Posted on 05/27/2013 9:23:42 PM PDT by neverdem
The 2012 election season was filled with angry cries of “voter suppression,” almost all of them regarding attempts by states to require voter ID and otherwise improve ballot integrity. Bill Clinton warned that “there has never been — in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting — the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.” Democratic-party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said “photo-ID laws, we think, are very similar to a poll tax.”
All of this proved to be twaddle. An August 2012 Washington Post poll showed nearly two-thirds of African-Americans and Hispanics backing photo ID. The Census Bureau has found that the rate of voter turnout for blacks exceeded that of whites for the first time in the 2012 election.
But it now turns out there may have suppression of the vote after all. “It looks like a lot of tea-party groups were less active or never got off the ground because of the IRS actions,” Wisconsin governor Scott Walker told me. “Sure seems like people were discouraged by it.”
Indeed, several conservative groups I talked with said they were directly impacted by having their non-profit status delayed by either IRS inaction or burdensome and intrusive questioning. At least two donors told me they didn’t contribute to True the Vote, a group formed to combat voter fraud, because after three years of waiting the group still didn’t have its status granted at the time of the 2012 election. (While many of the targeted tea-party groups were seeking to become 501(c)(4)s, donations to which are not tax-deductible, True the Vote sought to become a 501(c)(3).) This week, True the Vote sued the IRS in federal court, asking a judge to enjoin the agency from targeting anyone in the future.
“I was about to file with the IRS when other tea-party groups started to get harassed,” Pennsylvania activist Jennifer Stefano told Time magazine. “I remember checking with the IRS to see if they wanted the group [Facebook] page or my personal page, and they said ‘All of it.’”
The IRS claims that all of the delays and information demands were rooted in mere mismanagement and misjudgment, a stance that began to look even shakier yesterday when Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS’s exempt-organization division, took the Fifth Amendment before a House committee.
Conservatives have long tangled with Lerner, who was director of enforcement at the Federal Election Commission from 1986 until 2001, when she moved to the IRS.
“Everything we have seen at the IRS was reeled out first at the FEC,” says Jim Bopp, a noted election-law attorney who represented the Christian Coalition in its successful fight to quash the FEC’s attempt to impose a $5 million fine on the group for political activities. The FEC lost the case on summary judgment in a 1999 opinion written by a Jimmy Carter–appointed judge.
“In a dozen out of the 81 depositions in the case, the FEC wanted to know about people’s religious beliefs or the content of their prayers,” Bopp told me. “Lerner took the speech-chilling culture she developed at the FEC right over to the IRS.”
Ralph Reed ran the Christian Coalition until 1997 and now directs a similar effort called the Faith and Freedom Coalition. He told me that misbehavior against nonprofits by the IRS didn’t begin with Barack Obama’s presidency. “The corruption and abuse of enforcement power, the harassment of Christian and pro-life organizations began with the IRS regulations trying to block the tax-exempt status of Christian schools in the 1970s,” he says. “The only difference is that this time it was more blatant, and hopefully there’s a better paper trail to see exactly what happened.”
Jim Bopp, the election-law attorney, hopes some good will come out of the IRS scandal. “What’s clear is that bureaucrats and regulators can abuse the system when there aren’t bright lines. This should teach us we have to nail down exactly what the permissible level of political activity for a non-profit is. That will make it harder for arbitrary and capricious bureaucrats who might want to misuse their power.”
It won’t be easy to discover whether the “voter suppression” engaged in by the IRS was malicious and political. But we have to make every effort to find out before the American people start losing confidence in the integrity of our elections.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.
Whining about voter fraud does no good unless you can prove it was decisive. Had the RNC been serious about fraud, they would have addressed this:
Addressing the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Raised by Voting by Persons With Dementia
Ain't that the truth!
BFLR
definitely hurt the efforts by those groups to get out the vote.
if 500 organizations each helped bring just 1000 more people, that’s 500,000 votes to romney... possibly enough (depending the states)
A tax paid on all purchases and collected by the seller doesn’t identify or link the buyer to the purchase. There’s no need for the government to know who bought what in order to administer the system.
Director of the FEC since 1986 ? During Reagan’s presidency. Isn’t she a scion of Lerner Publishing who published a bunch of neighborhood weeklys on Chicago’s northside ? Was she a Carol Mosley Braun recomendation ? Republicans sure did a lousey job of “veting” here.
They even targeted James Dobson himself!
That's not likely to happen. The average liberal voter is liberal because they've been told their whole life how caring and compassionate the left is. They have no clue of the festering cesspit of corruption that is the left political cabal, and have no desire to lift up that thin veneer of wholesomeness to see what really lies underneath. And any time the leftist rot seeps out, the average liberal is happy that, finally, someone is getting back at those meeeeeeean and eeeeeevil conservatives. So I wouldn't expect any outcry from the left.
P.S It doesn’t have to ‘go away’. If they ignore it long enough, they can cry “WITCH HUNT” and the media will sing the chorus behind them.
That train left the station a long time ago for this citizen.
That train left the station a long time ago for this citizen.
A general question.
If the the US government is operating as a criminal enterprise, who investigates and prosecutes?
An independent prosecutor will only be limited in scope.
The DOJ has their own RICO problems.
EPA has their problems.
DHS has their problems.
These are only Federal operations. One cannot disbelieve similar progressive activity at state and local governments.
That happened when al frankenstein won after enough recounts showed him ahead and the recounts stopped. The dims proved that they will try anything in the 2000 presidential election.
FairTax does precisely that.
It really is up to We the People.
We have, collectively, elected just enough idiots and statists to local, state and federal positions of power that they can pretty much have their way with us without fear of their jobs. If we were to get off of our collective dead asses and elect real public servants instead of the clowns, buffoons and idiots, we might solve the problem.
I will not shed any tears for tax workers displaced by FairTax. They can go look for honest jobs.
It is called discrimination and there has been only one congressman that has dared use the word in accurately describing what the IRS did to “conservative” groups. His name is Trey Gowdy.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
DISMANTLE totalitarian agencies. DEPOPULATE totalitarians from the body politic.
TREASON - continuous, AGENCY-ABETTED, REPRESENTATIVE-DIRECTED, ongoing...
You are thinking about cash transactions. If you don't think they'll be there, you are smoking something, especially if the item being purchased is a weapon.
As of right now, if I go into a lawn care shop and buy a bag of fertilizer, or a jug of RoundUp, that purchase is tracked by the State of California using my driver's license number. That means they already have the software and databases in place and the rest is a matter of scaling.
You might want to post this one too...
Washington launches four different investigations into IRS scandal
I was speaking to a young college student the other day - a young liberal who generally doesn’t hear of scandals against conservatives - and asked her about the IRS targeting ... Not only had she heard of it, but she very deeply felt it was wrong. I think this one has legs.
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