[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 55 (Tuesday, April 17, 2012)]
[House]
[Page H1851]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   IRS HARASSMENT OF TEA PARTY GROUPS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, a defining aspect of the American 
tradition is that groups of citizens band together for a wide variety 
of civic purposes. They recruit volunteers, raise funds, and spend 
those funds to promote whatever project or cause brings them together.
  For more than a century, our tax laws have recognized that such 
voluntary associations--nonprofits as we call them today--should not be 
taxed because their proceeds are devoted entirely to improve our 
communities through education, advocacy, and civic action. Section 501 
of the Internal Revenue Code recognizes them today, and civic groups as 
diverse as MoveOn.org, the League of Conservation Voters, the ACLU, the 
National Rifle Association, and various taxpayer groups have always 
been included in this definition.
  We don't apply a political test to these civic groups. We recognize 
the fundamental right of Americans to organize and to pool their 
resources to promote whatever causes they believe in, left or right. 
Indeed, whatever their political persuasion, these civic groups perform 
an absolutely indispensable role in our democracy by raising public 
awareness, defining issues, educating voters, promoting reforms, 
holding officials accountable, and petitioning their government to 
redress grievances. Abolition, women's suffrage, the civil rights 
movement--all would have been impossible without them.
  In order to be recognized as nonprofit groups, these organizations 
must register with the IRS--a purely ministerial function that in the 
past has been applied evenly and without regard to their political 
views. At least until now. It seems that Tea Party groups are today 
being treated very differently than their counterparts on the political 
left. For the last 2 years, many have been stonewalled by the IRS when 
they sought to register as nonprofits. Most recently, they have been 
barraged with increasingly aggressive and threatening demands vastly 
outside the legal authority of the IRS. Indeed, the only conceivable 
purpose of some of these demands is to intimidate and harass.
  A Tea Party group in my district is typical of the reports that we 
are now hearing across this country. This group submitted articles of 
incorporation as a nonprofit to the State of California, and they 
received approval within a month. But then they tried to register as a 
nonprofit with the IRS. Despite repeated and numerous inquiries, the 
IRS stonewalled this group for a year and a half, at which time it 
demanded thousands of pages of documentation and gave the group less 
than 3 weeks to produce it.
  The IRS demanded the names of every participant at every meeting held 
over the last 2 years, transcripts of every speech given at those 
meetings, what positions they had taken on issues, the names of their 
volunteers and donors, and copies of communications they had with 
elected officials, and on and on. Perhaps most chilling of all, the 
organizer of this particular group soon found herself the object of a 
personal income tax audit by the IRS.
  Mr. Speaker, these are groups of volunteers who pass the hat at 
meetings to pay for renting the hall. They give of their own time to 
research issues and pay out of their own pockets for printing flyers. 
The donations made to them aren't tax deductible, so there is no 
legitimate purpose in asking for the names of their donors, let alone 
of their volunteers, unless--and this is the fine point of it--unless 
the purpose is to harass and intimidate.

                              {time}  1020

  Ironically, the same tactics we now see used by the United States 
against tea parties were once used by the most abusive of the Southern 
States in the 1950s to intimidate civil rights groups like the NAACP.
  No such tactics have been reported by similar civic groups on the 
political left, so the conclusion is inescapable--that this 
administration is very clearly, very pointedly, and very deliberately 
attempting to intimidate, harass, and threaten civic-minded groups with 
which they disagree, using one of the most feared and powerful agencies 
of the United States Government to do so.
  Mr. Speaker, these facts speak for themselves. They need no 
embellishment or interpretation. They should alarm every American of 
goodwill regardless of political philosophy, for if this precedent is 
allowed to stand, no one's freedom is safe. I bring these facts to the 
attention of the House today and ask that they be rigorously 
investigated and, if found accurate, that those officials responsible 
be exposed, disgraced, dismissed, and debarred from any further 
position of trust or power within our government.

                          ____________________