Bradley A. Smith: The Latest IRS Power Grab

Six months after the Internal Revenue Service's inspector general revealed that the tax-collection agency had been targeting conservative organizations for added scrutiny and delaying their applications for tax-exempt status, the IRS has proposed new rules for handling political activity by nonprofits. The proposed rules would plunge the agency deeper into political regulation.

The rules would upset more than 50 years of settled law and practice by limiting the ability of certain tax-exempt nonprofits, organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, to conduct nonpartisan voter registration and voter education. Such organizations would be forbidden to leave records of officeholder votes and public statements on their websites in the two months before an election.

It is tempting to pick the proposed rules apart—and there is much to pick, such as restrictions on a nonprofit discussing any aspect of a president's judicial nominees in a public communication any time between Feb. 2 and a national election day nine months later. But it is more important to ask how we got here. Why is the IRS regulating political activity at all?

The answer is that many Democratic politicians and progressive activists think new rules limiting political speech by nonprofits will benefit Democrats politically. Stymied by judicial decisions restricting direct government regulation of political speech, and by a Federal Election Commission whose bipartisan makeup prevents Democratic commissioners from forcing through partisan rules on a party-line vote, these politicians and activists have decided to dragoon the IRS into doing their work.

Nobody will admit that the goal is to hamper the political opposition. To make the case for IRS regulation of politics, these progressives, such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and the Campaign Legal Center, have promulgated three myths...

Of all of Obama's trespasses the perversion of the IRS and its deployment against his political enemies might well be the most dangerous, indeed, it might be the most dangerous threat to American liberty from government overreach since Franklin Roosevelt threw Japanese into gulags.This is a scandal of immense implications for our liberty because it is an attempt, in the event it appears a successful attempt, to improperly influence a national election.

It is evidence of Obama's well-founded confidence that he will not be pursued for his misfeasance by the media that he permits his agency to engage in this brazen expansion of its original crimes. How far Obama has retreated from his promise to America that this corruption would be rooted out. In fact, no heads have rolled, no serious investigation has begun, the Justice Department has interviewed virtually no one, no one has been prosecuted and no one is likely to be prosecuted so long as Obama and his spear carrier, Eric Holder, remain President and Attorney General.

Unless and until we conservatives find a way around the national media to alert the people that their liberty is being quite literally stolen, nothing will change. It is only by the most egregious misfeasance in the fiasco of the computerized health insurance exchanges that the extent of Obama's failure in healthcare was revealed. But we have had no such similar dramatic incident touching the lives of individual Americans on a large scale to drive this news story concerning the IRS. In fact, recent news stories that IRS abuses continue have been virtually ignored by the national media.

As always, it's easy to determine whether we are dealing with real scandal or conservative paranoia, simply change the names and identities of the players from conservative to liberal and vice versa and then predict the reaction of the media -the truth will then be self-evident.

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