The editors were exercised over the revenue agency’s latest shenanigans, which include covering up its past shenanigans — the willful targeting of conservative groups in order to frustrate their opposition to Obama-administration policies. And now, in the ultimate act of chutzpah, the IRS is attempting to codify the abuse as standard operating procedure.
While the country partied pre–Super Bowl, President Obama got in the spirit by hilariously claiming that there was really “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS’s politicized harassment of his political adversaries. Now it’s true that, five years in, the president’s Most Memorable Mendacity Cup runneth over. Yet the “smidgen” may take its place alongside such faves as “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan”; “We’ll lower premiums by $2,500”; “Al-Qaeda has been decimated”; “the most transparent administration ever”; “shovel-ready jobs”; “You didn’t build that”; and the claim that the Benghazi massacre wastriggered by “the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video.”
As the Journal’s editors point out, the existing rules governing non-profit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code have been in effect unchanged since 1959. But after President Obama took office in 2009, tea-party groups, many of which organize themselves under 501(c)(4) for fundraising purposes (just as left-leaning groups do), rose up in protest against his governance. The Tea Party led a rout of congressional Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. With Obama’s own reelection bid on the horizon, suddenly the purportedly non-partisan IRS began fretting over its 501(c)(4) guidelines.
To read them, NR’s Eliana Johnsonobserves, is to find “guidance that is more subjective than objective.” But that is why the guidance is not read in a vacuum. What a “social welfare organization” is, and the degree to which it may engage in “political activities” so long as doing so does not constitute the organization’s “primary activity,” are matters determined by the application of a half-century’s experience and practice.
Under that extensive precedent, no one at IRS seemed to have any problem with tax-exempt status for, to take just one example, MoveOn.org — an organization the IRS decided was not overly “political” notwithstanding its history of in-your-face political activism and its website’sproclamation of a mission “to lead, participate in, and win campaigns for progressive change.” No, it was only when conservatives became a threat to a second term of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” that the IRS decided its guidance needed clarification.
The IRS scandal, though egregious, is only one in a series of gross Obama-administration abuses of power — and if you expected the Obama Justice Department, at the urging of the Obama White House, to get to the bottom of what the Obama IRS was doing to Obama’s political opposition, then you probably also expected you’d be able to keep a smidgen of your health insurance. So the question on every conservative’s tongue has become, “How can we stop this?”
Simple: We stop paying for it.
The Journal’s editors are exactly right: The House should sharply reduce IRS funding. But not just “until it becomes more responsive” to congressional investigators. The budget should be slashed until the IRS has no resources to do anything other than what the House thinks it ought to be doing — which, at least until Obama’s term is done, ought to be nothing other than processing tax returns.