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After an election in which hundreds of millions of dollars
were funneled through “dark money” nonprofit groups by people like Karl
Rove, campaign finance advocates fear the nascent IRS scandal involving
these very organizations will make the already difficult task of
regulating them nearly impossible.
Organized under section 501(c)4 of the tax code, organizations like
Rove’s Crossroads GPS are social welfare organizations that are legally
barred from making politics their “primary purpose” — at least in
theory. In practice, many of these groups are plainly political, but the
IRS has never defined what differentiates an improper political group
from a bona fide social welfare group, so they’ve been able to flout the
intent of the law with impunity. With growing public awareness after
the 2012 election, campaign finance reform advocates thought they may be
able to finally get the IRS or Congress to impose some new rules. But
scandal may blow all of that up.
“The IRS is not really in a position right now to rewrite the rules
that apply to social welfare organizations. And it’s not going to be the
right time for that for at least a little while,” Lisa Rosenberg, a
government affairs lobbyist at the Sunlight Foundation, told Salon.
“Everything they do now, at least in the near future, is going to be
glossed with this taint of impropriety.”
It didn't bother the right wingers when the IRS investigated the NAACP after it criticized the Bush administration. And it didn't bother them when the IRS investigated a Pasadena, California, church for criticizing Bush. But now that it's been revealed that the IRS has gored their ox, they're up in arms about it.
It's early yet to have any idea where this story will go. We know, of
course, that the Republicans will push it and the other fresh
scandal—on wiretapping journalists—at least as hard as they have pushed
the faux scandal of Benghazi® for the past seven months.
This time, however, many Democrats, including some who have not
heretofore been critics of the administration, will surely be asking
some tough questions of their own. As well they should. What's
intolerable when done under a Republican administration is not just as
intolerable under a Democratic administration. It's worse. We have a
right to expect better behavior. We have plenty of past and recent
examples to the contrary and this cannot be allowed to be written off as
mere partisanship on the part of Republicans. They will certainly use
it to partisan advantage. But that doesn't make it a non-issue.
The best that can come out of both these scandals are
quick-and-thorough, get-to-the-bottom-of-it probes into what happened,
why it happened and who made it happen. Followed by some personnel
departures no matter how high they reach.
The most effective way Republicans have found to make their political
argument that government is bad is to actually break it, to keep it from
functioning. And they've had remarkable success, from slashing budgets
in previous budget fights to the sequester. They're also doing it with
the filibuster and other delaying tactics, like boycotting confirmation hearings. And they're, of course, doing the Chamber of Commerce's and Wall Street's and Big Oil's bidding by focusing their efforts in particular on those agencies that regulate big business.
Obama’s choices to lead the Labor Department and the
Environmental Protection Agency have been delayed by feuds over their
past positions and the policies of departments they aspire to lead. His
nominee to lead the Energy Department had been stalled, though an
agreement was reached late yesterday for a confirmation vote. [...]
“The confirmation process is increasingly turning into a hostage
situation,” said Ross Baker, a political science professor atRutgers
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.[...]
Senate Republican leaders say the criticism is unfounded, and that
the recent holdups are part of a careful examination of nominees whose
records raise important questions.
“We’ve processed a lot of nominations, but some of the nominees the
president has put up are really problematic,” said Senator John Cornyn
of Texas, the second-ranking Republican leader. “Congress has a role to
play, in terms of advice and consent. They need to relax a bit and let
the Senate do its job.”
That's just a lie from Cornyn, proven by the flat-out refusal of the
entire Republican Senate caucus to allow a vote on Richard Cordray,
which they freely admit isn't because of a problem with the nominee, but
because they want to nullify the law that created his agency, the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Senate Republicans are
spitting on their constitutional role of advice and consent. In doing
so, they're not just breaking the Senate, they're breaking the
government, all three branches of it.
It helps that more news organizations are recognizing just how
extraordinary this level of obstruction is, because that will help
convince the people who have power to do something about it—Senate
Democrats—to finally put an end to it with rules reform.
“Politicizing the IRS was one of the articles of impeachment against
Richard Nixon,” noted Doug Schoen, who handles polling for New York City
Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “That being said, we are still a very long way
from that point.” But, Schoen added: “The allegations are very, very
serious, and it is simply impossible to believe that it was just Lois
Lerner and some low-level employees in Cincinnati who came up with this
scheme to systematically focus on Tea Party and ‘patriot’ groups.”
