“Crossing The Line”: Tea Party Group Protesting IRS Has History Of Questionable Political Involvement
Tea Party Patriots, originally formed as a 501(c)(4) non-profit corporation in 2009, has a history of questionable electoral activity. Nevertheless, as one of the largest of the movement’s national factions, it is taking advantage of the so-called IRS scandal to re-ignite the anger of Tea Partiers, encourage their (false) sense of victimhood, and increase their ranks.
Dubbed “Rein in the IRS,” nationwide rallies were organized to protest IRS scrutiny of Tea Party non-profit applications. The announcement, posted on the group’s website Monday, called for “anyone and everyone to protest the IRS’ complete abuse of power” at noon local time on Tuesday. Dozens of local Tea Party Patriots chapters around the country emailed their members about the protests.
The Tea Partiers claim that “the IRS has waged a three-year war against the Tea Party, harassing our groups and even auditing our individual members. This abuse of power is unacceptable and un-Constitutional, and it must stop.” No mention was made of the Inspector General’s findings that that not a single Tea Party group has been denied 501(c)(4) non-profit status, and that more than two thirds of the scrutinized Tea Party-like groups had engaged in political activity that would usually disqualify them.
The effort is also being used to fuse anger over several different political issues, from the Affordable Care Act to immigrants. For instance, in sample Letters to the Editor they distributed, the group links the IRS controversy with their attack on comprehensive immigration reform. “The IRS’s abuse of power highlights why the Senate needs to slow down with its amnesty bill. We simply cannot trust bureaucrats to make the right decisions. Immigration policy is too complex and too important for us to delegate to a group of bureaucrats who may be pursuing an agenda that doesn’t match Americans’ best interest.”
It should be noted that until late Monday, the Tea Party Patriots were using the official group website listed on their IRS form 990, and the resources of their 501(c)(4), plus their network of local groups—many of which have filed for 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) status)—to organize the protests against the IRS. Suddenly Monday evening, after a day of soliciting volunteers to organize anti-IRS protests, all traffic to the group’s domain name teapartypatriots.org was directed to the group’s political action committee, The Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund (http://teapartypatriotscitizensfund.com), which features a “protest the IRS” page alongside a photo of Tea Party Patriots co-founder, Jenny Beth Martin.
The new PAC was formed in January 2013. Despite the current enmeshing of the 501(c)(4) and the PAC on the IRS protests, forms filed with the Federal Elections Commission curiously state that the PAC has no connected organization.
The sudden crossover to the group’s political action committee may be at least a tacit omission of questionable activity for a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. It also begs the question as to why any Tea Party groups so focused on politics would want to be a non-profit rather than a PAC.
Such concern about crossing the line and engaging in political activity was absent from the Tea Party Patriots, Inc. a year ago when the group threw its support behind Wisconsin governor Scott Walker in his recall election.
As IREHR noted last year, Tea Party Patriots, Inc., which registered with the IRS as a 501(C)(4) non-profit organization, may have run afoul of its tax exempt status with this electoral activity. Federally registered non-profit organizations with a 501c4 status are prohibited from devoting a majority of their energy and resources to support electoral campaigns.
On April 29, 2012, local Tea Party Patriots groups across the country voted 98 percent to 2 percent to throw all their energy and resources into Wisconsin for the recall elections. “We are deploying hundreds of volunteers into each of the targeted recall districts,” noted Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin in an email to supporters. “That’s 4,000 patriots going door to door and making phone calls” she added.
Tea Party Patriots brought activists to Wisconsin and did door-to-door canvassing, and had others make calls from their homes and spread the word on social media. Some of those activists were sponsored, with their costs covered by Tea Party Patriots.
At times, Martin and other Tea Party Patriots leaders have tried to suggest that the group was just engaged in GOTV (Get Out the Vote) efforts or some form of civic engagement, other times they’ve told their supporters that they’re directly intervening politically: “Tea Party Patriots—in conjunction with other local and national Tea Party groups—will spearhead efforts to help Walker and other candidates.”
There is also a question as to whether the funds of the group are going to “social welfare” as required. In 2010, the organization raised $12 million in fiscal 2010. But only about $3 million of that went to its “social welfare” mission, according to an IRS 990 form filed in May 2012. For fiscal year ending May 31, 2012, Tea Party Patriots raised over $20 million, but spent just $5.9 million on program service. Millions of dollars went to pay professional telemarketing firms, extensive travel costs, and legal fees from suing other Tea Party groups over control of the “Tea Party” brand.
