“An Untenable Position”: How John Boehner And Republicans Helped Create The IRS Scandal
The political powers the IRS was recently accused of abusing to harass Tea Party groups were given to it against its will by Congress — including some of the agency’s biggest critics today — over 10 years ago, according to documents and a former senior tax official. The revelation, which has been missing in most if not all of the commentary on the scandal, adds a key bit of context to it.
In a half-measure effort to strengthen campaign finance disclosure laws in 2000, Congress put the IRS, effectively for the first time, in the awkward position of having to make judgment calls about whether nonprofit advocacy groups would be required to disclose their donors because too much of their activities crossed the theoretical line between “issues advocacy” and “political campaign intervention.” It’s a messy and inherently subjective business, and something officials did not want to get more involved in, predicting it would lead to exactly the kind of controversy we just witnessed. “The IRS would inevitably be subject to claims of discrimination and political bias for actions taken or not taken,” an internal memo from the Treasury Department’s office of Tax Policy sent in June 2000 and obtained by Salon reads.
“The fuse was lit in 2000 with this law, which put the IRS in an untenable position. It’s almost surprising it didn’t explode on them earlier,” Steven Arkin, a former senior Treasury and IRS official, who proceeded Lois Lerner as the director of rulings and agreements for the IRS’ tax exempt organizations office, told Salon.
The law, a stand-alone bill numbered H.R.4762, had the best of intentions, but backfired thanks to an enormous loophole. After a comprehensive campaign finance bill failed, reformers pushed a narrow bill to increase disclosure of groups organized under section 527 of the tax code. That was reserved for groups primarily involved in electoral politics — but before this law, 527s that didn’t engage in explicit electoral intervention didn’t have to file any paperwork of any kind with the IRS. They incorporated as legal entities in their states, and that was that. No information on donors, expenditures or even their existence needed to be made public. If they did engage in electioneering, they would have to disclose that information to the FEC, but only for each specific activity. Thanks to the lax standards, these groups earned the moniker “Stealth PACs” and became the bane of campaign finance reform advocates.
When lawmakers brought up a bill to force 527 groups to disclose their donors just before Congress was about to go on its July 4 recess in 2000, they made a concession to skeptical Republicans and some Democrats who were looking out for liberal nonprofits: 501(c) groups — business leagues and the so-called social welfare organizations at the center of this year’s IRS controversy — would not be included. This didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, since almost everyone who wanted to meddle in politics organized as a 527 and not a 501(c)4. Both types of groups are tax-exempt, but 527′s had free rein to engage in electoral politics, while 501(c)4′s are limited to spending less than half their money on it. Social welfare and other groups are permitted to engage in unlimited issue advocacy, so long as their efforts to elect or defeat particular candidates were not their “primary” activity.
But former Sen. Russ Feingold, a staunch campaign finance reform advocate, saw what would happen if you cracked down on 527′s and not 501(c)4′s. “By only focusing on disclosure in one type of tax-exempt organization and not on others, we leave open the use of the other type of tax-exempt organizations by those who want to hide their contributions and activity behind the cloak of anonymity that these tax-exempt organizations provide,” Feingold warned on the floor during the Senate’s very short debate. He added that he was concerned that the IRS was “not prepared” to take on this burden, given the administration’s concern.
Sen. John McCain, the Senate sponsor, said that while it would be nice to do all groups, “focusing narrowly on 527 organizations” was necessary to “ensure that the legislation survives a constitutional test.” In the House, Wisconsin Democrat Tom Barrett, acknowledged that “this bill is not perfect” since it exempted social welfare organizations, but said including them might be “poison pill provisions” that would “scuttle this important reform effort.”
The bill passed overwhelmingly in both chambers. In the House, it was 385-39, with the “yay” column including Republican Reps. John Boehner, Dave Camp, Paul Ryan, Jim DeMint and many others who would later make hay of the way the IRS regulated 501(c) groups. Meanwhile, the Senate approved it 92-6, with McCain, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum and many others voting in favor. Sen. Mitch McConnell, a longtime opponent of campaign finance reform, voted no, but said, “I recommend to my Republican colleagues that they vote for this bill,” calling it “relatively benign and harmless.”