Here’s a quick summary of what we learned this weekend:
If Republicans were angry about the IRS story when it broke on
Friday, they were downright outraged by the end of the weekend. Maine
Sen. Susan Collins — a moderate if ever there was one in the current
Senate – called the IRS targeting of conservative groups “absolutely chilling.” House Republicans promised hearings and a broader investigation.
What became clear in the first 72 hours of the story was that this
(a) wasn’t an isolated, dumb incident by some random field office, (b)
was something high-level officials were aware of, and (c) was going to
be in the news cycle for quite some time.
The problem for Democrats is that the IRS’s targeting of
conservatives plays directly into a long-held belief by many Republicans
(and even some independents) that official government arms are being
used to carry out political agendas.
“Any political scandal that begins by validating previously held
contentions of a political opposition is bound to be trouble,” said one
senior Senate GOP operative. “When it includes denials that have been
proven false, it gets much worse.” Acknowledged a longtime Democratic
congressional hand: “This just feeds the right-wing paranoia that the
government is out to get them. On top of Benghazi hearings and e-mails,
not a good week for the [Obama] administration.”
“For Republicans, this will be the gift that keeps on giving,”
predicted Todd Harris, a Republican consultant and an adviser to Florida
Sen. Marco Rubio. “There won’t be a GOP campaign in the country that
doesn’t use this to raise money.”
The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a
congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that the IRS
field office in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status
decided to focus on groups making statements that “criticize how the
country is being run” and those that were involved in educating
Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”
The staffers in the Cincinnati field office were making
high-level decisions on how to evaluate the groups because a decade ago
the IRS assigned all applications to that unit. The IRS also eliminated
an automatic after-the-fact review process Washington used to conduct
such determinations.
Marcus Owens,
who oversaw tax-exempt groups at the IRS between 1990 and 1999, said
that delegation “carries with it a risk” because the Cincinnati office
“isn’t as plugged into what’s [politically] sensitive as Washington.”
Owens,
now with the firm Caplin & Drysdale, said that before the agency’s
most recent reorganization, it had a series of “tripwires in place” that
could catch unfair targeting, including the fact that the IRS
identified its criteria for special scrutiny in a public manual.
“There’s no longer that safety valve, and as a result, the IRS has
been rolling the dice ever since,” said Owens, who worked at the agency
for nearly a quarter-century and now represents some organizations
seeking tax-exempt status.
The IRS came under withering attack from GOP lawmakers Sunday. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, described the practice as “absolutely chilling” and called on President Obama to condemn the effort.
“This
is truly outrageous,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding
that even though White House spokesman Jay Carney has said the matter
deserves an investigation, “the president needs to make crystal clear
that this is totally unacceptable in America.”
In March 2012,
then-IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman, who was appointed by President
George W. Bush, told Congress that the agency was not targeting
conservative groups. On Sunday, the agency declined to answer questions
about whether senior officials asked IRS exempt organizations division
chief Lois G. Lerner and her staff in Cincinnati about this heightened scrutiny before testifying it did not take place.
“There has to be accountability for the people who did it,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa
(R-Calif.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding: “And, quite frankly,
up until a few days ago, there’s got to be accountability for people
who were telling lies about it being done.”
The appendix of the
inspector general’s report — which was requested by the House Oversight
and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be publicly released —
chronicles the extent to which the IRS’s exempt organizations division
kept redefining what sort of “social welfare” groups it should single
out for extra attention since the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
That decision allowed corporations and labor unions to raise and spend
unlimited sums on elections as well as register for tax-exempt status
under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, as long as their “primary
purpose” was not targeting electoral candidates.
The number of political groups applying for tax-exempt status more than doubled in the wake of the Citizens United ruling, forcing agency officials to make a slew of determinations despite uncertainty about the category’s ambiguous definition.
Of the 298 groups selected for special scrutiny, according to
the congressional aide, 72 had “tea party” in their title, 13 had
“patriot” and 11 had “9/12.” Lerner, who apologized Friday for the
targeting of such groups, described it as a misguided effort to deal
with a flood of applications for tax-exempt status. She did not release
the names of the groups.
On June 29, 2011, according to the documents, IRS staffers held
a briefing with Lerner in which they described giving special attention
to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the
country is being run.” She raised an objection, and the agency adopted a
more general set of standards. Lerner, who is a Democrat, is not a
political appointee.
