I am citing Trevor Potter, former FEC chairman, general counsel to the McCain presidential campaign, deputy counsel to the George H. W. Bush campaign, and general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center. You can watch the bit here.
um… woo…trying to think of how to respond to this.
O…EM…GEEEEE… that was a bad cite.
In one sentence he implied retro-approval. If the IRS doesn’t hold your application back you get the tax deduction.
And you think this is appropriate and legal behavior from a government agency?
Lets say there’s a “get out the vote” 501 C organization. Now I’m sure they spend most of their time in rich Republican neighborhoods trying to increase voter participation. But just on the off chance they may wander over into Democrat strongholds do you feel it’s OK for the IRS to pounce on them based on perceived party affiliation?
I’m really not sure how to respond to this.
First, Mr. OMG, why is that a bad cite?
Second, if the ex-chair of the FEC tells me that’s legal behavior from the IRS, I’m a lot likelier to believe him than to care about your uncited skepticism. What laws do you think that the IRS was violating?
Finally, I don’t see how the final paragraph has anything to do with Potter’s testimony.
Sorry – Really Not was the target of my comment, and I expect him to cheerfully wade through US code cites.
But 26 USC § 6104(b) says in pertinent part.
In other words, the law allows a person to contribute to a 501(c)(4) and be assured that his contribution will not be made public by the government.
If an organization fails to apply for 501(c)(4) recognition, they cannot provide this anonymity.
This is why, in court, cross-examination is such an important feature.
It’s not illegal to fail to apply for IRS recognition of your 501(c)(4) status. What the ex-cahir of the FEC said is true.
But Colbert failed to ask him what benefits come from applying. And one answer to that is: contributions to your organization are not public record.
Wanta see something interesting? Remember Dick Armey’s Tea Party Express. Totally non-political social welfare group, first to let us know that the Tea Party was solidly behind Verizon/Comcast in their recent regulatory struggle. I mean, who doesn’t love the cable company, amirite?
Guess who had a 501(C)4 exemption? Anyone wanna tell me why?
http://www.stateteapartyexpress.org/phone-from-home
An excerpt from their phoning for support script.
Apolitical social welfare, my ass!
Will you at least have the courtesy to wait until I ask a question before you answer it? 
If I may attempt a distillation in an effort at understanding:
-An organization can apply for 501©(4) status, which means they need not reveal the names of their donors.
-One of the conditions of having a 501©(4) status is that the majority of the organization’s work not be politically partisan in nature, hence some effort at calculating that the organization spent (for example) 51% of its time and funding running ads for tougher pollution laws and only 49% calling a particular politician from a particular party a rat bastard motherfucker, in an effort to influence an election toward his or her opponent.
-An IRS office, tasked with sorting out organizations eligible and ineligible for 511©(4) statues, had a policy of heightened investigation (or at least mailing out extra questionnaires) to organizations with Tea Party-ish names, I gather on the assumption that they were more likely to be politically partisan than someone called “Save the Whales” or “Think of the Children” or “Save the Thinking Whale Children” or whatnot.
I’m still not feeling the outrage, here.
Sorry, I missed this when you first posted it. I’ll see your “huh” and raise it. Here are the subsections you reference.
Neither says anything about a donor disclosure requirement.
Yes.
Er… yes. I say “er…” because while the IRS regulations say that an organization “…is operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare if it is primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community…” (Treas. Reg. § 1.501(c)(4)-1(a)(2)(i)); the actual law (26 U.S.C. § 501(c)(4)(A)) is more stringent.
But yes – you’re essentially correct.
The problem is that the IRS is not entitled to hold Tea Party organizations to one standard and other organizations to a different standard. Doing so violates IRS regulations and (potentially) US federal criminal law.
How about the words, “Nothing in this subsection shall authorize the Secretary to disclose the name or address of any contributor to any organization or trust …?”
First, thanks for the previous cites. I’m still not sure I understand them, but that’s on me.
Second, this appears to be the rub. I just don’t see that the IRS was holding Tea Party organizations to one standard and other organizations to a different standard. The police might infiltrate anti-WTO groups instead of infiltrating the Rotary Club if they’re looking to stop vandalism, because they suspect there will be more vandals in the former than the latter. Both groups are held to the same standard: no vandalism. The IRS seems to have decided to investigate Tea Party groups instead of racquetball clubs to look for tax evasion, because they suspected there’d be more tax evasion in the former than in the latter. Both groups are held to the same standard: no tax evasion.
