The Real Scandal is Secret Money Influencing US Elections
The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasnt that the IRS was too aggressive. It was that the agency focused on the wrong peoplenone of those groups were big spenders on political advertising; most were local Tea Party organizations with shoestring budgets, writes The New York Timesand wasnt aggressive enough. The outrage that Washington should be talking aboutwhat my colleague Chris Hayes calls the scandal behind the scandalis how the Citizens United decision has unleashed a flood of secret spending in US elections that the IRS and other regulatory agencies in Washington, like the Federal Election Commission, have been unwilling or unable to stem.
501c4 social welfare groups like Karl Roves Crossroads GPS, the Koch brothers Americans for Prosperity and Grover Norquists Americans for Tax Reformwhich dont have to disclose their donorsspent more than $250 million during the last election. Of outside spending reported to the FEC, 31 percent was secret spending, coming from organizations that are not required to disclose the original sources of their funds, writes Demos. Further analysis shows that dark money groups accounted for 58 percent of funds spent by outside groups on presidential television ads [$328 million in total].
IRS guidelines for 501c4 groups state that the promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office
a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity. Its ludicrous for groups like Crossroads GPSwhich spent at least $70 million during the last electionto claim that its primary purpose is not political activity. Only the likes of Karl Rove would believe that running attack ads against President Obama qualifies as social welfare.
The Roves of the world would like nothing more than for the public to believe that conservative groups had too few opportunities to influence the 2012 election and were wrongly persecuted by evil Washington bureaucrats. Yet the 2012 election should have taught us precisely the opposite lessonthat our patchwork regulatory system is far from equipped to deal with the new Gilded Age unleashed by Citizens United. As Rep. Keith Ellison told Hayes last night: We need to redouble our efforts to bring real campaign-finance reform forward.
Read more:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174320/irs-fallout-real-scandal-secret-money-influencing-us-elections#ixzz2TKBj6U5P