GOP Paranoics Freak Out About IRS Scandal, While Karl Rove Gets Off Scott Free
Republicans, as usual, are in a tizzy over what they say is a big scandal brewing at the Internal Revenue Service, because on Friday, Lois Lerner, the lawyer in charge of the department that reviews applications for tax-exempt organizations, said that the IRS had improperly flagged and scrutinized applications by ‘Tea Party’ and ‘Patriot’ groups.
The problem with this latest dust-up is that GOP outrage over the small but obvious stuff misses the real issues and bigger points. First, Lerner’s testimony— read it—says that her office discovered and tried to correct this. Moreover, does anybody really think that Tea Party chapters were not overt political creatures? They weren’t created to sell cookies.
The real scandal is that Lerner’s disclosure and apology, conveyed at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing Friday, ignores that the agency has not taken any meaningful decisions on the big political fish who hide behind this tax non-profit ruse and hide their donor’s names, notably Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.
Rove’s group spent more than $70 million on political ads in 2012. Its application to be a social-welfare organization is pending before the IRS—more than two years after it was filed. There are many forms of non-profits, but those at issue here, so-called C-4s, don’t pay taxes or disclose donor names.
The Tea Partiers are political little leaguers. Perhaps their best-known brethren in 2012, “TrueTheVote,” tried to recruit and train volunteers to challenge the credentials of black and brown voters in Democratic strongholds in swing states. They were so sloppy and offensive that election officials in Ohio and Wisconsin barred them from going near voting sites during the November 2012 presidential vote.
But Karl Rove is not a political rookie. He pioneered the latest dark money strategy by creating a major political organization that masqueraded as a social-welfare group just by filing a tax-exempt application. Other GOP political consultants, and then top Democrats, including the Obama campaign’s top allies, and 100s of others all followed suit.
Longtime Washington campaign finance groups have been crying ‘foul’ for years, urging the IRS to issue rulings on the prolifieration of the C-4 ‘dark money’ groups. The fact that the IRS still has not ruled on Rove’s group will not be helped by this latest scandal, as the agency will now be in ‘damage-control’ mode and will be even more cautious.
Similarly, this bureacratic dust-up
This article originally appeared on : AlterNet
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/gop-paranoics-freak-out-about-irs-scandal-while-karl-rove-gets-off-scott-free/33204/
