Apparently the IRS, while headed by a Bush appointee, gave extra scrutiny to groups that used the word “Progressive”. This sounds like a big scandal for the Republicans.
Meanwhile, centrist groups are getting away with all sorts of shit.
Flo had it coming.
OP assumes the manufactured scandal’s creators–or the feeders who take it in–care about such things.
Awesome and awesomer.
Do adahim and NotfooledbyM know?
We always knew that there were progressive groups that were examined also. As I understand it, though, it remains true that fewer of them faced scrutiny, they could be (and were) quickly approved by the line reviewers, while all of the Tea Party applications were sent upward to be held separately and were not approved until much later. It’s thus not clear to me why this new line of argument is saying that the scandal is deflated.
And certainly we’ve always known that Shulman is a Democratic contributor who was appointed by Bush, and no one’s connected him to any knowledge of these matters. I’m not sure that he’s a significant figure here.
And the true scandal continues to be that any political groups ever got their tax exempt status approved. The statute says that such groups must be EXLUSIVELY devoted to the public welfare which the IRS changed to PRIMARILY without authorization. Obama couild fix the whole mess by issuing an executive order to have the IRS obey the statute.
What statute is that?
Uh- that would be 26 USC Section 501
Lawrence O’Donnell explains it well.
Where does §501©4 say the promotion of social welfare can’t include political activity?
Is that the prequel?
I suppose any reasonable interpretation of the phrase social welfare would exclude it.
No, really - how is fighting to destroy the social safety net not social welfare? :rolleyes:
So… in your mind… “social welfare” would cover efforts by the left to increase the government social safety net, but never efforts by the right to decrease it?
It would?
If I lobby for an increase of the minimum wage – clearly a political matter – isn’t that also a social welfare matter?
And if I lobby for the minimum wage to remain where it is under the theory that an increase in minimum wage would cause a net loss of jobs, isn’t THAT also a social welfare matter?
I’m not going to read through the whole law, but I thought they had to limit “political activity” to 49% of their total activity (or spending or whatever). Political activity wasn’t prohibited, but it was limited.
And yeah, where does “social welfare” and and “political activity” begin.
“Exclusively” is pretty clear.
In effect, the IRS was enforcing limiting politics to 49%, but by letter of the law it should be 0%. The real scandal is the IRS ignoring statute since the Eisenhower years.
Since by definition no political activity is universally held to be in the public interest, no political group of any stripe should get tax exempt status under this provision.
So, the real scandal is the IRS is out of control. I think we all knew that!
This week’s search terms will be “moderate,” “centrist,” “neutral,” “whig,” and “mugwump.”
If you read the whole statute, you’ll notice that Congress explicitly noted that certain 501(c) groups could not engage in political activity at all. It did not include such language in subsection 4. Do you think that’s significant?