Donna Perry: The War On The Citizen Taxpayer
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Perhaps among the more striking realizations emerging in what has been an extraordinary week of bombshell news out of Washington is that for President Obama and his progressive allies, the concept of “tolerance” only works in one direction. As his White House comes under siege from huge dueling scandals involving the IRS and the Department of Justice, (Benghazi is still out there as number 3), it’s becoming more and more clear that the crowd which preaches tolerance has carried out, at the highest levels, a “No Tolerance” policy for all critics. What the IRS scandal, in particular, is really about concerns the attempt to muzzle and basically dismantle the growing movement of government critics/citizen taxpayer advocates, period. Though it seems to have manifested itself more recently in the form of IRS officials either denying, stalling, or basically intimidating local based Tea Party groups in their lawful right to seek 501 C (3) or 501 C (4) tax-exempt status, what this is really about is an attempt to demonize and basically destroy an ideology. Obama’s ascent to the presidency galvanized the attempt, years in the making, by many on the Left who have sought to squash the growing public call for smaller government; reined in pension systems; lower personal and property taxes; and other issues connected to government’s overreach.
Across the country, most local Tea Party groups and independently standing taxpayer advocate organizations, such as RI Taxpayers, have generally been created and carried out by citizen advocates, largely functioning with shoestring budgets or in a complete volunteer structure, who attempt to inject the weary taxpayer’s point of view in the public policy arena. How threatening!
Though the information coming out of a hastily assembled report by the Treasury Inspector General zeroed in on an especially zealous IRS office in Cincinnati, Ohio, the most recent news reports indicate widespread intimation of Tea Party tax exempt status applications since 2010, ranging to nearly 400 local groups scattered across the country. What seems to be coming to light is a Nixonian turn by Obama and/or by top department heads, to either conspire; encourage; or just be indifferent to, the intentional carrying out of a serious breach of IRS procedures, through the unlawful use of the agency to target perceived political opponents. Furthermore, other news reports indicate that during the same period that conservative oriented groups’ applications were unnecessarily stalled, some for as long as 3 years, groups with obvious liberal names, or having the words “Progressive” or “Progress” in them, were given what appears to be speedy approvals, most in as little as a handful of months. The word chilling cannot be overused on this one.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTScandal #2, involving the Department of Justice (DOJ), takes the Administration’s well known aggressive handling of the press to a whole new level. It involves the collision of the Administration’s anti-terrorism efforts overseas, the leaking of sensitive information to the press, and the 2012 election year. It revolves around the Administration’s seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters who were involved in the assembling of a specific news story in May of 2012. Attorney General Eric Holder is claiming the news report in question, which revealed a foiled bomb plot from Yemen on a U.S. bound airliner near the anniversary date of the killing of Osama bin Laden, amounted to the most serious leak of classified information he has ever witnessed. He claims the leak could have threatened the safety of Americans, and so the Justice Department pursued the phone records to find the source of the leak. The AP is now saying the report went out when the threat had passed, and suggests the real anger over the leak could have been because, in the midst of the 2012 election year, the Administration did not like a news story which showed they were perhaps unprepared for another al Qaeda plot. The congressional hearings have begun, the talking points are filling the air waves, accusations are filling up Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, and one thing, and perhaps only one thing is for sure: the Obama second term is a non-starter. In the wake of the revelations, it may be tempting to cheer that. Advocates for good government, and citizen taxpayer groups watching the decline of their own local communities, including those of us in Rhode Island, are entitled to feel vindicated that the exposure of a government orchestrated intimidation of citizen groups will now be properly addressed.
But when you take the long view, none of this amounts to anything favorable to anyone. The perception by ambitious politicians at the highest levels from all sides of the aisle, that there is no distinction to be made from campaign trail partisanship and governing for the greater good; and that the lawful right of the citizenry to project an opposition voice can be systematically demonized and squashed; amounts to a troubling and very sad day for America and its future.
Donna Perry is Executive Director of the RI Taxpayers organization, www.ritaxpayers.com.
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