Again, I think it was foolish for them to focus on Tea Party groups, but I don’t see that it was a double standard.
By that measure, everything is partisan. Birth control and abortion will limit the number of kids born who are likely to vote Democratic. Seat belt laws will save more young men and breast cancer screenings prolong the life of women: both of whom are more likely to vote for Democrats.
What the IRS did is wrong, but trying to say it was partisan activity aimed at helping Obama is reaching. At the worst it was people who let their political leanings affect their judgement of what organizations might be falsely claiming to not be engaged in political activities.
You can’t see that it’s wrong to target “get out the vote” groups who focus on getting Democratic votes? You literally can’t get more political than that.
Interesting question, I see what you’re saying.
If there were something called the Suffrage Party, a loose movement of groups that advocated for getting super-high participation in elections via lots of means, including running candidates that opposed voter ID laws and no-voting-felon laws and that advocated for longer voting periods and the like, and if they explicitly supported these candidates in Democratic primaries, then I’d certainly understand the suspicion about whether those groups were eligible for 501(c)(4) status. I’d think it foolish to target them specifically, but I wouldn’t think targeting them specifically had partisan motives, not necessarily.
But get-out-the-vote groups don’t do that. They don’t run candidates in primaries. They don’t try to take over a major political party from the inside. Their political participation is much more indirect.
So your analogy falls apart.
Further to the double standard, LHOD does seem to identify the correct determinant (as did I in an earlier post). One set of filing papers declares the name of the organization to be ‘Save Our Hummingbirds” and describes its mission as “produce literature intended to persuade more homeowners to plant flowers”. Another applicant calls itself “Patriotic Tea Party Activists Against Government Control” and its mission statement says it will “educate the public about the harm caused by government, and to some extent agitate against supporters of government and in favor of reducing government - for the betterment of society, of course”.
Frankly, asking the later group to more specifically define its mission, and questioning any possible associations it may have with similarly named and/or purposed but avowedly political action groups, and not bothering to ask for very much additional information from the former group, doesn’t strike me as an actual double standard. In today’s climate it is pathetically politically inept, yes. But it seems quite in line with the IRS’s obligation to investigate applicants’ compliance with the regulations, and the exercise of some reasonable amount of judgment about which organization is more likely to fall outside the bounds.
indirect? It couldn’t be more politically direct.
Of course it could be. I almost called you on this earlier, but I thought it was too obvious.
What’s more direct than encouraging voters in a friendly demographic to go cast a ballot, without telling them who to vote for?
Telling them who to vote for!
What’s more direct than that?
Running for office!
what’s more direct than that? Congress funding ACORN to do it. Please stop with the feigned disbelief that this is political.
what’s worse is that the IRS knew about this long before the election and kept it from Congress and refuses to turn over emails between them and the White House. This administration is as transparent as a black hole.
Add to that the sheer numbers of diverse “Tea Party” organizations formed in the relevant time frame. Which plays right into the wants and needs of wealthy benefactors who want to influence politics to favor their interests without leaving any fingerprints. Anyone wonder how many of those newly born groups found themselves in the happy position of receiving generous donations almost from the moment of their conception?
How many lefty leaning orgs were formed at the same time? If there is a major disparity in that number, then the only way the IRS investigators could have appeared to be impartial would have been by investigating all the leftys and only a few of the tighty righty groups. Would that have been wrong as well?
And if they gazed upon the political vaudeville that was the Tea Party Express, as referenced above, why wouldn’t they look with more curiosity at others? Seems to me that if they were doing their job at all, they would almost have to search their filings to see if there were a pattern of abuse. Searches, as you google monkeys know, require search terms. Like “Tea Party” or “Patriot”.
The mere fact that they are all of a similar political stripe doesn’t signify political bias. If I form the Eugene V. Debs Memorial Study Group, and I file a bogus effort to pretend I am not political, and a thousand other E.V. Debs groups spring up shortly thereafter, why in the world wouldn’t they search out and investigate those groups as well?