In the past year we saw the unfolding of the IRS scandal in which conservative, Tea Party, free market and patriotic organizations were targeted for audits, harassment and oppression by the Obama administration and his left wing hacks in the bureaucracy. Of course left wing, communist and progressive groups that hate the country, the constitution and freedom suffered no similar treatment.
Now we learn that those same people want to write these practices into law. While you were busy celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas, the corrupt power structure of Obama and his minions quietly put new regulations out that will have the effect of silencing conservative groups as a matter of official policy. The reason for releasing them during the holidays is, of course, to make sure that you don’t have time to object to those regulations during the mandatory 90-day comment period.
Several conservative groups like Numbers USA and Freedomworks have raised the alarm and are asking conservative activists to take action by commenting and letting the government know that these new regulations violate the spirit of the constitution, suppress free speech and are unacceptable in a free society. So if you think that the IRS should be stopped from silencing conservative groups, here is your chance to push back.
UPDATE
Some republicans with whom I have had online discussions do not seem to understand the problem with this. They seem to think that this is just a matter of applying existing laws in a more consistent way, thus parroting the talking points of the Obama administration. But what we know is that Obama’s IRS goons in the Treasury department went through Tea Party and other conservative group’s applications to find what activities they had in common. They then decided to make those activities illegal under the new regulations. Leftist groups won’t be affected because they aren’t trying to inform people about the debt, or teach the constitution or validate voter registration lists in their communities. The activities that will no longer be tax exempt are specifically the kinds that conservatives are most likely to engage in.
I found this article by Kimberly Strassel in The Wall Street Journal, some of which is reproduced below. It has since gone behind the pay wall, but here you can see the most important excerpts that detail just what the Obama administration is doing to silence Tea Party and related conservative groups.
IRS Targeting: Round Two
The first time around, targeting conservatives was a secret. Now, not so much.In the media blackout of Thanksgiving week, the Treasury Department dumped a new proposal to govern the political activity of 501©(4) groups. The administration claims this rule is needed to clarify confusing tax laws. Hardly. The rule is the IRS’s new targeting program—only this time systematic, more effective, and with the force of law.
That this rule was meant to crack down on the White House’s political opponents was never in doubt. What is new is the growing concern by House Ways and Means Committee investigators that the regulation was reverse-engineered—designed to isolate and shut down the same tea party groups victimized in the first targeting round. Treasury appears to have combed through those tea party applications, compiled all the groups’ main activities, and then restricted those activities in the new rule.
Here’s how it works. To get or keep tax-exempt status, 501©(4) organizations must devote a majority of their work to their “primary” social-welfare purpose. Most tea party groups were set up with a primary purpose of educating Americans on pressing problems—the size of government, the erosion of the Constitution—and did so mainly via nonpartisan voter guides, speakers forums, pamphlets or voter-registration drives.
What the proposed Treasury/IRS regulation would do is to re-categorize all these efforts as “political activity”—thereby making it all but impossible for tea party groups to qualify for 501©(4) status. Say an outfit’s primary purpose is educating voters on our unsustainable debt, which it does mainly with a guide explaining the problem and politicians’ voting records. Under the new rule, that guide is now “political activity” (rather than “social welfare”), which likely loses the group tax-exempt status.
The rule, in other words, is not designed to provide helpful “guidance” on allowable activities. It was designed, rather, as Mr. Camp explains, “to put tea party groups out of business.”
