It has come to light that the IRS has been targeting tea party members. Can someone explain what the big deal is? When you have members who decry “Stop taxing us”, “Taxed enough already,”, “Zero taxes”, and “The IRS is unconstitutional” why shouldn’t those tax returns receive an extra bit of scrutiny? There are a the long-line of rappers that have been targeted by the IRS (i.e. Young Buck, Rick Ross, etc). And for good reason. If you’re rapping about how much bling you got and how many maybachs you’re driving and you’re claiming less than a million in income, you’re probably lying and it should be a red flag for an audit. The IRS has also (unfairly) targeted the Cannabis industry in California and Colorado but I hear of no public outcry there, either.
If I were to post a bunch of anti-American rhetoric on Youtube, I would likely receive a bit more scrutiny from the FBI or the Secret Service. Here, I find it acceptable that tea party members have extra scrutiny on their tax returns given their public endorsement of no taxes and limited government. So can someone explain to me what the big deal is with the IRS targeting people tea members? 'cause I’m not getting it. It seems completely justifiable given the ethos of the tea party.
I have no problem with the IRS targeting Tea Party groups. They’re tax protest organizations. I do have a problem with the IRS targeting Tea Party members, as you suggest (though none of the sources I read indicate that occurred).
From what I understand, the IRS has been targeting Tea Party organizations (not members) applying for tax exempt status for a higher level of scrutiny than is applied to other organizations applying for tax exempt status. This is a problem because a government entity should not target a group for purely political reasons. Arguably, it could violate the First Amendment protections for free speech and free association.
I’m an Obama supporter, and I agree with this. The people responsible should be investigated and, if found guilty, be dismissed with cause. It is not quite as bad as the politicization of the Justice Department, but, if true, it is definitely over the line.
Oakminster nails it - delaying certification or forcing a higher scrutiny because of the use of the words “Patriot” or “Tea Party” in your organizational name should not be happening. It makes the IRS look like a political arm, instead of a neutral governmental group.
The appearance of the use of the IRS for political purposes does not help our nation, and only encourages more people to try to mess with the system.
The targeting doesn’t really seemed to have had anything to do with the groups status as tax-protest organizations. It was an attempt to come up with criteria to find groups organized to advocate for causes that promote public welfare (which are tax-exempt) but were really doing campaigning and electioneering work (which aren’t tax exempt).
I don’t think there was really any political motivation (if for no other reason then as a political strong-arm tactic, its pretty weaksauce). It was 2010, and so if you were looking for groups being formed that were walking the line between issue advocacy and electioneering, the fact is that almost all of them were going to have some varient of “Tea/Patriot/taxessuxx” in their name, so that’s what the IRS office looked for (a similar analysis in 2005-2006 probably would’ve given you a bunch of Progressive buzzwords).
Still, regardless of motivation, Conservative groups have a legitimate beef. Adding extra scrutiny to certain political groups can have a chilling effect, the IRS should’ve come up with a system that would’ve been politically neutral, at least if implemented over several electoral cycles. So investigating to verify there wasn’t a political motivation, and firing whomever approved the scheme even if there wasn’t, seem reasonable.
If the Tea Party…and you might well ask which “Tea Party”…is truly a grass-roots phenom made up of angry citizens banding together to petition for a redress of grievance, then they border on the secular sacred, they have every right.
If, however, they are little more than instrument for rich assholes with more money than good sense, that is quite another.
It sounds over the line, I agree. I’m not sure whether it’s “dismissed with cause” over-the-line, or “train these people better” over-the-line. The logic behind it makes some superficial sense to me, not so much because of the anti-tax stuff but because of the “party” in the name stuff. Normally when political groups include “party” in their names, they’re running candidates for office, and you don’t get tax-exempt status if you’re doing that. The Tea Party folks tried to skirt that line, and at least superifically that deserves some scrutiny.
However, when folks at the IRS say that violates guidelines, I’m inclined to believe them. I’m just not sure whether it violates those guidelines so severely that the people doing so were being malicious or hopelessly incompetent.
Yes, that sounds like the size of it. The IRS should be able to apply scrutiny on whatever rational and technical basis it wants, but it shouldn’t just single out groups based on political affiliation. “Targeting” is kind of an extreme word here, but this isn’t supposed to happen.
Because you have a Constitutional right to campaign for low taxes or no taxes and limited government, and doing those things shouldn’t be taken as a suggestion that you might cheat on your taxes. And anyway I don’t think the IRS’ actions would accomplish what you’re suggesting: they didn’t take a harder look at Tea Party members (how could they?), they applied more scrutiny to Tea Party-ish lobbying groups applying for a type of tax exempt status.
Misled, more likely. The rules are a mess, and some say deliberately so, to permit another way for guys with lots of money to skirt the rules on “contributions”. I lean towards that interpretation myself, but with the proviso that I can’t prove it.
That’s right-if a suspicious number of organizations apply for tax exempt status at around the same time, and they seem to tied together in some way, they should be investigated even if they all seem to support the same political party.
Yeah we do, pretty much. The IRS admitted that it [del]targeted[/del] selected groups with some variant of Tea Party or patriot or other related terms in the group name for heightened scrutiny. Hard to spin that in a non-political way.
Again, not necessarily: if a lot of these groups came about at the same time with a similar group of high-profile backers (let’s hypothetically call them the Peppcee Brothers), it might be worth looking to see if it’s a scheme to avoid taxation on political campaigning.
The IRS says the reasons were the ones I summarized in my previous post, which weren’t political. The Inspectors Generals report* is due out in a few weeks and will presumably support or refute that, but we certainly don’t know it.
*(though parts of the report are already being leaked by Congressional staffers. I suspect if the report had anything explicitly saying the targeting was for political purposes, that would’ve been the first thing leaked).
How could they possibly be non-political, if they didn’t give such groups heightened scrutiny? They’re not supposed to give tax-exempt status to any group that’s primarily political, and any group with “tea party” in its name looks an awful lot like it’s political.
You can’t have it both ways: If the Tea Party is a political movement, then the scandal here is that any of these groups had their tax-exempt status approved. If the Tea Party isn’t a political movement, then the IRS wasn’t targeting them politically.
If a person widely circulates his view that the income tax is unconstitutional and invalid (which is his right) do you think it is improper for the IRS to double check his tax return?
But the selection criteria was clearly political. They selected Tea Party sounding names, because they were Tea Party sounding names. A politically neutral approach would have been something like pulling every third (or fourth, tenth, whatever) application for scrutiny, regardless of political ideology.