Tag Archives: IRS

IRS Agrees to Atheist Group’s Demands to Monitor Sermons

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thenewamerican.com

The Internal Revenue Service continues to extend its already vast overreach, this time by agreeing to monitor church sermons as part of an agreement the government made on July 17 with the aggressively atheistic Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Freedom Outpost reported, “The Internal Revenue Service settled a lawsuit brought by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The 2012 lawsuit was settled after the IRS agreed to monitor what is said in houses of worship, something that is a clear violation of the First Amendment, since no law can be written by Congress to this effect.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Wisconsin, brought the suit against the IRS, asserting that the group had been ignoring complaints that churches were violating their tax-exempt statuses. According to the group’s suit, churches promote political issues, legislation, and candidates from the pulpit.

FFRF asserted, “Pulpit Freedom Sunday … has become an annual occasion for churches to violate the law with impunity. The IRS, meanwhile, admittedly was not enforcing the restrictions against churches.”

FFRF claims that the churches are acting in violation of the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which states that non-profits cannot endorse candidates.

A 2009 court ruling determined that the IRS must staff someone to monitor church politicking, but the Freedom From Religion Foundation claims that the IRS has not been adhering to the ruling.

Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom and head of the Pulpit Initiative, told LifeSiteNews that “the IRS has no business censoring what a pastor preaches from the pulpit.” Stanley states that his organization is currently “attempting to bring the era of IRS censorship and intimidation to an end by challenging the Johnson Amendment, which imposes unconstitutional restrictions on clergy speech.”

He contends that churches should not have to choose between tax-exempt status and freedom of speech. “No one would suggest a pastor give up his church’s tax-exempt status if he wants to keep his constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure or cruel and unusual punishment,” he said.

Stanley insists that not only would it be unfair for churches to have to choose between one or the other, but that “churches are automatically tax exempt out of recognition that the surest way to destroy the free exercise of religion is to begin taxing it.” “Churches are constitutionally entitled to a tax exemption and that exemption cannot be conditioned on the surrender of constitutional rights.”

In celebration of its victory with the IRS, the Freedom From Religion Foundation issued a press release wherein it outlined its win:

The IRS has now resolved the signature authority issue necessary to initiate church examinations. The IRS also has adopted procedures for reviewing, evaluating and determining whether to initiate church investigations. While the IRS retains “prosecutorial” discretion with regard to any individual case, the IRS no longer has a blanket policy or practice of non-enforcement of political activity restrictions as to churches.

The press release also acknowledges, however, that the judge in the case could not order immediate action since a moratorium has been placed on the investigations by the IRS of tax exempt groups after the 2013 scandal in which the IRS was found to have been targeting Christian and conservative groups.

The scandal involves the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division of the IRS openly targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt 501c4 “social welfare” organization status between 2010 and 2012. Those groups faced additional audits and scrutiny by the agency. The audits cost the organizations tens of thousands of dollars and many hundreds employee hours, and ultimately delayed the groups from receiving tax-exempt status.

But FFRF contends that it may still bring a lawsuit against the IRS again if necessary after the moratorium is lifted:

As a result, FFRF has reached a point where no further immediate changes realistically can be accomplished through continued litigation. The dismissal of the pending action, however, is expected to be without prejudice, which means that further legal action by FFRF to enforce anti-electioneering provisions is not precluded in the future if necessary.

Regardless of this, the FFRF views the settlement as a win overall. “This is a victory, and we’re pleased with this development in which the IRS has proved to our satisfaction that it now has in place a protocol to enforce its own anti-electioneering provisions,” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor in a press release. “Of course, we have the complication of a moratorium currently in place on any IRS investigations of any tax-exempt entities, church or otherwise, due to the congressional probe of the IRS,” she added. “FFRF could refile the suit if anti-electioneering provisions are not enforced in the future against rogue political churches.”

