In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, outgoing Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Steven Miller’s suggested that the targeting of tea party and other groups was in part caused by Congress’ failure to provide “clear rules” on what constitutes political activity.

“With respect to political activity, it would be a wonderful thing to get better rules,” Miller said, stating the rules needed to be “more clear.”

But those rules are already clear, Americans for Limited Government President Nathan Mehrens noted.

“IRS rules already stipulate that political activity is electioneering, that is, express advocacy for or against a candidate standing for public office and direct contributions to candidates or candidate committees. And it is already clear based on IRS rules that 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to engage in a limited amount of political activity provided it does not constitute a majority of its activity, plus an unlimited amount of lobbying and issues advocacy, that is, advocacy in favor or against legislation or regulations or court rulings, provided that it furthers its tax-exempt function,” Mehrens stated.

“Miller may not agree with those rules, but to suggest they are not clear is incorrect,” Mehrens explained.

Miller explained the targeting: “What happened here was someone saw some tea party cases come through. They were acknowledging that they were going to be engaged in politics. This was the timeframe in 2010 when Citizens United was out. There was a lot of discussion in the system about the use of [501](c)(4)s.”

Except, Citizens United clarified that organizations are allowed to engage in politics, Mehrens explained. “If anything, Citizens United made things more clear, not less. The Supreme Court simplified the rules and stated that organizations have a First Amendment right to engage in political activity, period.”

Miller continued in his testimony, explaining the process for centralizing these cases: “People in Cincinnati decided let’s start grouping these cases, let’s centralize these cases.” This meant quarantining the applications and sending them to Exempt Organizations (EO) Technical, based in Washington, D.C. for special scrutiny.

“The way they centralized it, troublesome. The concept of centralization, not,” Miller said, suggesting that targeting political activity of groups was permissible. Elsewhere in testimony, he agreed that the agency was targeting political activity: “the litmus test if anything was political activity.”

Mehrens blasted the practice, “The IRS processes thousands of tax-exempt applications a year that engage in issues advocacy, lobbying, and yes, political activity without any hassle or special scrutiny. They are allowed by law to engage in these activities. Yet, these tea party cases were selected for special scrutiny. This created inconsistency in the processing of applications, when the revenue procedures state that centralization is supposed to establish uniformity. Liberal groups doing the same thing as tea party groups were not centralized.”

But, even if liberal groups had been targeted too would not have helped, Mehrens added, “Targeting organizations for special scrutiny on the belief that they might exercise their First Amendment protected rights to engage in political activity in is an egregious violation of the freedom of speech. If it had been done consistently for groups of all stripes would not have made it better.”

Miller suggested the practice was “not illegal,” but Mehrens said, “Of course it was illegal. These actions violated the First Amendment to the Constitution which is the ‘supreme Law of the Land’.”

Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported some good news for a change — the federal budget deficit will fall to $642 billion in 2013.

The primary reasons for the drop are because of the expiration of the $120 billion a year payroll tax holiday and the $85 billion budget sequester going into effect. Plus, on top of that, expenditures, particularly to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are less than expected, while revenues for personal and corporate income taxes are more.

CBO suggests the deficit will continue falling through 2017 according to its baseline. But that comes with a very important caveat — that Congress do nothing to increase spending or cancel sequestration.

Read that again. The falling deficit is contingent on Congress not taking action to increase it. Now we have been warned to take the report with a grain of salt, so if and when the deficit is higher than expected, you’ll know why. It will only be because Congress increased spending.

Now, here’s the real headline. The $16.76 trillion national debt will still rise by more than $800 billion this year.

But why the discrepancy? How can the deficit be $642 billion for the year, but the debt increase so much more?

The two major factors here are the government’s direct and guaranteed loan accounts — which are not included in the CBO study but you can see them in White House Office of Management and Budget estimates — which will increase by about $150 billion this year. And debt held by the Social Security and Medicare trust funds is set to increase by another $50 billion or so.

