In the better-late-than-never department, the Internal Revenue Service has granted tax-exempt status to Friends of Abe. Variety magazine calls the group “Hollywood’s largest fellowship of conservative and right-of-center independents” in an industry known for tilting 320 degrees or so to the left.
The status comes three years after the Friends filed its application. But the belated approval does not mean that IRS’s politically motivated targeting has stopped and that all legitimate applications filed by conservative groups are now being granted with only standard quotients of bureaucratic lethargy.
The American Center for Law and Justice — representing 41 plaintiffs who say IRS violated their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly — attests that 13 of them have still not received tax-exempt status, with the oldest application having gathered dust since 2009. Meanwhile, the IRS officer until recently overseeing these applications, Lois Lerner, continues to plead the Fifth when asked to testify about the agency’s conduct.
We may never fully know what happened and is still happening here, given the stonewalling being done not only by Lerner but others in IRS and elsewhere in the government (like the Justice Department). But it is clear that IRS has abetted the freedom of speech and assembly of ideologically favored groups at the expense of others, and to the benefit of President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign; and that IRS wants even more power to thus discriminate. The policies being covered up are wrong, dangerous . . . and ongoing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.