-By Warner Todd Huston
On May 10, a spokeswoman for the Internal Revenue Service admitted that over the last year–during the presidential election, at that–the agency had conducted “overzealous audits” of the tax-exempt status of dozens of conservative activists and Tea Party groups. Last year The New York Times dismissed claims that the IRS was abusing its powers but even with these new admissions by the IRS the Times is underplaying the facts.
Last year several conservative groups began to notice that they were getting audited an awful lot and some banded together with Jay Selkulow’s American Center for Law and Justice to call for an investigation into the matter. Sekulow accused the IRS of launching a campaign intended to stifle free speech. At the time, Landmark Legal Foundation also demanded that the IRS conduct an investigation into agency misconduct.
Not long thereafter the Times ridiculed complaints made by conservative groups saying that the IRS was just doing its job.
In a May 7, 2012 editorial, the Times attempted to dismiss complaints about IRS overreach by acting as if these audits were being conducted against both conservative and liberal groups–even as not one liberal group said it was being audited. The paper of record went on to insist that the IRS should be conducting more audits of this nature and said that the conservative groups should be “thoroughly investigated.”
In another article at the time, the Times characterized the charges against the IRS as merely an “election-year struggle.” That article also claimed that the IRS was doing the right thing by ensuring that “nonprofits are sticking to their primary role as social welfare group.”
Flash forward to today where the IRS has finally fully admitted that it had acted outside its authority with “overzealous audits” of conservative, not liberal, groups. The IRS admitted that groups with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names were targeted, yet, even with this admission, the IRS claims it wasn’t a “political” targeting.
IRS spokesperson Lois Lerner somewhat absurdly claimed that the harassment campaign was all just the work of “low-level workers in Cincinnati,” wasn’t political at all, and wasn’t in any way an official policy.
Even with these admissions by the IRS, though, the Times finds questions on these admissions less than interesting. In its May 10 article on the IRS’ admission the paper ended up sticking with its now untenable claim that the agency is acting in an even handed way by targeting both liberal and conservative groups even though not one liberal group has reported any such conflict with the taxing agency.
In a softening of the blow of having to report the IRS admissions, the Times goes far afield of the subject at hand and ends up once again claiming that the IRS needs to be even more aggressive in its audits of political groups.
The gray lady spends half its piece misdirecting the discussion of the IRS’ admission that it had perpetrated “bad judgment” by discussing how “tax exemptions are widely abused by conservative and liberal groups” and that the IRS needs to be more active, not less.
While the Times may not be much interested in answers from the IRS, at least some Senators are.
For one, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, has released a statement demanding more information from the IRS.
While I’m glad to see the IRS apologize for unfairly targeting conservative groups, this frankly isn’t enough. We need to have ironclad guarantees from the IRS that it will adopt significant protocols to ensure this kind of harassment of groups that have a constitutional right to express their own views never happens again. As several Senators and I wrote to the IRS last year, there can be no tolerance for the IRS being turned into a political weapon; it has a chilling and, frankly, Nixonian effect on those who wish to speak their mind. I will be discussing this further with the head of the IRS and expect a full briefing and report as to how this happened. The American people deserve to know who at the IRS learned about this unlawful activity, when they learned about it, and what they did, or did not, do when they did learned about it.
Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) also called for a “wide review” of IRS practices in the wake of the IRS ‘ admissions.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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