“The IRS Gets Political,” WSJ:

We’re starting to see a pattern here. Since the Supreme Court restored the First Amendment rights of businesses and unions in last year’s Citizens United ruling, Democrats have been searching for a way to claw back control over political speech. The latest bureau to get the memo is the Internal Revenue Service, which may retroactively tax top donors to political advocacy groups.

In the crossroads, er, cross-hairs, are nonprofit groups that register under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code and spent millions on political advertising in the last election cycle. Big donations to those groups, the agency now says, should have been subject to gift taxes and may be owed retroactively. In a letter to one donor, the IRS noted that it “had received information that you donated cash to . . . an IRC Section 501(c)(4) organization . . . and your contribution should have been reported on your 2008 federal gift tax return.”

The letters are especially odd since the purpose of the gift tax has traditionally been used in coordination with the estate tax, to prevent people from avoiding the tax by divesting their wealth before they die. Contributions to 501(c)(4)s aren’t a routine death tax avoidance mechanism, and the contributions now under scrutiny are a pittance compared to overall gift tax revenues. So, hmmm, what could be the reason to start asserting the provision now, and only against a handful of high-profile political donors?

IRS spokesman Michelle Eldridge said in a statement last week that the letters are the idea of career IRS employees, not the White House, and that they are part of a larger investigation of gift tax compliance. Count us skeptical that a new targeted enforcement plan, likely coordinated between at least two of the highly compartmentalized divisions of the IRS, was just cooked up by some career guys.

But even if the Obama Administration doesn’t deserve primary credit for this idea to chill political activity, it will still serve the Democrats’ purpose in time for 2012 fundraising. A tax probe of donations given by a specific class of political donors is a boldfaced attempt to punish and discourage political speech.

The IRS also says the investigations into a few deep-pocketed donors isn’t the prelude to a broader offensive against the groups. Nah, that would mean they were taking their cues from liberal campaign finance groups like Democracy 21, which has been flogging this idea as a way to impose greater disclosure requirements. Last September, Montana Democrat Max Baucus wrote a letter to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman to suggest he start investigating the political groups.

We wish we were shocked, but the plan is merely the latest play by Democrats to crack down on donors who support their opponents. […]

[…]

All this is done in the name of “transparency,” which is a nice way of saying, we know where you live. The real goal is to intimidate business and big donors from giving money to Republicans. The draft executive order aiming to wrest disclosure from federal contractors appears to make no such demands on federal labor unions, which had their free speech rights restored alongside business in Citizens United.

Let’s get one thing straight: the only “transparency” on evidence here is this Administrations’ view that the rule of law is, as with everything else, contingent — and is just another tool among many to be marshaled in support of their ends. That it could be seen as a restraint on their desires or a check to their power simply doesn’t register with them; the law is never neutral: it is either with them or against them, and in the latter case. In the former case, it is to used as a weapon against opponents. In the latter case it is to be circumvented, ignored, or delegitimated.

Because this is who they are. When your entire ideological worldview is predicated on the notion that you know best and are supposed to be in control — and that having your noble ends reached is itself moral and good, even if the means you need to employ to reach those ends oftentimes are not (at least, by the standards of some rigid morality that doesn’t allow for the pragmatic finessing of context) — using power, however you wield it, in the service of the Greater Good is a kind of intellectual and emotional imperative.

Of course, the fact that this is an ideological question beg of the highest order is lost on these, our betters. Or rather, acknowledging the logical fallacy of their entire world view is what convinced these self-centered zealots that logic itself must therefore be vanquished — yet another obstacle obstructing the road to a leftist Nirvana.

(h/t geoffb)