The fallout was not particularly surprising. Two months after the law went into effect, the Washington Post reported that “instead of complying with the new law, a number of groups are instead reconstituting themselves under other provisions of the tax code that do not force them to reveal their donors.” Ben Ginsberg, a prominent GOP election lawyer, told the Post he couldn’t keep up with with his clients’ requests to convert. “We’d be running out of fingers and toes” just to count them all, he said. Claiming to be new groups, they reorganized as 501(c)4′s, which can do basically all the same things the old 527′s did, just under a different section of the tax code. So in the end, Congress swapped out 527 “Stealth PACs” for 501(c)4 “Dark Money” groups.
But while the change seems banal, it effectively transferred oversight of this species in the campaign finance ecology to the IRS, an agency less well equipped to handle delicate political questions than the FEC, which was designed with a bipartisan commission and other features precisely to handle touchy political issues, including fundraising matters impacting members of Congress themselves.
“The proposals to amend the Internal Revenue Code would put the IRS in the position where it, rather than the FEC, must become the “watchdog,” the Treasury Department memo, first reported by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, warned before the law passed. “Imposition of such a burden on the IRS would be an administrative nightmare for the agency.”
“It never should have been given to the IRS,” said Arkin, the former tax official.
It’s a fitting coda to the IRS scandal that the problem was largely created by the people most outraged by it.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 11, 2013
“What’s A Speaker To Do?”: The Farm Bill Failure Has Disastrous Implications For John Boehner
It’s hard to understate how much of a setback the farm bill’s surprise failure was for an already dysfunctional and divided House of Representatives.
It showed that House leadership doesn’t have a complete measure of the vote counts for even the most basic bills. It provided embarrassment all the way up to House Speaker John Boehner, who took the unusual step of publicly supporting the bill and voting for it. And it signaled possible turbulence ahead for other larger and higher-profile bills, such as one on the issue of immigration.
The debacle brings up fresh new questions about major legislation passing through the House. If Boehner can’t bring his conference together to move a farm bill through to a conference committee, what does it mean for immigration, debt ceiling, and government appropriations bills looming later this summer and fall?
The looming immigration fight, in particular, parallels the farm bill in many ways, though it could hypothetically have even more disastrous consequences for the Republican Party if it fails.
A similar version of a Senate farm bill that earned bipartisan support in a 66-27 vote failed to pass the House. Soon, an immigration bill that now looks likely to earn more than 70 bipartisan Senate votes could present Boehner with the same problem.
“The two are very different issues. However, the farm bill highlights how complicated things are here in the House,” one House GOP aide told Business Insider.
From here, the farm bill faces one of two likely fates — it could either face extinction, or House leadership could put a modified version on the floor. It’s unlikely, though, that a modified bill will come to the floor, considering that it would likely take more food-stamp cuts to earn Republican votes — something that would scare off Democrats. Most likely, a GOP aide said, a one-year extension will be passed, like both the House and Senate did last year.
A final version of any farm bill, even a one-year extension, will likely need a majority of Democrats to support its passage. The House last passed a farm bill extension as part of the bill to avert the fiscal cliff, which passed with a majority of Democrats supporting it. That overall bill required Boehner to break the Hastert Rule.
On immigration, Boehner will have an even narrower path to navigate. He has pledged to not allow a vote on a bill that does not garner majority support from Republicans. It’s clear that breaking that promise, however, is perhaps the only way a bill would pass through the House to become law — even if the Senate bill is watered down to earn more Republicans’ support.
Doing so would likely mean Boehner would face a revolt from conservative members of his caucus. Already, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) has warned him on his speakership.
One Democratic strategist, though, said Boehner might have to be willing to buck the majority of his caucus to do something he feels is necessary for the future of the party. The strategist pointed to comments from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) last weekend, who cautioned immigration reform was necessary to keep the GOP from falling into a “demographic death spiral.”
“He might have to decide between the short-term imperative of keeping his speakership,” the strategist said, “and the long-term imperative of the future of the Republican Party.”
