In the News
IRS
Need to Know: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Need to Know has a guest this week, Brad Smith, or Bradley A. Smith, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. He not only knows a lot of facts — he knows, and supports, the right principles. (Not right-wing ones, just right ones.) He explains some of the strange doings of the IRS and other federal bodies in this Age of Obama.
Heritage: Tax Dodge: Panel Urges Public to Thwart IRS Effort to Torpedo Conservative Groups
By Haley Halverson and Ken McIntyreMitchell and Smith urged the public to take a stand by registering their comments with the IRS through the Center for Competitive Politics’ website on the issue, NonProfitFreedom.org. More than 67,000 comments had been made as of Friday morning, but the deadline this Thursday, February 27, for comments is rapidly approaching because, Mitchell said, the new rules improperly “popped up” without prior notice near the Thanksgiving holiday……The changes also would force the groups to surrender previously confidential donor information — which could deter citizens from participating in politically active nonprofits. The changes fall outside IRS expertise and authority because they are concerned with campaign finance law and have nothing to do with raising federal revenue, Smith said. “This is an effort to regulate campaign finance disguised as tax regulation,” he said.The Supreme Court, Smith said, has ruled that campaign finance regulations cannot require disclosure of individual donor information unless the nonprofit organization in question expressly advocates a specific candidate. He said political operatives are attempting to get around the law by acquiring the details under the guise of tax status so that they can “harass and bother” donors.Smith noted that the Federal Election Commission, the agency that oversees campaign finance, is structured with bipartisan safeguards, detailed enforcement processes and advisory components that the IRS lacks. The IRS, he said, is “not equipped to make these kinds of campaign decisions, and it’s not equipped to ensure the public confidence that these decisions aren’t being made simply for political gain.”
Powerline: The IRS Harassment Scandal
By Scott JohnsonVon Spakovsky provides an excellent introduction to the proposed IRS regulation in “Silencing conservatives: The administration’s latest attempt to censor political speech.” Brad Smith and his colleagues at the Center for Competitive Politicshave compiled an invaluable, heavily footnoted document setting forth the efforts by the regulatory agencies to police political speech at the behest of the Democratic Party: “The IRS harassment scandal: A timeline of ‘reform.’”President Obama is now deep into the cover-up phase of the scandal. Obama asserted to Bill O’Reilly in the course of his pre-Superbowl interview on FOX, for example, that the IRS’s wrongdoing was confined to a few boneheaded decisions coming out of the IRS’s Cincinnati office. This is a demonstrable lie that all by itself demonstrates Obama’s centrality to the scandal.Von Spakovsky credited Eliana with breaking the story that the IRS targeting of conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) status was directed from Washington, not Cincinnati, as in her NRO column “Oversight from Washington, all along.”Kim Strassel has explored the IRS scandal in columns including “The president has a list” and Obama’s enemies’ list–part II.”
IRS
Wall Street Journal: Liberals vs. the IRS
EditorialNew York Democrat Chuck Schumer recently gave this game away when he urged the IRS and Administration to “redouble” their efforts to crack down on the “tea party elites” who “gained extraordinary influence by being able to funnel millions of dollars into campaigns with ads that distort the truth and attack government.”In other words, Mr. Schumer and the White House want to use the IRS to impose campaign-finance reform. But that’s a role Congress has never envisioned for what is supposed to be the nonpartisan tax authority. Congress set up the Federal Election Commission, with three members each from both parties, to enforce campaign-finance regulations so there would be a check on partisan enforcement.Conservative criticism hasn’t stopped the Obama IRS, but maybe liberal unhappiness will. The Treasury Department said earlier this month that the draft rule is merely the “first step in a careful, thoughtful process.” It’s been thoughtful only in the sense that it is driven by political motives. If the liberals don’t want some future Republican IRS to reduce their political speech, they’ll continue the clamor until the White House kills this assault on the First Amendment.
