Juliet Eilperin has a piece in the Post about the unfolding IRS story. The point that has surprisingly gotten little attention so far is that while high level IRS employees were told about the targeting of phrases like “tea party” and “patriot” in 2011, the person who was told, the head of the division overseeing non-profits, told them to stop. That sounds like a pretty relevant fact in terms of evaluating whether this came from the top or bubbled up from the staff level before getting discontinued by supervisors.
But there’s a passage in Eilperin’s piece which gives some key points about the progression of events …
On June 29, 2011, according to the documents, IRS staffers held a briefing with Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” She raised an objection, and the agency adopted a more general set of standards. Lerner, who is a Democrat, is not a political appointee.
But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to social welfare groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012, the agency decided to look at “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement,” according to the appendix in the IG’s report.
The agency did not appear to adopt a more neutral test for 501(c)(4) groups until May 17, 2012, according to the timeline in the report. At that point, the IRS again updated its criteria to focus on “organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention (raising questions as to exempt purpose and/or excess private benefit.)”
The story we’ve heard until now is that Lerner told the people in the Cincinnati office to stop what they were doing in 2011 and then they later came back with an equally problematic standard. But the January 2012 standard seems pretty broad and non-problematic. It speaks of expanding or limiting government, about the constitution and the bill of rights and “social economic reform movement”. Presumably that last part means ‘social and economic reform movements”? These are pretty generic descriptions of political advocacy and ones that cover the right and the left in equal measure.
There’s one point here that’s important not to forget: there’s a huge amount of political groups masquerading as educational and social welfare groups. They all deserve more scrutiny, right and left. Everybody who follows this stuff knows that. It’s not clear to me that the January 2012 standard was even a problem and it was watered down even more by the middle of the year.
