were the first to adapt to the suddenly lax and vaguely
undefined campaign finance laws by starting Political Action Committees
under the banners of their 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Over $100
million of tax-free, “social welfare” money was spent on elections that
year—twice as much as the previous midterm. The Tea Party, an ostensibly
populist movement, rolled into office for the first time on a wave of
corporate money. And that was just the beginning.
Conservatives
argued that union spending for liberals provides a counterbalance to
corporate spending for Republicans. The unions were outspent 10-to-1 in
that midterm.
Republicans were pleased. Democrats were not.
Democrats did not think it was fair that organizations who benefit from a
tax exemption for working “exclusively to promote social welfare” for
whom politics is not the “primary operation” could not raise and spend
several times more money on politics than everything else they do
combined. Senate Democrats asked the IRS to investigate the behavior of
501(c)(4) groups to see if they weren’t just offshoots of political
parties and campaigns. The IRS upper-management did not. They asked the
IRS to clearly define how much political activity a group can
participate in before they have to consider it their primary operation
for tax reasons. The IRS upper-management did not.
The IRS
upper-management did nothing. The IRS figured that looking into the ways
groups raised and spent money to assure compliance with tax law—in
other words, the job of the IRS—was too politically-charged to undertake
when the FEC had just suffered such a big blow. And besides, the IRS
was shrinking. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of applications for
501(c)(4) status doubled, while the IRS suffered Republican-led budget
cuts that left, by their own admission, unable to adequately preform its
duties.
[Pay Attention Because This Is the Part You Care About]
What we know for a fact is this: in March 2010, one branch of one
division of the IRS, inundated by a surge of new 501(c)(4) requests
(mostly from conservative groups) resulting from the Citizens United
decision and on the verge of the most expensive mid-term election in
history, made a very, very bad decision. This branch instituted a system
by which agents (and their computers) could single-out suspicious
groups by certain words commonly used by offenders: the so-called “Be On
the Look Out List.” In short, they had created a system for profiling.
The “Be On the Look Out” terms leaned heavily on traditionally
conservative talking points and slogans and quickly became popular with
other branches.
There is an important thing to note here, which
is that the IRS receives 10,000s of tax-exemption applications a year,
most of which are NOT just fronts for unlimited, anonymous, political
soft-money. Most of them are for people raising money to fix up parks,
provide after-school care for kids in bad neighborhoods or teach old
veterans how to read or something adorable like that. Some of them just
want to cure cancer. The ones that want something else—the ones that are
obviously political—tend to be started by a lot of the same people
having the same talks at conventions and, yes, tend to use the same
language. Categorically flagging applicants based on similar criteria
has always been IRS policy. The problem with profiling is that it’s
wrong, not that it’s stupid.
Now the numbers here get a little
fuzzy, but this is the heart of the controversy: over a two-year span,
it became impossible to get 501(c)(4) status if your name included “Tea
Party” (although why you would name yourself after a political movement
and hope to be considered non-political confuses me) “patriot” or
“9/12.” No one was denied, but only 4 were approved while the rest
waited in bureaucratic limbo. One liberal group actually was denied, and
many were put in the same limbo, but many more were approved during the
same time period. Many conservative groups without those three flagged
phrases were scrutinized but approved during this time as well.
That’s it. That’s the scandal. There is a lot of context and context
matters, but the fact is that there was a span of 2 years in which it
was apparently harder to get certified under a certain tax exemption for
conservatives than liberals.
It's worth noting that you don't
actually need to be certified 501(c)(4) to file as such, but it helps
fund-raising if you can show the certification in advance.
Well, okay.... it gets a little sketchier. What happens after you are
selected for further scrutiny, and what people in the media aren’t
talking about enough, is that the IRS starts asking you questions… Weird
questions. Some people got asked if they’d done any business with the
Koch brothers. Some got asked what kind of books their kids read. One
Republican congressman thought the IRS asked the contents of members’
prayers; that turned out to be untrue, but not before it spreads
throughout the conservative press. Some of the questions, actually, were
fairly routine, but by then it didn’t matter--the scandal was in
full-swing and misinformation is as good as any if you trust no one.
[And Then...]
The IRS covered their asses immediately and poorly. Lois Lerner was the
first to fess up, but was also caught lying and resigned. Higher-ups
Joseph Grant and Steven Miller also resigned. Miller basically ran the
place. The Treasury Dept. Inspector General conducted an investigation
that pointed to serious problem within the culture of the IRS—generally
speaking, insolence and ineptitude at lower and middle-management
levels. The House conducted an investigation looking specifically for a
link to the White House and found… nothing. The actions of this limited
branch of the IRS was condemned by President Obama, virtually every U.S.
Congressman on either party, and the matter was more or less put to
bed.
Like I said, this actually happened. A real problem
emerged, a bunch of people tried to lie their ways out of it. People got
fired but probably not enough, a system that has gone without oversight
for several administrations finally got some light shined on it, and we
move on to newer news. It's not a good day for America, but it isn't
exactly Hoover's FBI either.
[So Now What?]
To this
day, conservatives from the far right of the mainstream cite the IRS
Scandal as evidence that the administration (whose criminality is
already presupposed), will stop at nothing to silence its critics. There
are just a few problems with this representation: 1) the IRS didn't
stop at nothing, they just caused a delay in the certification of an
optional tax status that most of these groups arguably don't deserve 2)
there is only circumstantial evidence that the motivation was ever
political and systematic (let's screw over conservatives) as opposed to
misguided and systemic (see the definition of "sampling error"?) and 3)
no one found any link to the White House.
Now I know better
than to think I can convince anyone who already dislikes the president
or the government in general that every single scandal out there is not
only true, but obvious. However, the only thing I can say for sure is
that the Obama administration should have seen this coming at least by
2012 and called themselves out on it. Of course, that was an election
year.
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