For 2013, that will mean about a 5 percent increase in the debt, below its annual average increase of 7 percent the past 60 years.

That’s almost good news. In order for the U.S. to reduce its share of debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — now more than 100 percent — the nominal growth of the debt will need to be less than the nominal growth of the economy itself.

Alas, CBO projects that nominal economic growth will remain below 5 percent through the decade in its 10-year baseline. That’s bad. The average for nominal growth the last 60 years has been 6.5 percent.

Should economic growth remain lackluster in 2013, the debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to rise. And if Congress should cancel sequestration at some point, it will rise even faster.

To put these figures into perspective, if nominal GDP, at $15.864 trillion at the start of the year, grows 5 percent every year for the next 30 years — a rate faster than the CBO projects — without interruption, by 2042, GDP will total more than $66 trillion.

The debt, which was $16.432 trillion at the beginning of the year, if it returns to growing at an average 7 percent rate annually like it did the last 60 years, by 2042, the debt will be over $125 trillion.

That’s a debt to GDP of almost 190 percent. Don’t even ask what interest payments will be at that point — that could be in the tens of trillions of dollars a year if interest rates go awry. This is what eventually happens when the debt is allowed to grow uncontrollably faster than the economy.

Which means to battle excessive debt, Congress will have to remain ever vigilant against profligate spenders who believe we can borrow into perpetuity. Those who believe that we never need to pay back the debt.

Because should the spenders prevail, the American people will eventually be left with a debt that cannot be refinanced, let alone be repaid. Which won’t be good news.

Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.

Less than two weeks ago President Obama stood in front of graduates from The Ohio State University and told them to reject those who warn of government tyranny.

“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems,” he said.

To young, idealistic people his words likely sounded insightful — until last week. That’s when it became officially impossible to deny that the government abuses its power for political gain.

Practically overnight people labeled conspiracy theorists by the elite were proven prescient interpreters of how big government operates when news broke last Friday that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny in their tax-exempt applications. The media pile on against the administration is so ferocious Fox News could run live feeds from its competitors without losing a beat.

It should be so because the partisan treatment of hundreds of groups is stunning.

Ginny Rapini saw the IRS in action firsthand. The volunteer coordinator for the NorCal Tea Party applied for 501(c)(4) status for her group in July 2009. In the spring of 2010 the IRS asked for more information. She sent in the information immediately but didn’t hear from the IRS again until January 2012, she said. At that point the agency sent the group a list of 19 questions, including a request for the names of donors, every email the group sent and minutes of each board meeting, with the requirement that everything be returned within two weeks or the agency would consider the application void, she said. She sent the IRS 3,000 pages of information prior to the deadline — but did not include the names of donors. “I think they wanted to intimidate me, but instead they made me mad,” said Rapini.

After Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) spoke about NorCal’s problems with the IRS on the floor of the House and wrote to the agency, she got a favorable response to her application in the summer of 2012 — three years after the initial request, not unlike many other organizations treated to years of silence in between harassing questions.

What makes the IRS’s actions even worse is that top officials knew about the inappropriate questioning of conservative groups since 2011 but didn’t say anything about it to Congress. Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, was fired earlier this week, and should be the first of a long line of people held accountable for the agency’s flagrant mistreatment of political opponents by one of the most powerful government agencies.

On top of the IRS scandal, the Department of Justice (DOJ) last week admitted to secretly taking records of incoming and outgoing calls on work and personal phones of Associated Press (AP) reporters, its main lines in New York, Washington and Hartford, CT., and for the AP number in the House of Representatives. It took records on more than 20 lines in total in April and May of 2012 — lines used by more than 100 journalists.

Asked by National Public Radio how many other news media phone records the DOJ had taken Attorney General Eric Holder said, “I’m not sure how many of those cases…I have actually signed off on…I take them very seriously.”

So, confidential sources are not confidential if the government wants to know who they are. Whistleblowers beware.

