{"id":139937,"date":"2013-06-03T10:00:32","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T14:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=139937"},"modified":"2013-12-09T11:28:43","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T16:28:43","slug":"what-irs-did-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/06\/03\/what-irs-did-right\/","title":{"rendered":"What The IRS Did Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/what-irs-did-right.jpg\" alt=\"What IRS Did Right\" width=\"620\" height=\"412\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-139940\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/what-irs-did-right.jpg 620w, https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/what-irs-did-right-200x132.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/what-irs-did-right-600x398.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Article:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2013\/05\/28\/what_the_irs_did_right\/\">What the IRS Did Right<\/a> by Joan Walsh in Salon.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Text:<\/strong> Outrage first, facts later. That\u2019s often the way American political \u201cscandals\u201d unfold, and it seems to be the case with the news that the IRS targeted conservative political groups for extra scrutiny before granting them tax-exempt status as social-welfare organizations.<\/p>\n<p>We knew from the beginning of the IRS mess that the only group actually denied tax-exempt status was the Maine chapter of a Democratic women\u2019s group, Emerge America. Now we\u2019re learning about some of the right-wing organizations that came in for extra scrutiny, as reported by the New York Times Monday: a conservative veterans\u2019 group that only backed one candidate, a Republican, for Congress; an Alabama Tea Party group that took part in a \u201cdefeat Barack Obama\u201d voter-turnout drive, and the \u201cOhio Liberty Coalition\u201d led by a Republican activist who sent his members information on Mitt Romney campaign events and recruited them to volunteer for the GOP nominee.<\/p>\n<p>Some former IRS officials are speaking out to defend the agency, and taking issue with parts of the critical inspector general\u2019s report. Inspector General J. Russell George found evidence of inadequate management and supervision, and that the agency incorrectly used keywords like \u201cTea Party\u201d or \u201cpatriots\u201d to scrutinize applications. But the report also concluded that the agency acted inappropriately when it asked groups about their donors, or their leaders\u2019 plans to run for public office \u2013 when in fact such questions can be perfectly appropriate when trying to discover if a political group is wrongly seeking \u201csocial welfare\u201d status.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe I.G. was as careless with terminology as the Cincinnati office was,\u201d said Marcus S. Owens, former head of the IRS\u2019s exempt organizations division. \u201cHalf of those questions have been found to be germane in court decisions.\u201d Some election lawyers told the Times that they believed the IRS \u201cscandal\u201d was at least partly ginned up to derail audits and other scrutiny of the rising number of political groups seeking tax-exempt status as the 2014 midterms approach.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the conservative groups identified by the Times told the IRS they did not engage in electoral politics when in fact they did. The Wetumpka, Ala., Tea Party group told the Times that its participation in Code Red USA, a national voter turnout drive intended to engineer \u201cthe defeat of President Barack Obama,\u201d was for \u201ceducational purposes.\u201d The head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition claimed distributing literature for Mitt Romney was \u201cnot political activity.\u201d He told the Times his lawyers said the IRS was concerned about television and radio advertising.<\/p>\n<p>Clearly, the IRS\u2019s use of search terms like \u201cTea Party,\u201d \u201cliberty\u201d and \u201cpatriots\u201d was wrong, especially in the absence of comparable search terms to root out progressive groups. So the president was probably right to declare the targeting mess an \u201coutrage.\u201d On the other hand, it would have been nice to have all the facts before so many liberals, myself included, began throwing fuel on the right-wing fire.<\/p>\n<p>And predictably, having gotten the entire spectrum of political opinion to declare the IRS\u2019s activities a \u201cscandal,\u201d the National Republican Campaign Committee is now using the embattled agency in ads against four vulnerable Democratic House incumbents: Arizona\u2019s Ann Kirkpatrick and Ron Barber, Collin Peterson of Minnesota and John Barrow of Georgia. They\u2019ll be driving trucks around each district with a billboard: \u201cRep. Barrow\u2019s Plan: Put the IRS In Charge of Your Health Care. Fed Up?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The IRS mess is coming to look more like the Benghazi \u201cscandal\u201d: a diversion from the genuine policy questions at issue, concocted to embarrass the president.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Article: What the IRS Did Right by Joan Walsh in Salon. The Text: Outrage first, facts later. That\u2019s often the way American political \u201cscandals\u201d unfold, and it seems to be the case with the news that the IRS targeted conservative political groups for extra scrutiny before granting them tax-exempt status as social-welfare organizations. We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What The IRS Did Right<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Turns out some of the conservative groups it scrutinized were actively and wrongly involved in partisan politics.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/06\/03\/what-irs-did-right\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What The IRS Did Right\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" 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