Tea Party Patriots leader Martin has had her fair share of troubles with the IRS before. As noted in Tea Party Nationalism, according to court documents, Martin and her husband, Lee Martin (who served at the group’s “assistant secretary” and was intimately involved in the group’s financial matters), owed over $680,000 in tax debt, including over half a million dollars to the Internal Revenue Service, when the pair filed for bankruptcy in August of 2008.
Whether or not Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest national factions, can turn this scandal into a chance to regain lost ground will, in some measure, depend on the reception their protests receive by an informed public.
By: Devin Burghart, The National Memo, May 23, 2013
“Why Should You Vote?”: Visualize Romney World And Move America Forward
My wife, Jan Schakowsky, and I are friends with a wonderful woman named Bea. Bea is now 95 years old. Bea was born in 1917.
She was born in a country where women couldn’t vote. In some areas of the country, just fifty years before, slavery had been legal. Collective bargaining was not recognized under the law. Poverty was rampant — especially among the country’s oldest citizens.
Bea was born in a country where there was an unimaginable gulf between a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs, and the masses of ordinary people. It was a country where only a tiny fraction of the population ever went to college — or even graduated from high school — a country were hardly anyone was considered “middle class.” It was a country where there were few regulations to protect health and safety on the job, no national child labor laws, no federal minimum wage, and very little to prevent corporations from recklessly destroying the environment.
Bea was born in a country where people of color were considered second-class citizens and discrimination against them was enshrined into law — a country where gays and homosexuals could be prosecuted for their sexual orientation.
Bea was born in the United States of America.
Over her lifetime, Bea has been involved in many of the great social movements of our time — movements that helped transform our country into the envy of the world.
She was active building the labor unions that build the middle class. won a living wage, weekends and a 40-hour work week, pensions for retirement, and the passage of Social Security and Medicare that ensured a retirement free of poverty.
She marched with the civil rights movement that gave people of color an equal status in American society.
Bea became a public school teacher and helped educate an ever-expanding number of ordinary Americans — watching more and more of them go on to college to fulfill their dreams.
She was part of the women’s movement that demanded equal status and equal pay for women — as well as the right for women to control their own decisions about contraception and abortion.
This year, Bea — at 95 years old — is working on a phone bank to turn out voters for Barack Obama. She says that if Mitt Romney and the Republican Right win the election on Tuesday, they have made clear that they absolutely intend to destroy all of the things for which she has struggled her entire life. She’s right.
Mitt Romney has demonstrated over the years that he has only one real core value: his own success.
Throughout his career, Mitt has demonstrated that he will do whatever is necessary to benefit himself — and his investors. At Bain Capital he didn’t flinch when it came to destroying other people’s jobs and lives if it would make him and his investors money.
Now his “investors” are the oligarchs of the Republican Right — people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson — who, between them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Many are the same people who funded the Tea Party movement. Others are the Wall Street hedge fund barons whose recklessness collapsed the economy and came very close to recreating a Great Depression.
These people — and their Tea Party allies in Congress — have shown the country that they have no intention of compromise. They are intent upon rolling back all of the things Bea has fought for — on sending us back to the Gilded Age. They truly believe that America would be a better place without labor unions. They want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers of ever-shrinking value that pay private insurance companies.
They want to be free to despoil the environment, do away with public education, eliminate jobs, cut wages, and continue to appropriate every dime of economic growth that is generated by our increasingly productive labor force.
As President Obama said in the second presidential debate, they want send us back to the foreign policy of the 1980’s, a social policy of the 1950’s and an economic policy of the 1920’s. They believe in a society where the law of the jungle reigns supreme — where you look out for yourself above all else — where, if you believe you are your brother and sisters’ keeper, that we shouldn’t leave anyone behind, that we should have each other’s back — you’re simply a chump.
If Mitt Romney becomes president, Republicans keep control of the House and win the few seats necessary to control the Senate, there will be nothing to restrain them from making their vision of society a reality in America — from taking America backward to a time most of us cannot imagine.
What are some of the things a President Romney has promised to do?
- Eliminate Medicare and convert it into a voucher for private insurance — ending the most popular and successful health care program in American history and raising out of pocket costs for seniors by6,500 a year.