This is just one of many items on the FFRF anti-Christian agenda. In 2012, the group targeted the presence of a cross at a World War I memorial at a fire department in Rhode Island, though the cross had been there for nearly 100 years.

Earlier this year, the FFRF demanded that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker remove a Christian reference from his Twitter and Facebook accounts. The group’s president, Annie Laurie Gaylor, had sent a letter to the governor insisting that it is “improper for a state employee, much less for the chief executive officer of the state, to use the machinery of the state of Wisconsin to promote personal religious views.”

The FFRF had also targeted prayer offerings at the city council meetings of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, as well as at the city council meetings in Pueblo and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Unfortunately for the FFRF, a May Supreme Court ruling has determined that prayer at these meetings is permissible. In Town of Greece v. Galloway, the court determined that prayer offered by members of the clergy at town board meetings does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The case pertained to prayer at town board meetings in Greece, New York, and was forwarded by a pair of non-Christians who complained that all the town of Greece government meetings between 1999 and 2007 were opened with specifically Christian invocations.

“The prayer opportunity in this case must be evaluated against the backdrop of historical practice,” the majority wrote in its opinion. “As a practice that has long endured, legislative prayer has become part of our heritage and tradition, part of our expressive idiom, similar to the Pledge of Allegiance, inaugural prayer, or the recitation of ‘God save the United States and this honorable Court’ at the opening of this Court’s sessions.”

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The real path to Pulpit Freedom

Top Constitutional Experts: Obama Is Worse than Nixon

Originally posted on May 15, 2013

washingtonsblog.com

Objective Analysis: Obama Versus Nixon

In the wake of the twin scandals of the IRS targeting conservative groups and the Department of Justice spying on AP reporters, the comparisons between Obama and Nixon are everywhere.

But what do experts say?

Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale – who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration – said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms. And see this.

Former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald noted last year:

We supposedly learned important lessons from the abuses of power of the Nixon administration, and then of the Bush administration: namely, that we don’t trust government officials to exercise power in the dark, with no judicial oversight, with no obligation to prove their accusations. Yet now we hear exactly this same mentality issuing from Obama, his officials and defenders to justify a  far more extreme power than either Nixon or Bush dreamed of asserting: he’s only killing The Bad Citizens, so there’s no reason to object!

Jonathan Turley – perhaps the top constitutional law expert in the United States (and a liberal) – writes:

The painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be.

Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments. Consider a few examples:

Warrantless surveillance

Nixon’s use of warrantless surveillance led to the creation of a special court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). But the reform turned out to be more form than substance. The secret court turned “probable cause” into a meaningless standard, virtually guaranteeing any surveillance the government wanted. After hundreds of thousands of applications over decades, only a couple have ever been denied.

Last month, the Supreme Court crushed any remaining illusions regarding FISA when it sided with the Obama administration in ruling that potential targets of such spying had to have proof they were spied upon before filing lawsuits, even if the government has declared such evidence to be secret. That’s only the latest among dozens of lawsuits the administration has blocked while surveillance expands exponentially.

Unilateral military action

Nixon’s impeachment included the charge that he evaded Congress’ sole authority to declare war by invading Cambodia. In the Libyan “mission,” Obama announced that only he had the inherent authority to decide what is a “war” and that so long as he called it something different, no congressional approval or even consultation was necessary. He proceeded to bomb a nation’s capital, destroy military units and spend more than a billion dollars in support of one side in a civil war.

Kill lists

Nixon ordered a burglary to find evidence to use against Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the famed Pentagon Papers to the press, and later tried to imprison him. Ellsberg was later told of a secret plot by the White House “plumbers” to “incapacitate” him in a physical attack. It was a shocking revelation. That’s nothing compared with Obama’s assertion of the right to kill any U.S. citizen without a charge, let alone conviction, based on his sole authority. A recently leaked memo argues that the president has a right to kill a citizen even when he lacks “clear evidence (of) a specific attack” being planned.

