Justin's Political Corner

On Monday, President Obama weighed in on the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups by the Internal Revenue Service, calling for a full investigation into what he said would constitute “outrageous” conduct. That’s one way to put it. Here’s another: depressingly normal. For much of the last century, abuse of the IRS for political ends has been the rule, not the exception. Under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, the IRS has gone after communists, students, black activists, young conservatives, and mainstream political rivals. Here are some prime examples:

Franklin D. Roosevelt: According to libertarian historian Burton W. Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal, Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, noted that FDR “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution”—most notably against former Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long. (The famously corrupt Long, in fairness, was kind of asking for it.) Rep. Hamilton Fish, a New York Republican, alleged that Roosevelt’s IRS had gone after him on trumped-up charges—and when that failed, handed the investigation over to the FBI instead. Roosevelt’s longtime Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., admitted that the administration had deliberately targeted his Republican predecessor, Richard Mellon, on trumped-up charges of tax evasion.

Dwight Eisenhower: The FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, relied heavily on the compliance of the IRS to go after members of the Communist Party. Per a 1976 Senate report, “In its efforts against the Communist Party, the FBI had unlimited access to tax returns; it never told the IRS why it wanted them, and IRS never attempted to find out.”

John F. Kennedy: In 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy teamed up with United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther to produce the “Reuther Memorandum,” which proposed curtailing the influence of far-right groups in two ways. The first was the enforcement of the Federal Communication Commision’s “Fairness Doctrine,” to limit their use of the airwaves. The second was the IRS, through an initiative called “The Ideological Organizations Audit Project,” which explored the political activities of conservative nonprofits. The program eventually expanded to the other of the side of political spectrum, but according to the 1976 Senate investigation, that was mostly a facade of nonpartisanship.

Richard Nixon: The godfather of “Nixonian tactics” believed he’d been a political target of the agency in the Truman administration—not that he needed an excuse to use the Internal Revenue Service as a tool with which to dispatch “enemies.” Under Tricky Dick, the IRS created the Special Services Staff (SSS) to investigate thousands of perceived enemy groups and individuals. (Nixon aide Pat Buchanan feared that groups like the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution were acting essentially as Democratic organs.) White House counsel John Dean testified that the administration pushed the IRS to audit reporters who wrote stories critical of Nixon, such asNewsday’s Robert Greene. Nixon himself wanted the SSS to focus on political adversaries like 1972 presidential challenger George McGovern, student groups, and civil rights organizations like the NAACP. When the IRS audited Billy Graham, a Nixon ally, the president responded with force: “Get the word down to the IRS that I want them to conduct field audits of those who are our opponents, if they’re going to do in our friends.”

Jimmy Carter: Republicans accused the born-again Christian president of an “unconstitutional regulatory vendetta” against religious institutions after his IRS director, Jerome Kurtz, introducednew regulation to end the tax-exempt status of Christian schools. Kurtz ultimately had to retain Secret Service protection after a wave of death threats from supporters of religious education.

Ronald Reagan: This one hit close to home. Mother Jones had been around for six years when, in 1981, Ronald Reagan’s IRS tried to shut it down. The agency concluded that the magazine was not living up to its tax-exempt motives and instead functioned like any other publishing house, with the goal of making as much money as possible. That was weird, given that Mother Jones had to that point never made a profit. The timing was also suspicious—a half-dozen or so other left-of-center publications came in for the same scrutiny by the agency. MoJo eventually won—but not until it had burned hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Bill Clinton: The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which filed a string of lawsuits against the administration centering on public records, alleged that it was in the crosshairs of the Clinton White House—along with a dozen other groups and individuals that had gotten on the president’s bad side. The list of of audited parties in the Clinton era included Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Documents later released by the IRS during the Bush administration revealed that high-ranking Democrats, including a half-dozen members of Congress, had written to the IRS requesting an investigation into Judicial Watch’s nonprofit status. One IRS official allegedly told the group, “What do you expect when you sue the president?”

