Maybe we can put a stop to the assault on the privacy of donors to political causes.
By “we” I mean The Buckeye Institute and the Institute for Free Speech, who have teamed up to challenge “a decades-old law that forces the IRS to demand that nonprofit charities hand over the private information of their largest donors every year.”
The IRS itself admits that collecting this personal data “poses a risk of inadvertent disclosure.”
Also a risk of fully advertent disclosure.
The IRS has often been used to harass the political enemies of federal officials in a position to tell the agency what to do.
Buckeye Institute President Robert Alt reports the Institute’s own experience as Exhibit A. In 2013, soon after it had urged Ohio to reject Obamacare-inspired efforts to expand Medicaid, the Institute was subjected to an IRS harassment-audit.
The specter of this investigation was a scary one for the Institute’s major donors, who reasonably assumed that the audit was retaliatory. They worried that if their own names came up during the audit, they too would be subject to IRS attention. Many donors drastically scaled back their giving so they’d be less of a target; others stopped donating altogether.
Prospects for the Institutes’ litigation are good. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in a 2021 ruling that the government must at least consider “the potential for First Amendment harms before requiring that organizations reveal sensitive information about their members and supporters.”
Anonymity in political activism has a long American history — from the start, actually.
It’s what democracy looks like.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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8 replies on “Not Inadvertent”
Excellent article.
Agree in principle with full knowledge the protection will apply equally to all donors, progressive as well as conservative.
Hi Paul,
I agree that privacy is important. Even as a very tiny donor to some specific political causes, I have received unexpected attention. I used a unique email address when I donated, and it appears to me that others have access to that info because I get a ton of political emails to that address.
On the other hand, if privacy is assured to political donors, how do we address the threat of enemy countries funding chaos during our political elections? Doesn’t it seem like a terrible idea to allow enemy nation-states to have a hand in our USA elections? Is that even preventable?
In a functioning democracy, the outcomes of elections are not determined by who spends the most money, but by who provides the most persuasive argument amongst those that are heard.
So long as a campaign has enough resources to present its argument to virtually all potential voters, it can lose only to more persuasive arguments. Less persuasive arguments cannot win merely by their advocates outspending rivals, but by those advocates or their allies silencing those rivals.
The Chinese or Russians or whoever cannot defeat America by positively funding nonsense. They can only win if the institutions of America obstruct arguments that are not nonsense.
Arguing for any obstruction of argument plays into the hands of those seeking to obstruct sound arguments.
(And an underlying need here is to reduce or bypass the institutional immunization of nonsense by state-managed schools and by state-captured news and entertainment.)
Bravo! Agree 100%.
It can be a serious problem, yes — though, less for a country the size and wealth of America where foreign machinations will not drown out us natives. We can outlaw foreign money and participation, as we do. But they still do it. Ultimately, people have to be able to discern right from wrong and good from bad per policy and candidates.
While not a large donor to charities by any means, I have been known to drop some cash or a postal money order in an envelope to help out.
In various cases, recipients are legally required to forfeit anonymous donations.