IRS lawyers were harshly criticized in a federal appellate court decision Tuesday that gave the Tea Party a major victory in a fight over the long-running controversy surrounding IRS targeting of conservative non-profit groups.
In the opinion handed down Tuesday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the IRS’ request to stop a lower court ruling that it must hand over the lists it used in subjecting some conservative nonprofits to additional scrutiny when they applied for nonprofit status.
In the decision, Judge Raymond Kethledge, a George W. Bush appointee, criticized the IRS for trying to block Tea Party groups from learning about how they were singled out for scrutiny.
“The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation’s interests and enforcing its laws — all of them, not just selective ones — in a manner worthy of the department’s name,” Kethledge wrote. “The conduct of the IRS’s attorneys in the district court falls outside that tradition.”
“We expect that the IRS will do better going forward,” he added as he ordered the agency to turn over the relevant lists without delay.
The NorCal Tea Party, the group that filed the class-action lawsuit against the agency on behalf of conservative political nonprofits targeted by the IRS, welcomed the decision as a step toward resolution of the controversy, which has stretched on for the better part of a decade.
“We have been challenged by the IRS on numerous occasions and have overcome, and I believe that we will overcome in the end,” said Ginny Rapini, the coordinator for the NorCal Tea Party who originally filled out their tax-exempt paperwork in 2010.
“My overall expectation as one who was targeted by the IRS is justice, and to see that no American citizen will have to go through what I went through,” Rapini said.
In blocking the Tea Party group’s requests for information related to their suit, the Sixth Circuit decision said the IRS “has only compounded the conduct that gave rise to it.”
“The lawsuit has progressed as slowly as the underlying applications themselves,” the court said in rebuking the IRS.
“[T]he Internal Revenue Code cannot be used as a sword by the federal government to inappropriately target those it disagrees with but used as a shield to prevent public disclosure of its wrongdoing,” said Alfred Lechner, president of the watchdog group Cause of Action Institute, in a statement issued Wednesday. Tuesday’s decision “limits the ability for the federal government to use its power arbitrarily in ways that ultimately hurt, rather than help, the privacy interests of the American taxpayer,” he added.
