Read Online Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto by Matt Kibbe - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Matt Kibbe
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information about employees and donors and transcriptions of meetings and candidate forums, allowing them only twenty days to comply. 10
Dianne Belsom of the Laurens County (SC) Tea Party testified that she was told that she would receive information on her application for 501(c)(4) status within ninety days. More than a year later, she had still heard nothing. Once an election year rolled around, they started bombarding her with requests for information similar to the kinds listed above. After filing all requested information, the IRS asked for more, including repetition of previous requests. At the time of her testimony, her application had been pending for more than three years with no sign of resolution. 11
Toby Marie Walker of the Waco (TX) Tea Party said that the total number of documents requested from their group by the IRS would have filled “a U-Haul truck of about 20 feet.” 12
P OLITICAL S UPPRESSION?
Why so many questions, so many forms? One clue might come from an unrelated article regarding the tax treatment of certain nonprofit university activities. The IRS was cracking down. How? According to a Bloomberg article from November 2011:
Lois Lerner, the IRS’s director of tax-exempt organizations who is overseeing the investigation, says many schools are rethinking how and what they report to the government. Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a “behavior changer.” 13
What behavior was the IRS trying to change with regards to citizen groups wanting to make America a better place to live? Maybe the thick questionnaires and intrusive inquiries served a particular purpose? Maybe the IRS intended to change behavior? Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the IRS effectively suppressed “get-out-the-vote” activity by tea partiers in 2012:
The Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise. The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that, had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5–8.5 million votes, compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million. 14
The targeting of tea partiers and groups that sought to “make America a better place to live” mattered. Their political activity was suppressed and their First Amendment right to speak and assemble effectively taken from them. Bureaucrats buried them under mountains of questions. Attorney General Eric Holder has promised, in a different context that happened to accrue to President Obama’s political advantage in the 2012 campaign, to “not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right.”
Incredibly, Lerner originally maintained that these out-of-control line workers in the agency’s Cincinnati office, one of the agency’s largest and most significant branch offices, “didn’t do this because of any political bias. They did it because they were working together. This was a streamlined way for them to refer to the cases. They didn’t have the appropriate level of sensitivity about how this might appear to others and it was just wrong.” It was just an innocent mistake made by low-level civil servants—“line staff” based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Except that it wasn’t innocent. And it wasn’t limited to low-level staff at the
Dianne Belsom of the Laurens County (SC) Tea Party testified that she was told that she would receive information on her application for 501(c)(4) status within ninety days. More than a year later, she had still heard nothing. Once an election year rolled around, they started bombarding her with requests for information similar to the kinds listed above. After filing all requested information, the IRS asked for more, including repetition of previous requests. At the time of her testimony, her application had been pending for more than three years with no sign of resolution. 11
Toby Marie Walker of the Waco (TX) Tea Party said that the total number of documents requested from their group by the IRS would have filled “a U-Haul truck of about 20 feet.” 12
P OLITICAL S UPPRESSION?
Why so many questions, so many forms? One clue might come from an unrelated article regarding the tax treatment of certain nonprofit university activities. The IRS was cracking down. How? According to a Bloomberg article from November 2011:
Lois Lerner, the IRS’s director of tax-exempt organizations who is overseeing the investigation, says many schools are rethinking how and what they report to the government. Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a “behavior changer.” 13
What behavior was the IRS trying to change with regards to citizen groups wanting to make America a better place to live? Maybe the thick questionnaires and intrusive inquiries served a particular purpose? Maybe the IRS intended to change behavior? Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the IRS effectively suppressed “get-out-the-vote” activity by tea partiers in 2012:
The Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise. The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that, had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5–8.5 million votes, compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million. 14
The targeting of tea partiers and groups that sought to “make America a better place to live” mattered. Their political activity was suppressed and their First Amendment right to speak and assemble effectively taken from them. Bureaucrats buried them under mountains of questions. Attorney General Eric Holder has promised, in a different context that happened to accrue to President Obama’s political advantage in the 2012 campaign, to “not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right.”
Incredibly, Lerner originally maintained that these out-of-control line workers in the agency’s Cincinnati office, one of the agency’s largest and most significant branch offices, “didn’t do this because of any political bias. They did it because they were working together. This was a streamlined way for them to refer to the cases. They didn’t have the appropriate level of sensitivity about how this might appear to others and it was just wrong.” It was just an innocent mistake made by low-level civil servants—“line staff” based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Except that it wasn’t innocent. And it wasn’t limited to low-level staff at the
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