But six months later, the IRS applied a new
political test to social welfare groups, the document says. On Jan. 15,
2012, the agency decided to look at “political action type organizations
involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the
Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement,”
according to the appendix in the IG’s report.
The agency did not
appear to adopt a more neutral test for 501(c)(4) groups until May 17,
2012, according to the timeline in the report. At that point, the IRS
again updated its criteria to focus on “organizations with indicators of
significant amounts of political campaign intervention (raising
questions as to exempt purpose and/or excess private benefit.)”
Campaign reform groups have been pressing the IRS for several years to conduct greater oversight of nonprofits formed in the wake of the Citizens United case,
given that many have become heavily involved in elections. “But this
isn’t the type of enforcement we want,” said Paul Ryan, a senior counsel
at the Campaign Legal Center. “We want nonpartisan, non-biased
enforcement.”
Loyola Law School professor Ellen Aprill,
who specializes in tax law, said any groups that have applied for
tax-exempt status has “opened themselves up to scrutiny” by the IRS.
“It’s part of their job to look for organizations that may be more
likely to have too much campaign intervention,” she said. “But it is
important to try to make these criteria as politically neutral as
possible.”
Aprill said one of the problems is the agency’s top
officials have not provided clear enough guidelines on what constitutes
too much political activity for a social welfare group because it’s been
“a hot potato,” and that now with this new controversy, “it’s going to
make it even more difficult to do so.”
Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco Tea Party,
said the IRS subjected her group to a series of unreasonable requests
after it applied for tax-exempt status in June 2010. The requests came
in early 2012, Walker said, after being initially informed by an
official in the Cincinnati field office that
he was “sitting on a stack of tea party applications and they were
awaiting word from higher-ups as to how to process them.”
The
agency asked the group’s treasurer to supply information on its “close
relationship” with current candidates and elected officials as well as
future candidates, along with detailed information about its
contributors and members. It also asked for transcripts of any radio
interviews its officials had done and hard copies of any news articles
mentioning them.
“That would take me years to do,” Walker said,
noting that in some cases, Chinese media outlets referred to her
organization. “Am I responsible for every news article across the
globe?”
The group had even more difficulty providing transcripts
and details of speakers at its events, since they hosted informal
gatherings such as “rant contests” where anyone could come and express
their views.
While the IRS awarded the Waco Tea Party tax-exempt
status about six weeks ago, Walker said the group was now considering
suing the agency since the process not only consumed time and effort but
prompted the group to scale back its 2012 get-out-the-vote operation.
“We were afraid to do it and get in trouble,” she said.
Sal Russo,
chief strategist for the Tea Party Express, said that even though the
agency’s actions intimidated tea party adherents, he gives the IRS
“credit for standing up and admitting” it targeted them. And while only
two of the agency’s officials — the commissioner and the chief counsel —
are political appointees, Russo said the administration needs to
conduct better oversight.
“The culture is set at the top,” Russo
said. “Obviously you can’t control what every employee does. But you
have to set a standard, particularly with the IRS, to be squeaky clean.”
Josh Hicks and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Stephen Ohlemacher
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior Internal Revenue
Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early
as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general’s report obtained
by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by
the IRS commissioner.
The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was
“inappropriate” targeting of conservative political groups during the
2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The
agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were
aware.
But on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that
oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups
were being targeted, according to the watchdog’s report. At the meeting,
she was told that groups with “Tea Party,” ”Patriot” or “9/12 Project”
in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome
scrutiny, the report says.
The 9-12 Project is a group started by conservative TV personality Glenn Beck.
Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups “immediately,” the report says.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration is
expected to release the results of a nearly yearlong investigation in
the coming week. The AP obtained part of the draft report, which has
been shared with congressional aides.
Among the other revelations, on Aug. 4, 2011, staffers in the IRS’
Rulings and Agreements office “held a meeting with chief counsel so that
everyone would have the latest information on the issue.”
On Jan, 25, 2012, the criteria for flagging suspect groups was
changed to, “political action type organizations involved in
limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of
Rights, social economic reform/movement,” the report says.
While this was happening, several committees in Congress were writing
IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman to express concern because tea party
groups were complaining of IRS harassment.
In Shulman’s responses, he did not acknowledge targeting of tea party
groups. At a congressional hearing March 22, 2012, Shulman was adamant
in his denials.
“There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth
that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman said at
the House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing.
