The major tea party umbrella group -- Tea Party Patriots -- hopes to continue its anti-Obama crusade with Rein in the IRS rallies tomorrow at IRS offices across the country.
Of course, tea partiers, TPP and otherwise, have not had much success turning out media-coverage-worthy numbers since their heyday in 2009, so tomorrow's events will be another FAIL.
TPP profiteers, Jenny Beth Martin and her family mostly, are doing their utmost to rouse the rabble over the latest Obama micro-scandal.
With the usual BS and lies.
More, below.
Ignoring the fact that evidently every tea party group who applied was granted 501 (c)(4) tax-exempt status, TPP is poutraged that the IRS even considered vetting these obviously political groups.
The TPP talking points about this are typically fact-free, like these:
The IRS has crossed a line and set a precedent where individuals and their businesses may be targeted and harassed based solely on their political views or volunteer memberships.
Nixon did this, and got caught, so he crossed the line and set the precedent, way before Obama did not cross the line.
This large-scale abuse of power is illegal, unacceptable, and unconstitutional.
Requiring applicants for tax-exempt status to affirm that they are not essentially political is in no way unconstitutional, nor illegal, and certainly not a "large-scale abuse of power." It may be politically "unacceptable" when done clumsily, but the IRS has a duty to ensure that the tax-exempt laws are followed.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, which the Supreme Court has consistently said includes the right of association. Americans have the right to form groups and associations for the purposes of political education and civic engagement.
The First Amendment does not guarantee that groups engaged in political speech don't have to pay taxes, or that contributors to such groups can avoid taxes on their contributions. You'd think the Constitutional scholars at TPP would get the difference between free speech and the tax code. For example, newspapers engage in free speech and pay taxes.
Jenny Beth Martin has good reason to diss the IRS, which makes her grifting more public than she would like.
TPP is a 501(c)(4), that just happens to spend most of its resources on attacking Democrats and supporting Republicans, in furtherance of a far-right political agenda.
The most recent TPP Form 990, for 2010, shows that Martin paid herself more than $140,000, and spent more than half of its $12 million budget on fundraising.
Another reason Martin dislikes the IRS is that when her and her husband's temp agency specializing in low-wage foreign workers went bankrupt in 2008, they owed more than $500,000 to the IRS for unpaid payroll taxes.
Just after that, Jenny Beth (a low-level GOP activist in Georgia for years) became a national tea party leader, co-founded TPP, and brought her husband along as a "financial gatekeeper" at TPP.
Whether the Martins' current grift at TPP is illegal depends on whether any US Attorney or the IRS will dare to investigate them.
Which is unlikely, especially now.