The IRS vs. the NAACP

With all the news coverage of the recent presidential election, you may have missed a story that bears watching. The Internal Revenue Service, that paragon of efficiency and ethics, is coming after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In late October, newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and USA Today published stories outlining the strange case of the NAACP suddenly coming under IRS scrutiny. "Citing Speech, IRS Decides to Review NAACP," read the story headline in the Oct. 29 edition of The New York Times. The story by Michael Janofsky detailed an Oct. 8 letter from an IRS operative to NAACP chairman Julian Bond. The letter "reminded the association that tax-exempt organizations were legally barred from supporting or opposing any candidate for elective office," Janofsky wrote in the Times. Incredibly, it seems that the IRS decided that a speech that Bond gave back in July, during the NAACP's annual convention in Philadelphia, constituted a political speech which "conveyed statements in opposition of George W. Bush for the office of the Presidency." You may recall that the Philadelphia gathering of the nation's oldest civil rights organization was the same confab that Bush had declined to attend.

You may also recall that Bond, in that Philadelphia address and other speeches, has roundly criticized the Bush administration for it's negligence of civil rights issues. But less obvious to lay people – and to the IRS, apparently – is the fact that the federal tax code carries no language barring non-profit groups from criticizing elected officials in public speech. Moreover, as Bond pointed out in several interviews following disclosure of the IRS' attempt to jack up the NAACP, he has been critical of past presidential administrations, too, on a host of public policy moves, including welfare reform and affirmative action. Indeed, the meat of his speech to the crowd in Philadelphia last July was hardly outrageous: "The election this fall is a contest between two widely disparate views of who we are and what we believe," Bond told the crowd at the annual convention in Philadelphia last summer. "One view wants to march us backward through history – surrendering control of government to special interests, weakening democracy, giving religion veto power over science, curtailing civil liberties, despoiling the environment." Clearly Bond wasn't necessarily talking about the Democratic Party with those comments, but neither did he single out Bush or his cabinet members by name. Yet, the Oct. 8 letter from the IRS to the NAACP accused Bond of using language in that Philadelphia speech that "condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush in education, the economy and the war in Iraq." Of course, the IRS commissioner, Mark W. Everson, denies political motivation in the agency's move against the NAACP. "The IRS follows strict procedures involving the selection of tax-exempt organizations for adit and resolution of any complaints about such groups," Everson told The New York Times. "Career civil servants, not political appointees, make these decisions in a fair, impartial manner," Everson continued. "Any suggestion that the IRS has tilted its audit activities for political purposes is repugnant and groundless."

Sure thing, chief! But, as we learned from the Swift Boat Veterans' scurrilous attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry, the Bush administration is especially adept at getting surrogates to do its dirty work. And if a couple or several well-placed complaints from Republican operatives led to the IRS investigation of the NAACP mere weeks before the presidential election, it doesn't take a genius – or a conspiracy theorist – to sense the cold hand of political intimidation at work. Ultimately, only time will tell if the IRS is really serious about its "investigation" (it has asked Bond to provide a list of names of board members, their salaries, job descriptions, etc.) or if the agency was simply grandstanding as the presidential election approached. But, the bullying implication is clear: as Bond observed in an interview in late October,"It's Orwellian to believe that criticism of the president is not allowed or that the president is somehow immune from criticism." And more than that, of course, is the possibility that the IRS has the power to revoke the NAACP's nonprofit status, a move that would create disaster for the 95-year-old civil rights organization.