The portion of the draft report reviewed by the AP does not say
whether Shulman or anyone else in the Obama administration outside the
IRS was informed of the targeting. But it is standard procedure for
agency heads to consult with staff before responding to congressional
inquiries.
Shulman was appointed by President George W. Bush, a Republican. His
6-year term ended in November. President Barack Obama has yet to
nominate a successor. The agency is now run by an acting commissioner,
Steven Miller.
The IRS had no immediate response on Saturday.
Over 5000 children’s products contain toxic chemicals linked to
cancer, hormone disruption and reproductive problems, including the
toxic metals, cadmium, mercury and antimony, as well as phthalates and
solvents. A new report by the Washington Toxics Coalition and Safer
States reveals the results of manufacturer reporting to the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Makers of kids’ products reported using 41 of the 66 chemicals
identified by WA Ecology as a concern for children’s health. Major
manufacturers who reported using the chemicals in their products include
Walmart, Gap, Gymboree, Hallmark, H & M and others. They use these
chemicals in an array of kids’ products, including clothing, footwear,
toys, games, jewelry, accessories, baby products, furniture, bedding,
arts and crafts supplies and personal care products. Besides exposing
kids in the products themselves, some of these chemicals, for example
toxic flame retardants, build up in the environment and in the food we
eat.
Examples of product categories reported to contain toxic chemicals include:
Hallmark party hats containing cancer-causing arsenic
Graco car seats containing the toxic flame retardant TBBPA (tetrabromobisphenol A)
Walmart dolls containing hormone-disrupting bisphenol A
The chemical reports are required under Washington State’s Children’s
Safe Products Act of 2008. A searchable database of chemical use
reports filed with the Washington State Department of Ecology is
available at http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/swfa/cspa/search.html.
Like Washington, the Minnesota Department of Health has published a list or priority chemicals
in children’s products. Eight of the nine chemicals on this list are
also on the Washington list. The nine priority chemicals are lead,
cadmium, bisphenol A, formaldehyde, two brominated flame retardants and
three phthalates. However, in Minnesota, manufacturers are not required
to report if they use a priority chemical in a children’s product—so
both states agencies and consumers are in the dark when it comes to
these chemicals. Last month Minnesota’s Senate Commerce Committee voted
down the Toxic Free Kids Act of 2013, a bill that would have required
such reporting.
Minnesota can take a lesson from the Washington experience.
Manufacturers were able to produce this information without undue burden
and yes these chemicals are in products our kids are chewing on,
touching and inhaling every day! It’s time for Minnesota to follow
Washington’s lead and require manufacturers to submit the same type of
data. I urge the Minnesota Legislature to come back in 2014 and pass the Toxic Free Kids Act.
Kathleen Schuler, MPH, is a senior policy analyst in the Food and
Health Program at the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy,
which advocates for policies that protect human health and the
environment from the toxic chemicals that contaminate our food system
and our bodies. Kathleen is also Co-Director of Healthy Legacy, a
Minnesota-based campaign that advocates for public policies and business
practices that focus on safer products and safer production methods.
Rosena riding Lilly the horse in Coventry, Conn. (WNV/Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer)
Rosena, my six-year-old stepdaughter, is mad for horses. I think it began with Horseland,
a horrible-sounding cartoon (which I have never seen). But it had
ignited in her a love of all things equine, which is a lot of fun, so I
should not complain too much.
As I was reading from The Black Stallion Returnslast night, I found myself editing heavily. Walter Farley’s sequel to The Black Stallion
was originally published in 1945 and is (in my humble opinion) horribly
written. How many times can young Alec look or act “determinedly,” and
is that even a word? What is worse, the book reflects the casual
prejudice and ignorance of the time — the Bedouins of Arabia are
portrayed as backward and swarthy. And, it is also really violent.
So, as we approached the denouement, I found myself trying to keep
the action going while avoiding the fact that the swarthy Bedouin was
about to drive Alec and The Black off a cliff to certain death.
Without that bit of action, the whole chapter made no sense. Rosena
was half asleep and maybe not following any of this, but I did not want
her last words and images of the day to be of horse and boy smashed in a
rocky tomb.
If protecting her from imaginary violence is tough, shielding her
from real violence is even more difficult. And is it the right thing to
do?
Since she entered kindergarten last fall, our violent and
unpredictable world has pressed in close. In December, a young man armed
to the teeth massacred 20 kids and six adults at an elementary school less than 80 miles from our town.