By: Brett LoGiurato, Business Insider, June 21, 2013
“The Farce That Is Darrell Issa”: Just Another Symbol Of Today’s GOP
The only thing that makes Rep. Darrell Issa remotely qualified to chair the House Oversight Committee is his personal familiarity with the investigative process – on the receiving end. The man Republican House Speaker John Boehner put in charge of investigating government wrongdoing was himself indicted for stealing a car, accused of stealing at least one other car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and twice suspected of insurance fraud – and once extensively investigated by authorities for arson, because his former business associates accused him, on the record, of burning down a building to collect the insurance payout.
Democrats love to hate the silly, camera-chasing Issa, who came to power in 2011 promising to put the White House under generalized investigation. But now even some Republicans are happy to criticize Issa too. It’s easy for them to denounce his calling Jay Carney a “paid liar,” as well as his evidence-free claim that the IRS mess was directed from Washington, D.C., while they continue to participate in smearing the White House with non-scandals themselves, nonetheless.
Issa’s extremist idiocy lets “reasonable” Republicans denounce him and/or his rhetoric, while they continue their own ethically, intellectually and politically blinkered crusades against President Obama. Sure, Sen. John McCain says it was wrong to call Carney a “paid liar” – but also on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he compared the IRS mess to Ronald Reagan’s deadly Iran-Contra scandal. Um, no.
Scandal-drunk Sen. Lindsey Graham says Issa went too far when he said the IRS agents who keyword-targeted Tea Party groups “were directly being ordered from Washington.” But he continued to hype the IRS story. “At the end of the day, the IRS scandal really is scary,” he told Fox’s Brian Kilmeade. “How would you like your own government to turn on you?” Is that really what happened, Lindsey Graham? And if so, it happened most brutally to a Democratic group, Emerge America, which had its tax-exempt status revoked.
Of course, McCain and Graham are also the guys who brought us the ultimate non-scandal: Benghazi. Issa’s idiocy lets them retain their role as “statesmen,” gets them invited back on the Sunday shows, and gives the media an excuse to consider them arbiters of what’s politically acceptable – while they’re themselves on the right fringe. Of course it’s guys like Issa who constantly move that standard of what’s politically acceptable to the right.
Honestly, when David Plouffe started raising Issa’s past on ABC’s “This Week,” and then on Twitter, part of me winced. But that’s because I didn’t completely remember Ryan Lizza’s amazing Issa profile in the New Yorker – which was respectful while also documenting Issa’s troubling history with law enforcement – as well as my own life in California during the surreal 2003 recall of Gray Davis (another example of GOP nullification of election results, by any means necessary, usually big money).
Issa financed the recall, and hoped to run for governor himself, but then the Los Angeles Times and other California papers began reporting on his earlier legal troubles. There was particular attention to his indictment for grand theft when he reported his Mercedes stolen after his brother William sold it; William had earlier obtained the right to do so from his brother. The two men had different stories for a while, and authorities believed they’d conspired to sell the car, report a “theft” and collect insurance on it.
(I personally think the arson investigation was even more damning: An Issa colleague gave investigators vivid detail that indicated his car-alarm factory had been intentionally torched, after Issa increased his insurance from $100,000 to $462,000. “Quite frankly,” Joey Adkins told authorities, “I feel the man set the fire.” But the local fire marshal never determined the fire’s cause.)
In the end, the scrutiny doomed Issa’s chance to run for governor – but his wealth funded the successful recall of Davis. Sure, Issa could continue to hold his House seat in his conservative San Diego district, but a guy as ethically compromised (and as blinkered ideologically) as Issa could never win a statewide election in California – let alone a national one. So he tearfully stepped aside for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
So that’s the guy who’s heading up the House GOP’s investigation into alleged Obama White House “scandals.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer got a lot of attention Monday for telling “Meet the Press’s” David Gregory that Issa’s overreach is setting up a GOP loss in 2014 – just like the impeachment witch hunt against President Clinton set up his party’s historic gain of seats in the 1998 midterms. I hope Schumer’s right. But I find myself taking little comfort even in that uncertain outcome.
Democrats, including myself, like to declare that impeachment didn’t resonate with the American people, who gave Clinton ever-higher approval ratings as the witch hunt continued. And yes, Clinton’s party won seats in the ’98 midterm. But impeachment, and the myriad baseless investigations that preceded it, from Whitewater to Travelgate to alleged Chinese fundraising scandals, preoccupied both the White House and the media, to the detriment of Clinton’s agenda, particularly in his second term. They certainly didn’t help Vice President Al Gore in his campaign to win the presidency.