Attacking whistle-blowers

Nixon was known for his attacks on whistle-blowers. He used the Espionage Act of 1917 to bring a rare criminal case against Ellsberg. Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law. Obama has brought twice as many such prosecutions as all prior presidents combined [and see this]. While refusing to prosecute anyone for actual torture, the Obama administration has prosecuted former CIA employee John Kiriakou for disclosing the torture program.

Other Nixonesque areas include Obama’s overuse of classification laws and withholding material from Congress. There are even missing tapes. In the torture scandal, CIA officials admitted to destroying tapes that they feared could be used against them in criminal cases. Of course, Nixon had missing tapes, but Rose Mary Woods claimed to have erased them by mistake, as opposed to current officials who openly admit to intentional destruction.

Obama has not only openly asserted powers that were the grounds for Nixon’s impeachment, but he has made many love him for it. More than any figure in history, Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.

Long after Watergate, not only has the presidency changed. We have changed. We have become accustomed to elements of a security state such as massive surveillance and executive authority without judicial oversight. We have finally answered a question left by Benjamin Franklin in 1787, when a Mrs. Powel confronted him after the Constitutional Convention and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His chilling response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

We appear to have grown weary of the republic and traded it for promises of security from a shining political personality. Somewhere, Nixon must be wondering how it could have been this easy.

Nixon’s “Enemies List” is famous, and the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program says that Obama also has an enemies list … which has been used to take down a wide variety of people, including the head of the CIA. The Washington Post’s Ed Rogers notes:

Obama doesn’t need a traditional Nixonian enemies list. In the digital age, with the Obama machine’s much-celebrated technological capabilities, the president can sort his enemies by keywords.

You’ve heard about the AP spying scandal, and the head of the Department of Justice implies that the government has spied on many other reporters.

Reporters who criticize those in power are being smeared by the government and targeted for arrest (and see this).

Indeed, the Obama administration is treating real reporters as potential terrorists.

After Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans – the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange could face the death penalty for his heinous crime of leaking whistleblower information which make those in power uncomfortable … i.e. being a reporter.

Daniel Ellsberg notes that Obama’s claimed power to indefinitely detain people without charges or access to a lawyer or the courts is a power that even King George didn’t claim.  Former judge and adjunct professor of constitutional law Andrew Napolitano points out that Obama’s claim that he can indefinitely detain prisoners even after they are acquitted of their crimes is a power that even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim.

Indeed, Obama has turned America into the most spied upon nation in world history, and has rolled back liberties to the time of the enactment of the Magna Carta in 1215.

Obama’s Purge Against Political Enemies Continues

D’Souza & McDonnell charges part of accelerating crackdown on dissent

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
infowars.com

January 26, 2014

The political persecution of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza for alleged and comparatively minor infractions are part of an accelerating purge being led by the Obama administration in the run-up to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.

Throughout history every culture has had maxims in law denouncing the openly corrupt sitting in judgment. The Obama Justice Department is openly launching a night of the long knives-style purge of their political enemies that should send chills up the spine of all Americans.

McDonnell was charged last week with illegally accepting gifts, donations and luxury holidays from businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr totaling $165,000 dollars in return for lending, “the prestige of the governor’s office to Williams’s struggling company, Star Scientific.”

Before the allegations emerged, McDonnell was seen as a genuine contender for the 2016 Republican nomination and a potential foe of Hillary Clinton.

This was followed on Friday with the news that Dinesh D’Souza, director of the hit 2012 documentary 2016: Obama’s America, had been arrested in New York for allegedly violating campaign finance laws for donating more than the legal limit to the campaign of Wendy Long, who ran in 2012 for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Long’s opponent and victor in that race, Kirsten Gillibrand, is a vehement supporter of Clinton and recently declared that she was, “on the bandwagon for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

D’Souza himself, whose donations to Long totaled just $20,000, was in the middle of producing another anti-Obama documentary entitled America, which is set to be released later this year.