Independent Groups
Politico: The Democrats’ would-be Karl Rove
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and MAGGIE HABERMANBut Messina’s effort to tap his earning potential while maintaining a hand on the levers of the party’s apparatuses has fueled grumbles from various Democratic donors and operatives, who accuse him — privately, and without the risk or accountability that can come from on-the-record criticism — of taking more than his share of the credit for a multifaceted victory, and of a cash binge that exposes Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to potential backlash. Some Democrats question whether it’s unwise to have a single figure wield so much influence, while many former colleagues see Messina less as a Rove-like figure than as a deft operator who successfully implemented a strategy crafted by others.Messina’s allies cast him as a reluctant participant in the new big-money political world and argue he’s taking a leadership role only because it’s important for someone with wide experience and respect to help prepare the party for a potentially tricky post-Obama transition.
Washington Post: Exclusive: One of Washington’s wealthiest is giving $20 million to a top conservative think tank
By ZACHARY GOLDFARBDaniel A. D’Aniello, the co-founder and chairman of the Washington-basedprivate-equity giant Carlyle Group, is contributing $20 million to the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.The contribution by D’Aniello — set to be announced Tuesday — marks a new foray into policy advocacy by the top Carlyle executive, who has maintained a much lower profile than co-founder David Rubenstein. It also represents the marriage of one of Washington’s business titans to one of its top think tanks.AEI will name its new building after D’Aniello before moving in late next year. The building, at 1785 Massachusetts Ave. NW, formerly owned by Andrew Mellon and purchased from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is in a neighborhood that houses a number of think tanks, including the Brookings Institution.
SCOTUS/Judiciary
Washington Post (LTE): Campaign-finance ‘reform’ won’t solve government corruption
By Paul ShermanIf Americans really want to do something about government corruption — a worthy goal — we must move beyond failed campaign-finance “reforms.” Rather than restricting peaceful political activity by private citizens, we need to have a serious conversation about restoring meaningful constitutional limits on the government’s power to hand out favors.
More Soft Money Hard Law: Rick Hasen on the Tradeoff Between Corruption and Better Governance
By Bob BauerIn a Washington Post piece, Rick Hasen argues that if the aggregate individual contribution limits fall in the McCutcheon case, the results could be both good and bad. To the good: parties could raise and spend more freely, and therefore would be strengthened when more vigorous parties are needed to temper polarization and alleviate governing gridlock. To the bad: “more” corruption would result from expanded large donor influence over the political process. Rick wishes that the two goals, clean but also functional politics, could be achieved in tandem, but with the Supreme Court’s limitation on Congress’s authority to prevent corruption, he is convinced that we might have to accept more corruption in return for possibly better government.This is a surprising reading of the turns in Court’s jurisprudence affecting the influence parties might have. The older jurisprudence whose passing Rick mourns—the jurisprudence of the McConnell case—construed “corruption” so broadly and tied it so tightly to parties that it left little room for the party revival that Rick concedes may be salutary. And in any event, in forecasting “more corruption” in the event that McCutcheon is decided against the limits, Rick steps onto certain slippery ground he has warned others against entering.
Bloomberg: Looser Campaign Finance Laws Won’t Help Parties
By Jonathan BernsteinRick Hasen and Bob Bauer are fighting about the possible effects of a further loosening of the campaign finance regime in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. Hasen believes that ending contribution limits might strengthen parties, and thereby strengthen party leaders, and thus alleviate congressional gridlock. Bauer disagrees. But both believe, withRichard Pildes, that parties are (in Hasen’s words) “relatively weak” right now.None of them are listening closely enough to the party network arguments.Congressional parties aren’t relatively weak; they’re about as strong as they’ve ever been, and certainly the strongest they’ve been over the last century. I strongly disagree that parties are “in service” to candidates. Compared with the 1960s or 1970s, and probably with the 1980s and 1990s, candidates are more, not less, dependent on party resources, whether it’s for personnel or money. Yes, only some of these resources are controlled by formal party organizations, but that’s not the correct test of whether resources are party-linked. An “outside” group functioning fully within the Republican Party network can be, in some circumstances, even more of a party entity than groups and people within formal party organizations.
State and Local
South Carolina –– The State: Agreement breaks Senate logjam on ethics reform, for now
By ADAM BEAMCOLUMBIA, SC — The state Senate agreed Thursday that lawmakers should not have political action committees, anonymous political groups must reveal their donors and public officials must disclose who is paying them.But the Senate made no changes to who would enforce those new rules, meaning House lawmakers will regulate House lawmakers, Senate lawmakers will regulate Senate lawmakers, and an ethics commission appointed by the governor will regulate everyone else.
