More Complicated
Following his SOP, Zero has de facto fired the acting head of the IRS before actually looking at the situation.
Bloomberg discovered that the IRS gave Democratic leaning organizations the same treatment as the Tea-Partiers, but there were apparently fewer liberal applicants.
They also noted that:
Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which is conducting its own IRS investigation, has introduced legislation with Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to require all groups spending money on politics to disclose their donors.
“These problems will continue as long as there is an absence of clear and enforceable rules,” Wyden told reporters yesterday. “In the absence of clear and enforceable rules the bureaucracy pretty much makes it up as they go along.”
Jeffrey Toobin on his New Yorker blog wonders why no one has asked the obvious question: did the Tea-Partiers deserve 501(c)(4) status?
On MSNBC’s The Last Word, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has petitioned the IRS to enforce the law as written. That change would eliminate all of the political organizations from the category. The IRS IG report at the center of this ‘scandal’ references the problem for employees of the reinterpretation of the law in the regulations written in 1959, for the 1954 law.
Essentially, under the law as written, the IRS employees should have denied all of the applications from the groups they are accused of targeting. If their keyword searches to were to locate political groups, they were justified.
