ANDREW MCCARTHY: The GOP Should Use the Power of the Purse: The way to cure the rogue behavior of Obama’s agencies is not to pay for it.
In truth, there appears to be no smidgen of the IRS case that is not tainted by corruption: from the years-long conspiracy to undermine the free-speech rights of Obama opponents, through the Justice Department’s strategic selection of a heavy Obama-campaign donor to conduct an “investigation” in which there was little apparent interest in questioning witnesses, on up to the current effort to institutionalize the very misconduct that the president and his redoubtable attorney general once told us was “intolerable,” “inexcusable,” “outrageous,” and “unacceptable.”
As the Journal’s editors point out, the existing rules governing non-profit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code have been in effect unchanged since 1959. But after President Obama took office in 2009, tea-party groups, many of which organize themselves under 501(c)(4) for fundraising purposes (just as left-leaning groups do), rose up in protest against his governance. The Tea Party led a rout of congressional Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. With Obama’s own reelection bid on the horizon, suddenly the purportedly non-partisan IRS began fretting over its 501(c)(4) guidelines.
To read them, NR’s Eliana Johnson observes, is to find “guidance that is more subjective than objective.” But that is why the guidance is not read in a vacuum. What a “social welfare organization” is, and the degree to which it may engage in “political activities” so long as doing so does not constitute the organization’s “primary activity,” are matters determined by the application of a half-century’s experience and practice.
Under that extensive precedent, no one at IRS seemed to have any problem with tax-exempt status for, to take just one example, MoveOn.org — an organization the IRS decided was not overly “political” notwithstanding its history of in-your-face political activism and its website’s proclamation of a mission “to lead, participate in, and win campaigns for progressive change.” No, it was only when conservatives became a threat to a second term of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” that the IRS decided its guidance needed clarification.
The IRS scandal, though egregious, is only one in a series of gross Obama-administration abuses of power — and if you expected the Obama Justice Department, at the urging of the Obama White House, to get to the bottom of what the Obama IRS was doing to Obama’s political opposition, then you probably also expected you’d be able to keep a smidgen of your health insurance. So the question on every conservative’s tongue has become, “How can we stop this?”
Simple: We stop paying for it.
Also zero out their conference budget. They seem to care about that a lot, and so do the other agencies that are misbehaving. You can’t fire bureaucrats, but they’re exquisitely sensitive to things that affect their quality of life.