Politico has more on the IRS requests which were directed at election integrity organizations.

Some of the usual opponents of free speech rights, including Common Cause, are making excuses for the bad (and likely criminal) behavior at the IRS.  George Will has a response:

“An emerging liberal narrative is that this tempest is all the Supreme Court’s fault: The Citizens United decision — that corporations, particularly nonprofit advocacy groups, have First Amendment rights — so burdened the IRS with making determinations about who deserves tax-exempt status that some political innocents in Cincinnati inexplicably decided to begin by rummaging through the affairs of conservatives. Ere long, presumably, they would have gotten around to groups with ‘progressive’ in their titles.

Remember, all campaign ‘reform’ proposals regulate political speech. And all involve the IRS in allocating speech rights.

I will be speaking in Mobile, Alabama on May 21.  Link and details here. (It is in Mobile at 5:30pm at Witzells Oyster House on Dauphin Street).

Yesterday, we find out the IRS is being used as a partisan weapon.  Anyone in DC knows the reform groups have been trying to use the FEC as a partisan weapon for years.  The Republicans on the FEC have just bought a billboard to advertise and put the legions of “reform groups” on notice that they are not going to let it happen. In an op-ed, they write:

“When Congress created the FEC, it did not design an agency that could
be wielded as a partisan weapon; instead, the agency is required to be
equally divided, with, at most, three of its six members from the same
party. Thus, the FEC is designed to ensure fair and impartial regulation
and administration of campaign finance laws — not partisan or
ideological witch hunts.”

And this:

The agency’s harshest critics disregard the agency’s prime enforcement
directive: Enforce the law as it is, not as some wish it to be.

The DOJ looked at Wicomico County Delaware County a number of years ago.  Are they back?  Given the desparate need for the administrations first Section 2 case since it took office in 2009, signs point to yes, especially since the ACLU is aggitating for action.


“In the interim, as the ACLU is waiting for a response from the DOJ, Sample-Hughes, D-1, said she will continue hosting community meetings in her district to make sure constituents can be involved in their government.”

 MSNBC: He noted Rice has “the absolute, total, complete confidence of the President of the United States of America. So when she speaks, when she speaks in the discordant world we reside in right now, no one wonders, no one wonders, whether or not she’s speaking for the president.”

The RNC filed its opening brief in a case challenging limits on the
total amount one person can donate in a single election cycle. The RNC
says the limits are unconstitutional.

The Hill.

While the President has launched a so-called bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration after the 2012 General Election, the Vice-President apparently got the internal political memorandum and is making the “long lines” issue a racial and partisan issue.  Whatever his excuse, he is already undermining any legitimate review of election issues from the previous presidential election.  Biden ignores the evidence of no racial intent in lines where the relatively few lines were in urban area codes that included both whites and blacks and have a history of underfunding of election. 

Instead, the Vice-President of the United States feels the need to make “the lines” an racial and political issue.  Up to this point, few substantive analysts have pointed to intentional racial discrimination for any of the lines on election day.  But there is always Joe Biden.  With these comments certain to alienate Republicans, the White House is setting the Commission up for failure.

Politico reports: 

Before a heavily African-American crowd, Biden seized on a deeply polarizing issue in this state: voting rights.  Invoking a 106-year-old lady who cast a ballot last year, Biden claimed she waited seven hours to vote.  “She said, ‘I tell you what, I didn’t fight this hard, this long, for
anybody to deny me the right to vote,’ ” thundered the vice president.

It wasn’t clear if Biden was alluding to the 106-year-old South
Carolina woman who voted for the first time last year or the
102-year-old Florida lady who famously had to wait for over three hours
to cast her ballot and attended President Obama’s State of the Union
address in February. Or, Biden being Biden, he might have
unintentionally rolled the two anecdotes together and come up with his
own version.

It turns out the “honor system” is not an effective way to ensure honest elections.

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