Summary: A weak narrative pushed by administration allies that the IRS was merely doing its job in investigating Tea Party groups in 2010 through 2012 has been all but abandoned, now. Facts having intervened, and it looks like the Obama administration will throw some IRS staff under the bus and hope the scandal ends. It won't, because the problem is not that people were weak, but that government is too strong. Back in March of 2012, a New York Times editorial praised the IRS for challenging tea party groups, saying the same should be done for the larger national organizations that the Times saw as abusing the tax code to hide donors. Ezra Klein revived the narrative on May 10, after the scandal broke open and the IRS admitted its wrongdoing: The problem wasn’t that the IRS was skeptical of tea party groups registering as 501(c)4s. It’s that it hasn’t been skeptical of Organizing for America, Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA and Heritage Action Fund registering as 501(c)4s. The IRS should be treating all these groups equally and appropriately — which would mean much more harshly. ... Now everyone from Moveon.org to the Heritage Foundation has a 501(c)4. The number of 501(c)4 applications the IRS is getting more than doubled in recent years, rising from 1,500 to more than 3,400. That, by the way, is their explanation for the added scrutiny of the tea party groups: They weren’t trying to look specifically at conservatives. They were just trying to separate out the organizations that seemed likely to be overly political. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo decided smugly that conservatives can be PC, too. No one would admit it, he said, but : The only real sin the IRS committed in its ostensible targeting of conservatives is the sin of political incorrectness—that is, of not pretending it needed to vet all the new groups that wanted tax-exempt status, even though it mostly just needed to vet right-wing groups. But that isn't what Tea Party groups were doing, and vetting isn't what the IRS was doing. The Tea party Groups were all essentially self-supported, with most donations from their members and literally passing the hat at rallies. They -- OK, we -- were, and still are, engaged primarily in educating our communities about America's history and the danger of straying too far from our founding. Tea party groups fit squarely in the description of "social welfare" organization as "a community movement designed to accomplish community ends." As Ohio Liberty Coalition's Tom Zawistowski told The Cato Institute, Well, I think one thing I'd like to point out is that some of these media organizations have been saying that here's these Tea Party anti-tax people, and we were "filing for 501(c)(4) so we could avoid paying taxes." Nothing was further from the truth. We're farmers and business people, and we were having bus trips that cost money. And we needed insurance and things, so you had to form a company. We thought we were going to be companies. So in a pre-Citizens United world, you couldn't take a bus trip to Washington, because that's a political act, and we didn't know that. So the 501(c)(4) came from the IRS. We didn't ask for the 501(c)(4), we were told we must be a 501(c)(4). Liberal groups have not in fact been separated out for similar scrutiny, and the level and type scrutiny itself is as outrageous as the fact of being targeted based on political ideology. As Zawistowski told Cato, the questions were "clearly politically motivated." They did not ask us about our electioneering activities. You know, electioneering is a legal term, it means a very specific thing. Why didn't they ask us if we had given money to candidates or to parties? They never asked those questions. They want to know how many donors you have, how much they gave you, who are your members, how many members do you have, who spoke to you, what do you know. There's a word for
