Tea Party groups win first round in court

Good day all. It’s been a while since we discussed the IRS’s suppression of the various Tea Party and other conservative groups. Besides the investigations in Congress, the various groups are suing the Internal Revenue Service for civil rights violations.

Well, there’s some good news on that front. A judge ruled in their favor in a critical case. Here are the details from the Daily Mail:

A federal judge has ordered the Internal Revenue Service to hand over a list of the 298 tea party organizations that it targeted with broad and often intrusive questions when they applied for nonprofit tax-exempt status. The decision from U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott means right-wing groups are a step closer to being allowed to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the IRS.

First a quibble. These groups are right-wing only in the sense that they aren’t quoting Karl Marx. The “Tea” in Tea Party stand for “Taxed Enough Already.” Other TEA Party groups also want a full restoration of the Constitutional style of government which would mean the closure of most of the federal agencies.

My second quibble is the fact that I found this article in a British newspaper, not an American one. You would be hard pressed to find this story anywhere with the possible exception of Fox. The reason for this is simple. The Main Stream Media supported the IRS’s suppression of these groups and still does.

The agency has admitted playing political favorites with the tax code beginning in 2010, when it began applying extra scrutiny to groups with red-flag words like ‘patriots’ or ‘tea party’ in their names. While those organizations’ applications were held up for years, liberal groups sailed through the process.

It could be argued that the suppression of these groups also curtailed the GOP’s “Get out the vote” drives for Mittens Romney. It’s been fairly well documented that a large number of the Republican base stayed home in disgust with Romney. If the various Tea Party groups had been able to raise and spend money on voter education instead of dealing with the Internal Revenue’s demands for information they weren’t entitled to ask for.

Dlott agreed this week that the tea party groups suing the government can pursue their claims that the IRS violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights, along with a section of federal law – Section 6103 of Title 26 – that prohibits the government from releasing private information contained in tax returns.

I looked up Judge Dlott. She was appointed to the bench by Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton. It’s nice to see a Democrat appointed judge actually standing by the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Now, what is this list that the judge has ordered turned over to the Plantiffs?

When the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General investigated the IRS’s actions, it demanded – and received – a list of 298 groups whose tax-exemption applications had been held up. It’s this list that the tea party groups want.Their lawsuit aims first to identify a list of ‘all dissenting groups targeted for additional scrutiny by the IRS from January 20, 2009, through July 15, 2013.’

As you might expect, the IRS said they couldn’t provide this information.

The IRS’s lawyers claimed that they couldn’t provide the court with the names of all the groups, saying they would have to turn over the very documents that Section 6103 requires them to keep confidential.

Considering all the leaks of taxpayer information coming out of the IRS, all of it designed to hurt conservatives, I think this was a rather bogus argument.

The conservative plaintiffs said they would be happy to have only the spreadsheet that the inspector general got from the IRS. Dlott agreed and ordered the agency to hand it over. ‘The Court concludes that the return information sought is directly related to the issue of class certification in this federal court proceeding,’ her ruling reads.

Game, Set, Match to the Tea Party. Now this is only a very early phase of the lawsuit. There’s a lot more to come. It’s conceivable that a Tea Party backed candidate could win in 2016 and he or she comes in and starts cleaning house. If that were to occur it’s likely that a reasonable settlement will be made and the court case ended. We shall see how things proceed.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

[yasr_visitor_votes size=”medium”]