While I’ve always rejected the claims of some anti-Clinton centrist Democrats that Clinton’s philandering cost Gore the election, there was at least some polling that suggested it hurt Gore with suburban women. Certainly the cloud of scandal – and the stalling of the Clinton-Gore agenda – couldn’t have helped Gore, who won the popular vote and by reliable accounts the electoral vote in a race that shouldn’t have even been as close as it was, given the strength of the economy and the deficits of George W. Bush. I would argue that Clinton’s experience proves GOP scandal-mongering works – and once again, the media let the party get away with it.
I’m happy even some mainstream media pundits are warning that Issa’s overreach could hurt the GOP in 2014. And yet that new rhetorical twist puts the focus on horse race politics, where all of journalism appears most comfortable today. Issa’s extremism may or may not hurt his party at the polls. All I know is it should be hurting him, and the GOP, more with the American people, when they think about what they want in their leaders.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, June 4, 2013
“Fitful Fabrications: Watergate Amnesia, The ‘Nixonian’ Slur, And Other Big Lies
Let’s state this very simply, so everybody will understand. The notion that Barack Obama is “Nixonian” — or that his administration’s recent troubles bear any resemblance to “Watergate” — is the biggest media lie since the phony “Whitewater scandal” crested during the Clinton presidency.
Fraudulent as it is, we have listened repeatedly to versions of this bogus comparison uttered by figures as diverse as former Fox News commentator Dick Morris and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, alongside a phalanx of Republican politicians, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) – whose latest attack ad directly links Obama with Nixon.
Only in a country afflicted with chronic historical amnesia could they issue such accusations without shame or embarrassment. Only under those circumstances could the Republicans continue their fitful fabrication of a “Democratic Watergate” without fear of being laughed off the stage. It is a project that they will never grow tired of pursuing.
Coming from figures such as former White House political boss Karl Rove and Fox News chief Roger Ailes — both of whom worked for Nixon and defended him with vigor — the hypocrisy is stunning. They can only say words like “Watergate” or “Nixonian” because most Americans have forgotten who they really are behind the respectable masks – or never knew.
The last time we heard Obama mentioned in the same breath as Watergate was in 2009, when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) – the same Issa who has labored for months to pump air into the Benghazi “scandal” – decided that a job offered to a potential political candidate had erupted into a Constitutional crisis. Is it necessary to note that nothing of consequence ever emerged from Issa’s investigation back then? Yet somehow, he maintains credibility with the Washington media.
So does Graham, who slandered Susan Rice over the Benghazi talking points, which he deemed “worse than Watergate” – an assertion since proved entirely wrong, irresponsible, and vicious. Nevertheless Graham is treated as someone worthy of airtime and quotation, rather than a discredited blowhard.
But certain liberals in the media have fretted loudly over Obama’s “scandals,” too. Is it reasonable to compare the Benghazi incident, the vetting of abused tax exemptions by the IRS, or the Justice Department’s leak investigations with the Watergate crisis? Or is it all just trumped-up hysteria? To answer those questions, it helps to remember what Nixon and his gang actually did to America – and why they were driven out of Washington and, in many cases, sent to prison.
In these circumstances, a quick history lesson seems vital. For those who have forgottten or don’t know, Watergate is the name of an apartment complex near the Potomac River in northwest Washington, D.C., where then-President Nixon’s henchmen staged a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on a June night in 1972.
But Watergate came to stand for a vast agglomeration of gangster conspiracies based in the Nixon White House but spanning the nation. Watergate was a series of burglaries, warrantless domestic wiretaps, illegal spying, campaign dirty tricks, election tampering, money laundering, and assorted thuggish schemes conceived by a large and lawless gang whose leaders included G. Gordon Liddy and the late E. Howard Hunt.
And Watergate grew into a cover-up of those initial felonies with still more felonies, committed by lawyers and bureaucrats who collected cash payoffs from major corporations and then handed out hush money and secret campaign slush funds.
Eventually, Watergate implicated scores of perpetrators, from the right-wing Cuban footsoldiers all the way up to the president, his closest advisors, and his crooked stooges at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA.
