Conservative Activist Says It’s His Turn To Use the IRS as a Political Bludgeon

Fresh off a year in which the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) came under heavy fire for
targeting non-profit Tea Party political organizations for
extra scrutiny, Bill Wilson of Americans for Limited Government
suggests that such politicized use of tax collectors is just
swell—so long as they’re unleashed on groups that get under
his skin. Pointing to tax audits of environmental groups
performed by the Canada Revenue Agency under that country’s
conservative government, Wilson calls for the U.S. to do the same
south of the border once Republicans are back in control. And he
makes no bones about the fact that this would be tit-for-tat
retaliation for the last round of politicized thuggery by the
IRS.

Writes Wilson at
Investors Business Daily:

[T]he government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
recently entered a critical policy debate on the right side —
directing the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to conduct audits of
several radical environmental groups accused of conducting
political activity in violation of their tax-exempt status.

Among the groups being audited? The David Suzuki Foundation,
Ecology Action Centre, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, the
Pembina Foundation, Tides Canada and West Coast Environmental
Law.

The far left in Canada is apoplectic, but the real targets of
this action are the radical American billionaires funneling money
through faux Canadian front groups — hoping to shut down the
Keystone XL pipeline by exploiting the country’s Aboriginal
population. …

Liberal elitist foundations — Rockefeller, Pew, Ford, Heinz,
etc. — have hidden for years behind a labyrinth of carved-out rules
and special protections, unfair advantages enabling them to pump
billions of dollars into a far left agenda while donors claimed
untold amounts of tax deductions.

Meanwhile, an IRS bent on protecting Obama and vulnerable
Democrats in advance of the 2012 elections has effectively silenced
groups with the words “Constitution,” “Tea Party” or “Liberty” in
their titles. Does that sound like equal protection under the law?
Of course not.

Canada has shown it has the courage to stand up to these wealthy
eco-radicals. It must be the policy of the next U.S. administration
to follow suit.

Same as it ever was. The Democrats got to use the IRS as a
political bludgeon, so now it’s Republicans’ turn to do the same.
And so the cycle continues. It’s a long and grim cycle of abuse and
retaliation, varying over the decades only in the choice of
victims.

James Bovard has documented the long, bipartisan history of tax
collectors as hit men. Writing in the
Wall Street Journal, last spring, he detailed abuses
of tax powers to punish opponents of the administration by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Bill
Clinton.

“My father,” Elliott Roosevelt
said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “may have been the
originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of
political retribution.”

“In almost every administration since the IRS’s inception the
information and power of the tax agency have been mobilized for
explicitly political purposes,” noted David Burnham in
A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS.

In a 1989 New York Times article, Burnham
added, “The history of the I.R.S. is riddled with repeated
instances of agents acting out of self-interest or pursuing their
own ideological agenda, as well as examples of Presidents, White
House staff and Cabinet officials pressuring the tax agency to take
political actions.”

Wilson would perpetuate this dangerous misuse of the vast powers
of the federal tax agency, responding to the targeting of
conservative groups not by stripping the IRS of its weaponized
authority, but instead by taking hold of the grips and shifting
aim.

Presumably, the next Democratic administration could be expected
to swivel the IRS cross hairs around once again.

It’s true that the IRS resists reform. So long as they get to
abuse some targets of their own choosing, tax officials don’t seem
to mind performing hits for the White House and Congress. But when
politicians occasionally try to rein-in the monster they’ve creatd,
it’s all too happy to turn on them. Writes Bovard:

The agency also has a long history of seeking to intimidate
congressional critics: In 1925, Internal Revenue Commissioner David
Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes
to Michigan’s Republican Sen. James Couzens —who had launched an
investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue—as he stepped out
of the Senate chamber. More recently, after Sen. Joe Montoya of New
Mexico announced plans in 1972 to hold hearings on IRS abuses, the
agency added his name to a list of tax protesters who were capable
of violence against IRS agents.

Is this something that we want to continue? Instead of taking
turns at using the IRS to torment political opponents, how about
disarming the damned thing instead?