George W. Bush: The NAACP experienced an unwelcome case of Nixon Nostaliga in 2004, when it found itself under IRS scrutiny after the group’s chairman, Julian Bond, told attendees of its annual convention to oust Bush. (The president had been invited to the convention but declined.) After a two-year investigation, the IRS backed off.

h/t: Tim Murphy at Mother Jones

SPRINGFIELD-Advocates for same-sex marriage in Illinois scored an important endorsement Friday in their bid to win over black Illinois House members, who may hold the key in determining whether legislation legalizing gay marriage passes.

Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP from 1998 to 2009, signed a letter of support that went out to the Illinois House, which could take up the legislation when lawmakers return from their two-week spring break next week.

“I’ve experienced the joys of marriage for more than 20 years. My wife, Pamela, and I stood before our friends and family and made a lifelong commitment to one another. We’ve taken care of each other ever since,” the civil rights leader and longstanding backer of gay marriage said in his letter.

“My gay and lesbian brothers and sisters simply want the freedom to make that same commitment. And they deserve the same protection that my wife and I have. It’s just that simple,” Bond said.

Bond’s entry into Illinois’ gay-marriage debate came the same day that Cardinal Francis George joined a group of African-American pastors in denouncing the legislative push and insisting marriage should only exist between a woman and a man.

Supporters of the legislation, Senate Bill 10, need 60 votes to pass the Illinois House, and House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) said last month the measure was about a dozen votes shy of meeting that threshold.

Since then, both sides of the contentious debate have been working the legislation. Between three and five House Republicans are expected to be on board, leaving supporters having to nail down backing from 55 to 57 out of a total of 71 House Democrats.

h/t: Chicago Sun-Times

A group of prominent black conservatives is trying to help scrap a key part of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights-era legislation that enshrined the right of black Americans to have equal treatment at the ballot box.

The law was signed in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson in the presence of civil rights leaders like Dr Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, and it represented one of the milestone victories in ending the Jim Crow segregation of the deep south.

Now, however, a black conservative group called Project 21 has filed a legal brief before the US supreme court in support of a case aimed at overturning key provisions of the act. The bid, on which the supreme court is set to rule this summer, has been brought by the authorities in Shelby County in the southern state of Alabama. 

Project 21′s argument focuses on the part of the Voting Rights Act called Section 5, which holds that certain areas of the country with a history of racial discrimination when it comes to voting rights need to get federal approval before changing any of their voting procedures.

Cherylyn Harley LeBon, a former senior counsel for the US Senate judiciary committee and a co-founder of Project 21, told the Guardian that her group – which represents numerous high-profile black conservatives – supports the scrapping of Section 5 because she believes America had changed so much since the law was signed.

“Now we are in 2013, and the Voting Rights Act was something that came from a historical context. We need to update the law and this part of it is no longer needed,” Harley LeBon said. She said her own father had hailed from the deep south and had left the region at times to get away from racial discrimination, but she insisted changing the act now was still the right thing to do. “Just because issues may be difficult to deal with does not mean they should not be dealt with,” she said.

However, the effort to scrap part of the Voting Rights Act has met stiff opposition with many civil rights groups, especially those seeking to represent black Americans. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has come out strongly against the legal bid by Shelby County and its supporters.

Harley LeBon disagreed, saying that Section 5 was an unfair intrusion by the federal government into the rights of local government to organise their own affairs and that she was happy for black conservatives at Project 21 to spark a debate on such a thorny racial issue. “This is what America is all about: having a discussion. There is a whole network of black conservatives. The Democrats do not have a lock on black support,” she said.

Project 21 is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Washington-based foundation that says it is dedicated to finding “free market solutions” to social problems. According to its website, the NCPPP opposes environmental regulation, the influence of the United Nations and wants to drastically cut government spending.

H/T: The Raw Story

Conservative blogs and news media are all buzzing about a team of international election monitors coming to observe the presidential elections in November. The observers are arriving at the invitation of the State Department and the behest of a number of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, ACLU, and others.

The latter groups’ call for an international team to keep an eye on the U.S. elections focuses particularly on states that have enacted strict voter I.D. laws and other curtailing of voting rights. An NAACP delegation visited the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland in September to bring attention to the issue. The NAACP’s move, and the idea of foreign presence in the U.S. to observe elections, has infuriated many on the right.

The response at the state-level is varying. Alabama Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard is, in protest of the monitors’ presence preparing legislation to have all poll watchers in Alabama hold U.S. citizenship. “It’s bad enough that Alabama remains trapped under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act,” Hubbard said “So we certainly don’t need anyone from the United Nations coming into our state and meddling in our elections, as well.”

Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote appeared on Fox News on Monday claiming that the monitors’ presence was actually intended to prevent and discourage U.S. voters from exercising their rights. Fox’s Megyn Kelly readily agreed, stressing the left-leaning nature of the civil rights groups, seemingly unaware of the State Department’s role in inviting the monitors. It’s worth mentioning that True the Vote, itself a Tea Party group voter suppression effort, is currently under investigation for possible criminal conspiracy.

What none of these commentators mention is that this is neither an unprecedented event nor particularly worrisome. The Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) is a group of over fifty countries in North America, Europe, and Central Asia committed to security and strengthening democracy. Counter to many of the exclamatory statements by the right-wing, the OSCE is not a part of the United Nations, but instead is loosely affiliated with the global organization.

Also, counter to conservatives, the monitors have no mandate to interfere in the elections. 

H/T: Hayes Brown at Think Progress Security

A group of anti-gay pastors is heading to Houston to hold a press conference outside of the NAACP’s convention today, protesting the organization’s decision to endorse marriage equality. The Coalition of African American Pastors is led by William Owens, a Memphis preacher who has been a consistent advocate on behalf of state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and is a founding member of the anti-gay Arlington Group. Owens launched a new coalition, 100,000 Signatures for Marriage, to stop the “hijacking of the civil rights movement by homosexuals, bisexuals and gender-confused people” and to “speak out against President Obama’s support for this destructive agenda,” and is now alleging that Obama is snubbing African Americans for not speaking at the NAACP convention even though he held a gay pride event:

“He can have the gay pride celebration in the White House, he can have Lady Gaga in the White House, and he’s in the White House today because of the civil rights movement and the price that was paid for civil rights,” said the Rev. William Owens, the president of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, a group that opposes Obama’s gay marriage stance. “He has met with the Latinos; he meets with everything except for the people who put him where he is.”

He told the Christian Post today that he is going to the NAACP convention not only to protest Obama but also attack the group’s position on marriage equality, saying that the NAACP is abandoning “its roots” and must do what “Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., called on us to do,” which according to Owens is to oppose gay rights.

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

Willard told the audience that he’d “support traditional marriage” which was weird, because the NAACP came out in favor of same sex marriage a couple months ago. He blamed all of the nation’s educational problems on “unions” — also very odd — and obviously untrue.

On the plus side, he broke with George W. Bush and said he’d address the NAACP next year if he was president, which did get some applause and surely pissed off the right-wingers that defended Bush for snubbing them all those years.

But then there was this:

I will eliminate all the expensive non-essential programs I can find, that includes Obamacare, and I’m going to work to reform and save…

UPDATE: You knew it was coming: Hannity Guest: ‘NAACP Has Become a Hate Group’

H/T: Blue Texan at Crooks and Liars

Attorney General Eric Holder deviated from his prepared remarks during a speech before the NAACP on Tuesday and called voter ID laws “poll taxes.”

“Under the proposed law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID, but student IDs would not,” Holder said. “Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them, and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. We call those poll taxes.”

Holder has been very critical of voter ID laws in the past, but this appears to be the first time he’s gone as far as to compare them to the Jim Crow-era effort to purposefully disenfranchise African-Americans.

Holder’s right on target.

H/T: Ryan J. Reilly at TPM

The board of the NAACP, the “nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization,” endorsed marriage equality at a meeting this afternoon. The move comes 10 days after President Obamaannounced his support of same-sex marriage.

The NAACP’s move comes as attitudes about gays and lesbians in the African American community are changing rapidly. A recent poll found that 54% of African Americans supported President Obama’s recent decision.

The NAACP Board of Directors has just endorsed marriage equality unequivocally. Only two opposed! An historic moment.

— Maxim Thorne (@Maximthorne) May 19, 2012

Who wants to bet that the Conservative [Christian] Media will deride the NAACP as a “bunch of pervert-coddlers and immoral filth peddlers for the ‘(radical) homosexual agenda?’” I bet it will happen, as soon as later this afternoon or in your pulpits tomorrow.

h/t: Judd Legum at Think Progress LGBT