Just last week, two heavily armed young men detonated
bombs at the Boston Marathon’s finish line killing three and injuring
hundreds. Our plan was to be right there, too… cheering our friend as
she finished the 26.2-mile course.
And then, of course, a little further away is the daily dose of
violence wrapped in plastic and delivered to our door every morning —
killing in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq; saber-rattling and threats of
war on the Korean peninsula; death and destruction from West Texas to
Dhaka, Bangladesh; the random and not so random brutality displayed in
inner cities and suburbs throughout our country; the grind of poverty,
racism and sexism; the looming threats posed by cataclysmic climate
change, nuclear weapons proliferation and environmental destruction. The
list goes on and on.
Can I protect her from all of this? Should I?
Growing up, my family and community watched the news every night. It
was the only TV I got to watch, so I was there in the front row. When I
was about Rosena’s age, I watched transfixed as the Iran hostage crisis unfolded, Mount Saint Helens volcano exploded in Washington State, the Irish Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands
starved to death in British custody, four U.S. church women — Jean
Donovan and Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel — were
raped and murdered in El Salvador, and President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II were both shot and injured (separately). The whole time, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock stood at 7 minutes to nuclear midnight (it is 5 minutes today, by the way).
These where what we talked about around the dinner table. And it was
terrifying. I had nightmares. I worried. I was preoccupied by these
events. I recently found a “poem” I wrote when I was nine. “What will
happen when the bomb comes shoting (sic) down? I am not in a hurry to
know. I don’t want to see it come tumbling down. The president will say:
I declare war on Russia, or India or Norway or any other country. But
it’s not their fault. We could have prevented it from happening. I hope
we can someday.” Terrible poem. It does not even rhyme. It is written in
my best penpersonship and illustrated with little bombs.
When I was Rosena’s age, I knew a lot about nuclear weapons. We
watched grainy black and white documentaries about Hiroshima and
Nagasaki on the wall of our living room. I could fold paper cranes and
tell you the story of Sadako,
the little girl in Hiroshima who died of leukemia even though she was
not even born when the United States dropped the two nuclear bombs on
her country. She tried to fold 1,000 paper cranes so that the gods would
make her better. I also knew about hunger and starvation, how the
billions we spend on war preparation take food and nutrition from the
people who need it most. It made sense I knew all this. It helped me
understand my immediate reality — going to lots of protests, watching
the people I loved getting arrested, collecting food from dumpsters at a
big produce terminal and sharing it with hundreds of our neighbors on a
weekly basis.
Rosena is not writing poetry yet, but she is churning out art at a
prodigious rate. I marvel at her cheerful drawings and art projects —
carefully colored in blocks of color, grand sweeps of magic marker and
crayon, intricate illustrations of her big loving family, of me and her
dad, her mom and stepdad, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. Each
drawing comes with a long and elaborate backstory that she relishes in
telling. There are no nuclear bombs or heavily armed men lurking in the
background. Nuclear aggression and mutual assured destruction are not
part of the picture. There is not even a hint of deprivation or longing —
except for deceased and beloved cats and the dog and horse she fully
expects one of us to get for her someday soon.
Within an hour or so of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, we got an email from her school with suggestions
and instructions about how to talk about the tragedy — simple and brief
reassurances that she is safe and that school is safe. Over the
weekend, we got another email updating parents and caregivers on new
school security procedures and telling us how they planned to handle
discussions with the kids on Monday. “In K/1 we will not make any
reference in the classrooms to the incident. As we normally do, children
will write about their weekend. If any students mention the incident,
the teacher will do a check-in with them individually.”
As far as I know, Rosena does not know about the Sandy Hook massacre
or the Boston bombing — she is blissfully unaware. And despite my own
youthful exposure to the dark side, I think that is a good thing.
Lots of kids don’t have the luxury of being shielded from tragedy and deprivation. Almost 17 million kids in this country are hungry. Every hour, 84 kids
end up in a U.S. emergency room as the result of violence perpetrated
against them. And there is no “war” on our urban streets and suburban
cul-de-sacs. The picture is equally grim (or worse) outside of our
borders — every five seconds, a child dies of hunger somewhere in the world.
I want Rosena to know all of this and feel it too. I want her grow up
compassionate and empathetic. I want her to work for justice and peace.
I want her to be curious about people and empowered to help them. She
already is and those impulses will grow and mature with time. But, right
now, I just want her to be six years old — innocent, lucky, happy and
horse mad.
