Interesting piece in the Times yesterday on the origin of the IRS controversy.
Any group claiming tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(4) of the internal revenue code can collect unlimited and undisclosed contributions, and many took in tens of millions. They are not supposed to spend the majority of their money on political activities, but the I.R.S. has rarely stopped the big ones from polluting the political system with unaccountable cash.
Right. So, the initial motivation for this was the Citizen's United decision and the fallout that has come since that time.
So, my question is this: would all this have happened if Citizen's United had not passed and the IRS was not tasked to get tough on the tax cheats?
2 comments:
Organizing for America is a 501(c)(4).
Yes, among other big liberal organizations that for some reason didn't get the same scrutiny as conservative or libertarian ones (note for Mark, they're not the same thing, despite your endless attempts to conflate the two). It seems it only became a problem when more non-progressive groups sought this tax classification -- oops, no it didn't. It seems to have become a problem when the masters of the IRS decided that non-progressive organizations were a problem. Not necessarily a tax problem, but a problem that had to be solved with the only hammer that was at hand...
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