That all of this is happening as the IRS is in the middle of hiring potentially thousands of new employees to write and enforce ObamaCare regulations should make everyone afraid. It is also happening while the IRS is in the middle of creating a giant information center with other federal agencies called the Data Services Hub to assist with rolling out ObamaCare (http://cciio.cms.gov/resources/factsheets/ffe.html ) that will provide one stop shopping on everything but what color underwear someone is wearing for the day.

The government promises, “Protecting the privacy of individuals remains the highest priority.” But after the last week, Americans should know there is no guarantee of personal privacy with the government or impartiality in how their information is used. It should also put Americans on notice that their political party could determine the quality of their health care. Welcome to the real world, Ohio State graduates.

Marta H. Mossburg writes frequently about national affairs and about Maryland, where she lives. Write her at marta@martamossburg.com. Follow her on Twitter at @mmossburg.

At a time when even Democrats are expressing shock at the political overreach of the Obama administration, and a new political scandal seems to pop up every day, you would think the Senate Democrats would be careful about what Obama appointees they support.  Instead they are bowing to pressure from labor, pushing through deeply flawed nominees, and contemplating radically rewriting the rules of the Senate to eliminate any attempt of bipartisanship.

Republicans have been fighting against some deeply flawed and highly controversial nominees for the National Labor Relations Board and Thomas Perez for Secretary of Labor.  While Republicans are demanding answers, Democrats and big labor are talking of ending the filibuster to push through their nominees.

As Americans for Limited Government (ALG) President Nathan Mehrens recently said, “President Obama’s nomination of Thomas Perez to become our nation’s next Secretary of Labor tests one of the fundamental tenets that have made our country great — the idea that no man is above the law.”

Mehrens added, “Yet Perez has demonstrated time and again not only a strong willingness, but almost a zeal, to subvert the law to meet his own political agenda.”

The labor movement’s response to these criticisms was to have a closed door meeting with Democrat leadership and demand they end the filibuster to confirm Obama’s nominees.  Redstate described the situation this way:

“With so many scandals in Washington these days, Senate Democrats may be about to add more fuel to conservatives’ fire at the behest of AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka and his fellow union bosses.  On Thursday, it’s political payback time in the U.S. Senate as union bosses demand that Harry Reid and his fellow union dues-funded Democrats go to bat for Barack Obama’s deeply-flawed nominations at the National Labor Relations Board and Department of Labor.

“The question will be whether Reid and his union-backed cronies deploy the so-called “nuclear option” to overcome Republican filibusters, as union bosses are demanding, and further widen the political divide for years to come.”

We need to stand strong and insist the president stops politicizing these positions.  We need people who will follow and enforce the law, not work hard to find creative ways to skirt it.

For a more stories on why Thomas Perez is too radical to be Labor Secretary see the following:

http://netrightdaily.com/2013/05/marsha-blackburn-and-nathan-mehrens-call-for-more-scrutiny-before-perez-confirmation-vote/

http://netrightdaily.com/2013/05/a-pattern-of-political-targeting-by-the-obama-administration/

http://netrightdaily.com/2013/05/thomas-perez-too-radical-for-labor/

Willie Deutsch is Editor-in-Chief for NetRightDaily.com, and Social Media Director for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow him on twitter @williedeutsch.

Now, the Obama Interior Department seeks to impose duplicative and costly new regulations on using hydraulic fracturing on public lands.  Land which hold billions of barrels of oil and an abundance of natural gas that can only be reached using this more than 50 year old technique.

Only the Obama Administration would think it is a good idea to disrupt through draconian regulaions the expansion of a process that is singlehandedly changing our nation’s energy future.  This is just another example of Obama’s backward focused energy policy that is more intent on forcing our nation into dependence on 13th century technologies like windmills and burning bio-mass while rejecting the new energy future that promises to lead to a new American century.

Below is the response to these regulations by House Resouces Committee Chairman Doc Hastings.