Again then, in what sense is the Benghazi tragedy – thoroughly investigated by an independent board, as provided by law – akin to Watergate? How is the IRS effort to vet the tax exemptions of Tea Party groups, which were violating their status brazenly, similar to Nixon’s criminal abuse of the agency to punish his enemies with audits? What makes the Justice Department probe of national security leaks, conducted with valid subpoenas, resemble the secret Nixon White House war against “enemies” in the press, which went so far as trumped-up FCC license challenges and even threats of violence against the Washington Post?
The answers are fairly obvious: None. Not at all. Nothing whatsoever.
And so far as we know, Attorney General Eric Holder hasn’t rung up any Fox News reporter drunkenly at midnight to warn that Roger Ailes is “going to get his tit caught in a big, fat wringer.” But if and when that ever happens, the chance to roll out the Watergate clichés will arrive at last — starting with “Nixonian.”
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, May 30, 2013
“Unhinged Insanity”: Michele Bachmann’s Powerful Legacy
Michele Bachmann’s retirement from the House of Representatives is an obvious loss for political journalists and their editors, who could guarantee web traffic by just reprinting anything she said, with minimal comment. That was especially true during the Republican presidential primaries.
In her short time as a candidate, Bachmann blamed natural disasters on America’s unwillingness to cut non-defense discretionary spending, accused Texas Governor Rick Perry of spreading autism with mandatory vaccinations, warned that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had plans to bomb the United States with a nuclear weapon, and pushed for a full ban on pornography.
The unhinged insanity of all of this is worth noting. But what we should also point out is that none of this disqualified her from consideration as a presidential candidate. Not only did Bachmann win the Iowa straw poll—a symbolic victory, but a victory nonetheless—but at one point, she led her competitors for the nomination. In a July survey from Public Policy Polling, 21 percent of Republican primary voters said she was their top choice for the nomination, compared to 20 percent for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, 12 percent for Rick Perry, and 11 percent for Herman Cain.
In other words, Bachmann may embarrass GOP elites, but actual Republicans don’t seem to have a huge problem with her or her antics. Indeed, if there’s a “Bachmann style” in conservative politics, it’s only grown more prominent since her moment in the spotlight. Texas Senator Ted Cruz is building his national brand by appealing to the same right-wing fever swamps. Conservatives describe him as a new “standard-bearer” for “constitutional conservatism”—a term popularized by Bachmann.
The entire Republican Party has taken a page from the Minnesota congresswoman with its obsessive focus on the Benghazi “scandal” and the situation at the Internal Revenue Service, using both to accuse President Obama of outright treason (in the case of Benghazi) and Nixonian tactics of intimidation (in the case of the IRS). The main difference between Bachmann and many of her Republican colleagues was of form, not content. Her view of President Obama—a dangerous left-wing tyrant—is shared by many on the right.
Look, for example, at Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination who has also been known to moonlight as a conspiracy- monger. Earlier this month, he lent his name to a fundraising email that accused Obama of working with “anti-American globalists plot[ing] against the Constitution.”
It’s of a piece with South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham’s assertion that the Obama administration manipulated talking points to avoid political blame for the attacks in Benghazi during the presidential election. “This is a story of manipulation by the government with the president being complicit of trying to tell a story seven weeks before an election that was politically beneficial for the White House, but did not represent the facts on the ground,” Graham said during an interview on Fox News two weeks ago.
And that’s just the national Republican Party. In states like Virginia, the party has elevated candidates who take Bachmann’s extremism and dial it to 11. E.W. Jackson, the Virginia GOP’s nominee for lieutenant governor, has already made national news with his furious denunciations of same-sex marriage, LGBT Americans (they’re “sick people psychologically, mentally, and emotionally”), and Planned Parenthood (it’s worse than the Ku Klux Klan). Their gubernatorial nominee, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, differs only by degree. He won’t accuse reproductive rights advocates of engaging in an anti-black genocide, but he will go after groups that attempt to dispense accurate information on sexually transmitted infections, contraceptives, and sexual health.
Observers from across the political spectrum are cheering Michele Bachmann’s departure from politics, and for good reason: She was a toxic influence on public life. But it’s worth remembering that what she represents—extreme right-wing paranoia—is still present and powerful on the national stage.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, May 29, 2013
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