- Privatize and cut Social Security – handing over the Social Security Trust fund to Wall Street and eliminating guaranteed benefits.
- Appoint — most likely two — Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, outlawing abortion rights — and most likely make the Court a firm ally of unrestrained corporate and Wall Street power for generations.
- Repeal Wall Street Reform. Return us to the pre-crash law that would allow Wall Street to once again run wild, gamble with more and more exotic financial instruments, make a fortune for itself — and once again wreck the economy.
- Repeal ObamaCare. That by itself would end the promise that no one will ever again be bankrupt by a sudden illness. It will return us to a very recent time when someone who has a pre-existing condition can be denied insurance coverage – and that insurance companies can call the shots when it comes to your health care.
- Pass the Ryan Budget. That would mean slashing critical federal expenditures that benefit the middle class and those who aspire to the middle class, like cutting Medicaid that pays for health care for the poor, children and those in need of nursing homes or home care — and slashing funds for education and college grants.
- Increase military spending by two trillion dollars above the amount requested by the military leadership. That might benefit big defense contractors, but it would make it practically impossible to reduce the giant federal deficit.
- Give the wealthy an additional 5 trillion dollar tax cut and pay for it by increasing the effective tax rate paid by the middle class.
- Stop funding for Planned Parenthood and any other family planning programs that we fund around the world that use their own funds to pay for abortions.
- Try to pass the “Personhood” Amendment that would effectively outlaw all abortions and many forms of hormonal contraception.
- Allow many of the same Neo-Con foreign policy advisers who got us into the Iraq War to once again take control of American foreign policy.
- Veto the Dream Act that would allow young people who were brought to America as children to apply for citizenship.
- Eliminate the Presidential Directive that prevents the deportation of Dream Act-eligible young people.
- Empower people like Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who wrote the Arizona “papers please” law and now serves as Romney’s chief adviser on immigration.
- Slash environmental regulations and investment in clean energy development.
The list goes on and on.
But worse than the individual initiatives that Romney and Ryan have made clear they would undertake, is the attitude they would bring to decision-making.
Romney’s true views were laid bare in the now famous “47 percent video” where he explained how he could not convince 47% of Americans to take responsibility for their lives — people like retirees who worked all of their lives for their Social Security and Medicare — people like veterans who risked their lives for the country — people like the disabled — in fact, pretty much anyone who doesn’t agree with his “we’re all in this alone” view of American society.
If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are elected on Tuesday, they will turn back the clock on progress in America. If they are allowed to do so by a Republican House and Senate, they would return us to a time we could scarcely imagine.
For those who believe in a society where we’re all in this together, Tuesday’s election is the mother of all battles.
But if we all vote, we will win — it’s that simple. If you care about the future society we leave to our children; if you believe that we can once again have an expanding, robust middle class; if you believe that the American Dream is not dead and that our children should be able to look forward to more opportunity than was available to their moms and dads — there is no excuse not to vote.
We simply cannot allow the millions of right wing special interest money to buy America’s democracy.
Where you can, vote early. Regardless, get to the polls. If you need to stand in line, stay there until you vote. Everyone who is in line will have a chance to vote, even if the lines are long.
However it turns out, Tuesday will mark a decisive, historic turning point in American history. Together, if we all vote, we have the power to continue America’s progressive tradition. We have the power to move America forward, not back. We have the power to assure that at this decisive moment we once again bend the arc of history toward justice.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, November 4, 2012
“All The Explanation You Need”: Mitt Romney, The Most Mysterious Man In The Election
It’s often said that the way a candidate runs his campaign gives insight into the way he’ll run the government, but unfortunately it usually isn’t true. A campaign has a few similarities to a government, but not many; likewise, while there are similarities between running for president and being president (lots of speeches, for instance), most of the really important things couldn’t be more different.
As the presidential election nears its end—a vote of tremendous consequence preceded by a campaign of unusual triviality—is there anything left to learn about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? Despite the fervid hopes of those on the extreme right that there is some secret revelation waiting to be unearthed about Obama, we know most of what we need to know about his potential second term just by taking stock of his first. We know that domestically, where he needs Congress’s cooperation he’ll pursue the policies his party supports, just as Mitt Romney will. In foreign policy and national security, we know that he’ll continue to distress the progressives who care to think about it, with a continuation of the drone war in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a vision of presidential power that is little different from George W. Bush’s. The bulk of his policy initiatives will merely continue what he has already done; whether you think that’s a good idea depends almost entirely on your party affiliation.