Chairman Hastings: Obama Admin’s Proposed Hydraulic Fracturing Rule Imposes New Layers of Red-Tape, Duplicates States’ Efforts

Would Hinder American Energy Production, Job Creation

WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) released the following statement on the proposed regulations of hydraulic fracturing on federal lands announced today by the Department of the Interior:

“The Obama Administration is once again choosing costly red tape at the expense of American jobs and American energy production.  It is charging forward with new regulations on hydraulic fracturing on federal and tribal lands that are burdensome, restrictive, unnecessary, and directly duplicate what states have been doing efficiently and effectively for over sixty years.  States are able to carefully craft regulations to meet the specific needs of their states.  Yet the Department seems committed to imposing a new ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of rules for hydraulic fracturing.  This is nothing more than another roadblock by the Obama Administration in the way of job creation, lower energy prices, and American energy security.  At a time when the Interior Department is currently canceling lease sales because they say they do not have the necessary funds, they should not be wasting federal dollars and resources implementing duplicative and unnecessary regulations.

“Furthermore, it is unacceptable that the Administration is only offering a mere 30-day public comment period on this proposed regulation that will have significant job, economic, and energy production impacts throughout the country.  The public comment period should be no less than 120 days.”

Background

For over two years, the Natural Resources Committee has conducted aggressive oversight of the Obama Administration’s pursuit of duplicative and potentially costly regulations of hydraulic fracturing on federal lands.  The Committee has held numerous hearings to learn from stakeholders about the job and economic impacts of federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing – most recently an oversight hearing on May 8, 2013 – and will conduct additional oversight of this proposed rule in June.

###

Willie Deutsch is Editor-in-Chief for NetRightDaily.com, and Social Media Director for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow him on twitter @williedeutsch.

Willie Deutsch is Editor-in-Chief for NetRightDaily.com, and Social Media Director for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow him on twitter @williedeutsch.

“We were simply doing what our bosses ordered.”

So say the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees in Cincinnati who were charged with targeting tea party and other conservative groups with improper and invasive scrutiny, according a Fox19 in Cincinnati exclusive report on May 15.

If true, this seemingly contradicts a Treasury Inspector General report on the matter released earlier that day, which stated: “the Determinations Unit developed and implemented inappropriate criteria in part due to insufficient oversight provided by management. Specifically, only first-line management approved references to the Tea Party in the … listing criteria before it was implemented.”

So, if the employees were just following orders, who gave the orders? According to the report, the Determinations Unit supposedly acted alone.

“We asked the Acting Commissioner, Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division; the Director, EO; and Determinations Unit personnel if the criteria were influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS. All of these officials stated that the criteria were not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS,” the report states.

So, the agency says nobody told them to do it. Which does not actually prove the matter. It merely states that agency members denied they were influenced from outside the agency.

But is that true? Did the IRS really just suddenly take it upon itself to target the tea party?

If so, it would have had to internally develop the presumption — without any outside stimulus — that such groups applying for tax-exempt status under section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code were actually engaged in electioneering as their primary purpose and subjected them to special scrutiny, meanwhile approving the applications of other organizations.

501(c)(4), (5), and (6) organizations are legally allowed to engage in electioneering so long as it is not the group’s primary purpose.

According to the report, other non-tea party organizations’ applications were approved in a timely manner, while tea party groups’ applications were held up for months and months: “For Fiscal Year 2012, the average time it took the Determinations Unit to complete processing applications requiring additional information from organizations applying for tax-exempt status … was 238 calendar days according to IRS data. In comparison, the average time a potential political case was open as of December 17, 2012, was 574 calendar days.”

A “potential political case” was among those that were targeted at tea party groups. If the employees were following orders from the managers, was it the “first-line management” who developed the criteria? Were they following orders, too?

Why was the tea party targeted? We still don’t know.

One clue may come on page 5 of the report, which states, “According to media reports, some organizations were classified as I.R.C. § 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations but operated like political organizations.”

