6 Key Takeaways From the Stupidity and Reality of IRS 'Scandal'

From AlterNet:

4. Charities are not political front groups. The question of who turned charities into political front groups has barely been discussed. The answer, of course, is the same as it always has been: election lawyers and campaign consultants who look for loopholes in the law so clients can run for office using any tactic with little or no accountability.

Media coverage of this scandal has had the wrong starting line. It wasn’t the IRS that deluged its staff with thousands of applications from political groups pretending to be charities. It was groups following the advice or example of campaign consultants such as Karl Rove. He was the first to use this ruse on a large scale in order to run a shadow presidential campaign where he could hide his donors’ identities.

The way this works is simple. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling deregulated campaign finances, political operators looked for ambiguities to exploit and turned to non-profit tax law—knowing the agency's primary focus has nothing to do with electioneering. One of the legal ambiguities is the fiction that "public education" and "lobbying" activities by non-profits groups are not political (and thus subject to election law) if they comprise [less] than 50 percent of that group’s activities.

So that’s what Karl Rove ginned up with his non-profit Crossroads GPS, which spent $123 million for the 2012 federal elections, according to the Sunlight Foundation, with 70 percent raised from secret donors. The IRS still has not issued a ruling on whether Rove’s group violated non-profit tax law.

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Let's see, the scandal-rama continues.  Benghazi I'm ignoring because I don't really think it's a scandal.  The AP phone records affair, which I think very likely is a scandal, I've already addressed.  That leaves the IRS thing.  And the above excerpt gets right to the heart of the matter.

Blatantly political "charity" groups are definitely gaming the system here.  I have no doubt that groups from both sides of the aisle do this, but it's probable that there's more action from mom and pop operations on the right simply because the right is traditionally better at this sort of thing.  I mean, I could be wrong about that, but the point is that the IRS is tasked with figuring out who's political and who's not for taxation purposes, and the political groups are doing their damnedest to look non-political on paper.  So it's a pretty huge and difficult thing for a government agency to pull off.

It was probably, in hindsight, a really bad idea to use "patriot" and "tea party" as key words for scrutiny because it looks really bad, although it makes complete sense as to why an IRS worker would make that call.  But really, that's about it.  Something slightly embarrassing for Obama, a little fuel for the right-wing outrage machine, and nothing more.  I mean, that's what the IRS is supposed to do here, figure out who's breaking the law.  They just need to avoid stepping in Tea Party dog shit so as to avoid freakout.  

So it's another pseudo-scandal.  Okay, there's also Umbrella-gate, but that's stupid, too.

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