Hopefully, This Will Amount to Something

The IRS is investigating the political Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS to see if they violated tax code:

Big dark-money groups like the Karl Rove-advised Crossroads GPS promised the IRS they would have "limited" involvement in politics—in order to protect their nonprofit tax-exempt status—yet went on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the 2010 and 2012 federal elections. Now several tax policy experts, including a former high-ranking IRS official who ran the division overseeing nonprofits, say the IRS must bring the hammer down on these shadowy nonprofits or risk looking weak and useless.

"The government's going to have to investigate them and prosecute them," says Marcus Owens, who ran the IRS's tax-exempt division for a decade and is now a lawyer in private practice. "In order to maintain the integrity of the process, they're going to be forced to take action."

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The most high-profile nonprofit to tell the IRS one thing and seemingly do another is Crossroads GPS, the powerful group cofounded by Karl Rove. In a 41-page application, dated September 3, 2010, Crossroads told the IRS it would spend only a "limited" amount of money on influencing elections. Crossroads is different from the two groups mentioned above in a crucial way: The IRS has yet to approve its tax-exempt application, which means its 2010 application is confidential. Yet ProPublica obtained it and exposed the gap between what Crossroads said in September 2010 and what it went on to do.

Despite telling the IRS it would spend a "limited" amount of money on politics, Crossroads unloaded nearly $16 million in dark money on political advertising during the 2010 campaign and more than $70 million to influence the presidential and congressional contests in 2012.

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Hill says she doubts whether the IRS has the "political will" to go after political nonprofit groups, which spent well over $400 million on the 2012 elections and often have direct ties to top Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Yet what's at stake, Hill adds, is nothing less than the very integrity of the tax law. "We have tax laws on the books—the question now is, does the IRS intend to enforce the law?" she asks. "Or are we all just going to pretend that the laws are going to be enforced?"

I'm inclined to believe Frances Hill when she doubts that the IRS has the political will to enforce the law. 

The IRS cannot do this without support from the Department of Justice and from the White House, because there will be a storm of coordinated faux-outrage from the right wing punditry.

Based on prior history, it is highly unlikely that the White House will have the IRS's back when this happens.