The Internal Revenue Service has overstepped its legal boundaries and expertise to assault the free speech rights of nonprofit advocacy groups, but the public can put the IRS in its place by commenting in the next few days, campaign finance experts and journalists assembled at The Heritage Foundation said.
The IRS’s proposed rule changes to reclassify town hall meetings, legislative scorecards and other regular activities of such groups as “political,” the panel agreed, threaten the groups’ tax-exempt status and thus their existence.
“This is a scandal as bad as they get,” panelist Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journalsaid of IRS actions at one point. “This is an agency that has abused its power grievously against the American people.”
Speaking at the February 21 event, dubbed “Taxing the First Amendment,” were Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer representing conservative groups targeted by the IRS in a scandal that erupted last spring; Bradley A. Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and a law professor who heads the Center for Competitive Politics in Alexandria, Va.; and two journalists who have covered the unfolding IRS story – Eliana Johnson, media editor for National Review, and Strassel, a Washington-based columnist and editorial writer for The Journal.
Mitchell said the secretly developed rule changes would stifle the free speech of organizations across the political spectrum, from the Sierra Club on the left to the National Rifle Association on the right. Johnson noted, however, that “Republicans have more to lose” because 20 of the 28 advocacy groups that recently spent more than $1 million lean to the right.
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