Read Online Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto by Matt Kibbe - Free Book Online
Authors: Matt Kibbe
Ads: Link
took Lois Lerner to prove us right, and “Them” wrong. Again.
Y OU A RE THE T ARGET
Lerner, of course, was the Internal Revenue Service director in charge of tax-exempt organizations, who would infamously plead the Fifth during her testimony before the House Oversight Committee on May 22, 2013.
On May 10, just five days after Obama’s “awesome authority” speech, Lerner dropped the bombshell admission that put her in the hot seat before Congress. Speaking at an American Bar Association conference, she used an audience question to “apologize” for the inappropriate targeting of conservative and libertarian activist groups prior to the presidential election of 2012. Innocent mistakes were made, she concedes. But it wasn’t her fault. She threw “our line people in Cincinnati” under the bus for their “not so fine” targeting of tea partiers. “Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list,” she said. “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.”
It was later discovered that the question from the ABA audience was actually planted, virtually word for word, by Lerner. 6 The confession was an extraordinarily clumsy attempt at damage control. She wanted to get ahead of the news cycle before the inspector general released a scathing report on the IRS’s extraordinary practice of singling out and targeting tea party groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax status in the two years leading up to the 2012 elections.
Activist bureaucrats in an agency of the federal government singling out citizens, based on their political ideology, and effectively impinging upon their political speech. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
“The other thing that happened was they also, in some cases, sat around for a while,” Lerner continued to her ABA audience of tax professionals. “They also sent some letters out that were far too broad, asking questions of these organizations that weren’t really necessary for the type of application. In some cases you probably read that they asked for contributor names. That’s not appropriate, not usual. . . .”
It was always “they” who were in the wrong. Not “we,” or “I.”
America would soon discover that nonprofit organization applications that contained the phrases “tea party,” “government spending,” “government debt,” “taxes,” “patriots,” and “9/12” were isolated from other applications and subjected to extra paperwork and inquiries, delaying some approvals by as much as 1,138 days. 7 Your citizen group’s application would have been flagged if you had stated in the IRS application your desire to “make America a better place to live.” Targeted groups were instructed to disclose hundreds of pages of private information, including the names of volunteers, donors, and even relatives of volunteers; résumés for each governing group member; printouts of websites and social media contents; and book reports of the clubs’ suggested reading materials. Even the content of members’ prayers were scrutinized. 8
According to National Public Radio, of the conservative and libertarian groups requesting tax exempt status in 2012–2013, only 46 percent were approved, with many more never receiving a response from the IRS. In contrast, 100 percent of progressive groups were approved. Additionally, the IRS asked conservative groups an average of 14.9 questions about their applications, but progressive groups were asked only 4.7 questions. 9
Karen Kenney of the San Fernando Valley (CA) Patriots testified before the House Ways and Means Committee about her experience being targeted by the IRS, that her application for 501(c)(4) status was ignored for two years. Suddenly the IRS demanded an enormous amount of information, including personal
Y OU A RE THE T ARGET
Lerner, of course, was the Internal Revenue Service director in charge of tax-exempt organizations, who would infamously plead the Fifth during her testimony before the House Oversight Committee on May 22, 2013.
On May 10, just five days after Obama’s “awesome authority” speech, Lerner dropped the bombshell admission that put her in the hot seat before Congress. Speaking at an American Bar Association conference, she used an audience question to “apologize” for the inappropriate targeting of conservative and libertarian activist groups prior to the presidential election of 2012. Innocent mistakes were made, she concedes. But it wasn’t her fault. She threw “our line people in Cincinnati” under the bus for their “not so fine” targeting of tea partiers. “Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list,” she said. “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.”
It was later discovered that the question from the ABA audience was actually planted, virtually word for word, by Lerner. 6 The confession was an extraordinarily clumsy attempt at damage control. She wanted to get ahead of the news cycle before the inspector general released a scathing report on the IRS’s extraordinary practice of singling out and targeting tea party groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax status in the two years leading up to the 2012 elections.
Activist bureaucrats in an agency of the federal government singling out citizens, based on their political ideology, and effectively impinging upon their political speech. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
“The other thing that happened was they also, in some cases, sat around for a while,” Lerner continued to her ABA audience of tax professionals. “They also sent some letters out that were far too broad, asking questions of these organizations that weren’t really necessary for the type of application. In some cases you probably read that they asked for contributor names. That’s not appropriate, not usual. . . .”
It was always “they” who were in the wrong. Not “we,” or “I.”
America would soon discover that nonprofit organization applications that contained the phrases “tea party,” “government spending,” “government debt,” “taxes,” “patriots,” and “9/12” were isolated from other applications and subjected to extra paperwork and inquiries, delaying some approvals by as much as 1,138 days. 7 Your citizen group’s application would have been flagged if you had stated in the IRS application your desire to “make America a better place to live.” Targeted groups were instructed to disclose hundreds of pages of private information, including the names of volunteers, donors, and even relatives of volunteers; résumés for each governing group member; printouts of websites and social media contents; and book reports of the clubs’ suggested reading materials. Even the content of members’ prayers were scrutinized. 8
According to National Public Radio, of the conservative and libertarian groups requesting tax exempt status in 2012–2013, only 46 percent were approved, with many more never receiving a response from the IRS. In contrast, 100 percent of progressive groups were approved. Additionally, the IRS asked conservative groups an average of 14.9 questions about their applications, but progressive groups were asked only 4.7 questions. 9
Karen Kenney of the San Fernando Valley (CA) Patriots testified before the House Ways and Means Committee about her experience being targeted by the IRS, that her application for 501(c)(4) status was ignored for two years. Suddenly the IRS demanded an enormous amount of information, including personal
Similar Books