If you had particular foresight, you might have seen in Obama’s pre-presidential political career some of the characteristics that produced his greatest successes as president. In particular, he combines a carefulness and methodical planning with extremely bold action when he believes circumstances have produced the perfect moment. The most obvious example was his decision to run for president in the first place. Let’s not forget that at the time, nearly every sage observer said Obama was being presumptuous and premature. When his run began he was a mere two years removed from the Illinois state senate, an electrifying presence but hardly possessed of the seasoning that a president needed. But Obama saw that the end of the Bush years provided an opportunity he might not see again, when the thirst for someone new and different made the election of the nation’s first black president a possibility, even one who had only occupied high office for only a brief time.
There have been plenty of times when Obama could have gone farther than he did, or would have done better forcing a confrontation instead of settling for conciliation. But that boldness could be seen at most of the key moments of his first term: ignoring advisers like Rahm Emanuel who counseled abandoning the Affordable Care Act when it was in jeopardy; bailing out the auto industry when many thought it was a dying elephant; and yes, ordering the operation that killed Osama bin Laden despite all the risks it entailed.
Like Obama, Mitt Romney is known as a careful planner. But unlike Obama, Romney has shown an aversion to risk-taking that is nearly absolute. That isn’t always a bad thing; though many of Obama’s risks have worked out well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with caution. But Romney’s caution is extreme, so much so that it’s impossible to think of a single risk he’s ever taken—political, personal, or otherwise. When he was working at Bain & Co. and the firm’s founder asked him to run the new venture of Bain Capital, Romney negotiated a deal that guaranteed him his old job back if the private equity firm failed. When he went to run the Olympics in Salt Lake, he negotiated a similar deal with Bain Capital. And the private equity business that he helped pioneer is all about risking borrowed money and making sure to charge huge management fees, so even if the company you buy goes under, you still wind up making a profit.
In politics, Romney’s aversion to risk is all the explanation you need for his reinventions: When the next electorate to be wooed didn’t look favorably inclined to the last iteration of Mitt, rather than risk being rejected because of what he stood for, he sought out the path of least ideological resistance. The problem is that if he becomes president, Romney will face decisions in which there is no safe choice. I don’t doubt that if a natural disaster hit, Romney could effectively manage the government’s response, since it would be an administrative challenge with clear goals. But what about some international crisis where all paths pose tremendous risks? What if, say, fundamentalists staged a coup in Pakistan? Can anyone say how Romney would respond, or even what in his character or experience might give us some idea? He might handle such crises brilliantly or disastrously. We have no idea.
Nevertheless, for all Romney’s ideological revisions and reimaginings, we can be fairly sure about many of the things he’ll do. Just like Obama, he’ll be a creature of his party. He’ll stock the executive branch with the same Republicans who would arrive with any GOP president. He can’t enact his tax cut plan as he has presented it during this campaign, but he’ll attempt to cut income tax rates in some fashion, and probably try to cut capital gains and inheritance taxes to boot. He’ll appoint judges (and Supreme Court justices if he gets the chance) who are hostile to reproductive rights and friendly to corporate power and privilege. When he promises to cut regulations that limit business’s ability to pollute or harm consumers, he means it. While he may not achieve his utterly arbitrary goal of increasing military spending to 4 percent of GDP, he’ll certainly try to increase it. He might get cold feet on voucherizing Medicare, but he’ll be happy to go after Medicaid; doing so is less risky since the latter’s constituency is poor people.
Finally, if we’re trying to imagine the next four years, it’s as important to ask what each candidate doesn’t care about as what he does care about. A president won’t take a political risk or invest in a long-term effort to accomplish a goal he can live without achieving. Obama wouldn’t have undertaken the monumental struggle required to pass the Affordable Care Act if he didn’t care about the goal of health care reform. On the other hand, he clearly doesn’t care much about the proliferation of guns.
As for Mitt Romney, it’s so hard to determine what he cares about that it’s equally difficult to say what he doesn’t care about. His campaign recently informed reporters that he will be giving no more interviews between now and Election Day, lest he be subjected to the risk of an uncomfortable question or another cringe-inducing gaffe. So whatever voters don’t know about Mitt Romney they aren’t going to find out unless he becomes president.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 29, 2012
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