On one hand, this seemingly contradicts the finding that the IRS was not influenced into targeting the tea party from outside the agency. If media reports at the time in 2010 were essentially suggesting that 501(c) organizations were acting as alleged front groups for electioneering purposes, and if this was somehow relevant to how the agency developed its criteria for targeting the tea party, then it appears that perhaps the agency was influenced from outside sources into developing its criteria.

However, it is hard to comprehend the context for that sentence on page 5, as it appears in a heavily redacted paragraph, with content both before and after omitted.

On the other hand, perhaps the Inspector General was merely commenting on the fact that there were media reports at the time about 501(c)(4) social welfare groups acting politically, but it had nothing to do with how the agency developed its criteria. If so, why include it in a section under the heading, “Criteria for selecting applications inappropriately identified organizations based on their names and policy positions”?

With the redactions, it is hard to know why.

Full timeline can be found in Appendix VII.

One of the only major media reports one can find specifically referencing 501(c) organizations acting politically in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision prior to Feb. 25, 2010 — when the report’s timeline of events begins — was a New York Times piece, “GOP Group to Promote Conservative Ideas” published on Feb. 3, 2010.

That story was about the formation of Norm Coleman’s American Action Network being formed and patterned after another well-known left-wing 501(c)(4) organization, the Center for American Progress. It referenced that the group would launch on Feb. 22, three days before the report’s timeline of events begins.

It also quoted Center for American Progress founder John Podesta as being against his group acting politically: “Podesta said his group has a policy against that and will not change it. Policy work, he said, ‘has political relevance but we shouldn’t become political actors.’”

Was that the media report the Inspector General was referencing? Who knows?

The fact is, nobody except for the Inspector General and the review board at Treasury knows what actually happened on Feb. 25, 2010 that prompted the IRS to actually develop new criteria targeting tea party and other conservative organizations. That portion of the report has been redacted and omitted.

The report includes an explanation about the omissions: “This report has cleared the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration disclosure review process and information determined to be restricted from public release has been redacted from this document.”

In all cases, the redacted information supposedly contained “Tax Return/Return Information,” according to the report.

Unfortunately, the Inspector General report leaves more questions than answers. It merely attributes the targeting of the tea party to breakdowns in management: “the Determinations Unit developed and implemented inappropriate criteria in part due to insufficient oversight provided by management.”

That still does not answer the question of why the Determinations Unit developed the criteria. What caused them to do this. They reportedly say they were following orders. The Inspector General has upper management stating it knew nothing at first. Perhaps, somebody’s lying.

To get to the bottom of this scandal, Congress will need to subpoena witnesses, and the Attorney General will need to name a special counsel — that is, an independent, special prosecutor — to ensure that a fully inquiry can be made without politics intervening.

Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.

There’s an old adage that personnel is policy and that no man is above the law.

That’s why President Barack Obama’s nomination of Thomas Perez, a man who has routinely undermined the rule of law to advance his own political agenda over the country’s best interest, to be our nation’s next secretary of labor is so troubling and why his nomination deserves closer scrutiny.

The U.S. Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is holding a hearing on the Perez nomination Thursday. U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee is the ranking Republican on the committee.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has called Perez “a committed ideologue who appears willing, quite frankly, to say or do anything to achieve his ideological ends. … His willingness, time and again, to bend or ignore the law and to misstate the facts in order to advance his far-left ideology lead me and others to conclude that he’d continue to do so if he were confirmed.”

In light of the growing scandals involving the IRS targeting conservative organizations and the accounts about how the Justice Department monitored Associated Press phone lines without users’ knowledge in possible violation of the First Amendment, we can ill afford to insert another blatant political activist in a high-level cabinet position in our government. Evidence of Perez’s disregard for the rule of law is rife throughout his career.

Finish the story for the rest of the details of Perez’s radical views.

Senate Democrats Block Sen. Paul’s Resolution

Condemning IRS