No one should be surprised by the scandals at the Internal Revenue Service involving tax-exempt status of Tea Parties and the targeting of conservatives for audits.
Such abuses of power within government, of course, are not confined to the IRS or even the federal government. They are not even confined to one political party.
Tea Partiers are not surprised. It is why the Tea Party came to be.
In December 2009, I first taught Tea Party activists how to form tax-exempt organizations. These were small-business owners, working and home-schooling moms, farmers and the like.
Few had any experience being activists, but they were eager to learn the complexities of applying for tax-exempt status. The intricacies of these tax-exemption laws were very new to them.
These Tea Party “students,” however, were not surprised by my anecdotes about dealing with government bureaucrats who smugly violate the very laws that they claim to enforce.
Tea Partiers understand why our system of limited government under the rule of law is in place, better certainly than most of the well-placed sophisticates in Washington. Tea Partiers may be new to political activism, but not to life or principles of the rule of law.
These students were a refreshing contrast to so many political professionals — consultants, the news media, lawyers — who not only gain more power, prestige and wealth by the expansion of government, but because of government law-breaking itself.
Tea Partiers are wiser to systematic government abuses than daily political comic Jon Stewart. His hilarious and frequently bleeped tirade about the IRS’ abuse of the Tea Party showed that there is no love so blind as progressives’ love of big government.
Stewart is yet the hopeless romantic. “I still believe that good government has the power to improve people’s lives,” the jilted but unrequited lover concluded.
The IRS got “caught” at the common practice of government violating the very laws it enforces because Tea Party and patriotic groups spoke out.
Now we’re seeing waves of conservative donors and activists speak out about IRS audits directed at them. They were previously afraid to come forward publicly. Law-breaking government knows how to exact retribution directly — and indirectly.
Whether through fearlessness of being in the right or because they did not have any real reputation to lose among the political establishment, make no mistake that the Tea Party beat the government. They did what elected officials don’t do enough: They demanded that government be accountable to the law.
Government bureaucrats operate in a mostly consequence-free world compared with the rest of us, especially when it comes to law-breaking in the conduct of one’s livelihood. That must change.
As Tea Partiers were learning about how to get tax-exempt status both in the classroom and in the school of hard knocks, Sarah Hall Ingram was busy lecturing about “good governance practices” for nonprofits.
Ingram was the acting commissioner at the IRS overseeing tax-exempt organizations until 2012. Again, it is no surprise to Tea Partiers that she was lecturing the rest of us about good governance and following the law during her reign of terror against them.
She, other bureaucrats and many progressives were simultaneously pushing for more federal control over nonprofits, which would have resulted in more insulation for government law-breaking against citizen activists.
As I wrote recently in the NonProfit Times (“A Lack of Lawful and Competent Oversight of Charities”), “The real battle in the nonprofit sector … is whether the nonprofit sector will protect its independence by refusing to tolerate violations of law by those who regulate it.”
William Blackstone, the great English jurist who was perhaps the single biggest influence on American law during the founding period, expressed the Lockean principle that where there is no law, there is no freedom.
Government bureaucrats frequently see themselves not merely above the law, but as the very law themselves. That is why they and others who benefit from government abuses have contempt for the Tea Party.
Mark J. Fitzgibbons is co-author with Richard Viguerie of “The Law That Governs Government.”