Matt Drudge responded to D’Souza’s arrest by tweeting that Attorney General Eric Holder was “unleashing the dogs” on Obama’s most prominent critics.

“In light of the recent events and the way the IRS has been used to stifle dissent, this arrest should send shivers down the spines of all freedom-loving Americans,” said Gerald Molen, D’Souza’s co-producer. “When American citizens begin to suspect that people are being arrested for alleged minor violations because of their vocal dissent against their elected representatives or rulers, it breeds disrespect and contempt for the law and suspicion of those officials. … If this unfortunate action against Dinesh is intended to deter the release of his upcoming film, America, that effort will fail.”

Radio host Laura Ingraham warned that the administration was, “criminalizing political dissent in the United States of America. Welcome to the Brave New World of retribution justice.” Rush Limbaugh also responded by warning that the Obama White House is “trying to criminalize as many Republicans and conservatives as they can.”

Fox News Katie Pavlich also questioned the dubious coincidence of an anti-Obama film maker being targeted by Eric Holder’s DOJ.

The political purge continued last week when conservative activist group Project Veritas announced that it was being targeted by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who recently asserted that conservatives “have no place in the state of New York”.

“We got a subpoena over the last week from the Board of Labor and they’re asking for every single financial transaction over the last three years,” O’Keefe told the Steve Malzberg Show.

“I’ll be happy to cooperate but there’s some funny business going on, especially when there’s so much corruption in the state of New York and they’re going after my organization and compelling me to give them every transaction,” added O’Keefe, lamenting that he would have to follow Sean Hannity’s in leaving New York altogether.

All three instances of conservatives being targeted in just the last week alone arrive after last year’s scandal wherein the IRS targeted conservative and Tea Party groups by scrutinizing their political themes. The IRS was also more recently accused of targeting Hollywood conservatives by demanding to know all the names of members of the Friends of Abe organization.

As Alex Jones explains in the video above, a view which is supported by the majority of respondents to the Hollywood Reporter article about D’Souza’s arrest, when compared to the crimes and corruption of Eric Holder, who has been embroiled in no less than 16 different scandals, from Fast and Furious, to Benghazi, to Solyndra, to spying on conservative reporter James Rosen, D’Souza and McDonnell’s alleged infractions pale into insignificance.

Also recall that the Obama campaign itself was responsible for violations of campaign finance laws that dwarf those alleged to have been committed by D’Souza or McDonnell.

The Obama campaign committee was hit with one of the largest ever fines handed down by the FEC when it was found to have illegally hid and improperly disclosed thousands of political donations to Obama’s 2008 presidential run totaling nearly $2 million dollars.

In addition, according to a report by the Government Accountability Institute, the Obama campaign was flooded with illegal donations from foreigners in 2012, fraudulent contributions that were policed by the campaign itself without FEC interference.

While these huge campaign finance scandals were largely glossed over by the media, comparatively paltry sums in the case of D’Souza and McDonnell have been seized upon as part of the transparent persecution of Obama’s political adversaries.

This is clearly part of an unfolding purge designed to chill dissent and intimidate conservatives against being vocal and politically aggressive in the run-up to 2016. This is about clearing a path for Hillary Clinton’s victory by means of dirty tricks and bullying tactics.

Democrats are notoriously the dirtiest when it comes to political campaign scandals, but they won’t hesitate to invent and exploit comparatively non-issue scandals if they can be used to sink Hillary’s political foes.

If conservatives and those from across the political spectrum don’t display outrage at these developments then the purge will only accelerate, targeting an ever broader array of dissenting voices and enriching both Obama and potentially Hillary Clinton’s executive dictatorship.

This major escalation in onerous political persecution can only be stopped with the impeachment of Barack Obama, proceedings that should already be in motion given the deluge of other clear constitutional violations Obama has overseen.