Republican outrage over IRS targeting Tea Party didn’t extend to NAACP
OPINION - Where was the outrage when the IRS audited the NAACP in 2004?...
The NAACP in 2004 was subjected to a two-year investigation by the IRS. Why? As the Baltimore Sun reported in October 2004, just before that year’s presidential election, putting the organization’s tax exempt status as a 501(c)3 entity — a different designation from 501(c)4, but similarly tax exempt — at risk:
The Internal Revenue Service is auditing the NAACP, scrutinizing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its chairman gave a stinging criticism of the Bush administration in a speech this summer.
Julian Bond’s July 11 comments at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s convention in Philadelphia chastised President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the group. Bush declined the group’s invitation to speak, while Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry accepted.
In a letter dated Oct. 8, the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Division informed the NAACP’s national office in Baltimore of the investigation. The letter said the probe was limited to ” … whether or not your organization has intervened in a political campaign. … ”
Bond said yesterday that the audit was “an attempt to silence the NAACP” right before a tight presidential election.
“They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”
At the time, the IRS commissioner, Mark Everson, made it very clear why the agency was scrutinizing the NAACP:
In a statement, IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson said the agency could not comment on activities involving specific tax-exempt organizations, but he rejected Bond’s claims.
“Any suggestion that the IRS has tilted its audit activities for political purposes is repugnant and groundless,” the statement said.
The IRS letter states that Bond’s speech “condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush on education, the economy and the war in Iraq.”
The letter goes on to note that the NAACP’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status prohibits “directly or indirectly participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.”
Two years later, the IRS quietly ended the probe, determining that in fact the NAACP had not violated the terms of its tax-exempt status. The opposite outcome would have seriously limited the nation’s oldest civil rights organization’s fundraising ability, effectively, as Bond said in 2004, silencing them. At the time the probe ended, the Washington Post wrote:
The investigation started Oct. 8, 2004, a month before the election. As the investigation dragged on into the following February, the NAACP announced that it would not continue to cooperate.
Angela Ciccolo, an NAACP lawyer, noted that although Bond’s remarks were made in July 2004, the investigation did not begin until October, just when the NAACP was attempting to register voters. “The timing of the investigation is critical,” she said.
When the investigation started, Bush and the NAACP were locked in a long-running feud that started shortly before the president’s first election victory in 2000.
During that campaign, the NAACP ran television spots featuring the daughter of James Byrd Jr., a black man who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Texas in 1998. She criticized Bush, then governor of Texas, for not signing hate-crime legislation.
The rift grew when the NAACP charged that Republicans in Florida stole the 2000 election by turning black voters away from the polls.
Double standard?
Reached for comment by theGrio on Monday, as news of the IRS tea party probes rocketed around the news world, Bond said, “of course there is a racial double standard. Black people audited — no big deal. Overwhelmingly white and racist Tea Party audited? Super outrage!”
Bond said the IRS scandal was taking hold because of the persistence of its messenger. “The Republicans speak with one voice in their outrage; they always seem louder,” he said. “In fact, it is the only thing they do.”
“In 2004 after criticizing Bush administration policies that severely impacted its members and the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, the NAACP was subjected to an audit by the IRS,” said political strategist Angela Rye, who heads IMPACT Strategies in Washington. “The NAACP audit didn’t end for two years. As the IRS reviews its standards for subjecting organizations to additional scrutiny, I hope that its fact-finding mission will begin prior to the last two years and examine practices that impacted organizations serving people of color and other vulnerable communities for decades.”
The NAACP wasn’t the only entity to be targeted by the IRS during the Bush years. A southern California church, All Saints Episcopal, received an IRS warning letter in 2004 over an anti-war sermon delivered by the church’s former rector, and the environmental group Greenpeace was audited by the IRS in 2006 following a complaint by a group called Public Interest Watch, which was largely funded by oil companies.
Also in 2006, the IRS acknowledged hiring a private vendor to collect the party affiliation of voters in 20 states (Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin) and the District of Columbia, which Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash) called an “outrageous violation of the public trust.”
Tea Party groups, Republican lawmakers, called on IRS to review NAACP’s tax status
Still, the focus on the NAACP, and whether it deserved its tax exempt status, extended beyond the IRS to Republican lawmakers and the Tea Party itself.
As early as December 2000, Republican members of Congress sent letters to the IRS commissioner, Charles O. Rossotti, questioning whether the NAACP should keep its 501(c)3 designation, based on statements from leaders of the group questioning the Supreme Court decision that placed George W. Bush in the White House. Some of those members who wrote to the IRS in 2000, like Maine Sen. Susan Collins, are now calling the alleged targeting of conservative groups by the IRS “absolutely chilling.”
And after the civil rights organization passed a resolution in July 2010 during their annual convention in Kansas City, calling on tea party groups to repudiate racist elements within their organizations, tea partiers and their allies on Capitol Hill reacted angrily, with a group called the St. Louis Tea Party passing a counter-resolution, calling on the IRS to revoke the NAACP’s tax-exempt status.
The current leadership of the NAACP says the group’s past experience with politicization of the IRS makes them sensitive to Republicans’ concerns.
“As an organization targeted by the IRS under the last Bush Administration, we know all too well the capacity for the IRS to abuse its power and the chilling impact that can have,” NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous told theGrio in a statement Tuesday. “The recent allegations of bias, if true, cannot be tolerated in a free society.”
“We are pleased that the president has acknowledged the need for a full and comprehensive investigation,” Jealous said. “If abuse is uncovered, the responsible parties must be held ‘fully accountable’ for their actions. The IRS plays a critical role in our society and must not engage in political discrimination.”
The question is, whether the same outrage applies when it comes to the clear abuse of the charitable designation in the tax code by political groups, or when the targets are not conservatives.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @TheReidReport.
