Originally published on Forbes.com Nov 3rd, 2014
The e-mails I have been getting from Jenny Beth Martin, Chairman of the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, have me thinking about Lois Lerner and Teapartygate. I went back and took another look at a report prepared by the staff of Darrell Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Government. The report is titled Lois Lerner’s Involvement in the IRS Targeting of Tax-Exempt Organizations. It is well worth reading the whole report and I recommend it. I still don’t think it adds up to some sort of crusade against conservatives, but that’s just me. You can read it yourself. It seems that Lerner was strongly against money in politics and sensitive to the criticism that IRS was letting 501(c)(4) organizations get away with too much political activity. And along comes the Tea Party, which Lerner sees as “very dangerous”.
One GD thing after another and now we are on Day 542 of the IRS Scandal, by TaxProf count, with no end in sight. Here is the question that is troubling me right now thanks to the e-mails I have been getting from Jenny Beth Martin. If there is a pretty compelling case that Tea Party Patriots Inc was intended from day 1 to be a political organization, rather than a social welfare organization, would that make any difference in how we view Lois Lerner?
The Jenny Beth Email
Jenny Beth and I have a strong, though one-sided e-mail relationship. There is quite a bit from her in my in-box. On Saturday I heard from Jenny about an urgent and agonizing decision that comes from not having enough money “to fund all our grassroots efforts in all the critical Senate elections”. Here is the part that I found kind of interesting:
I didn’t get involved in the Tea Party movement for fun. Like you, I got involved to stop Barack Obama and to help save America. Now I’m being told by my staff that we’re probably going to have to let some leftist like Bruce Braley in Iowa or Kay Hagan in North Carolina win because we can’t afford to fight back in every important state.
Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, the PAC, which by definition, can make lots of political expenditures is a relative newcomer to the “movement”. This is the clearest statement I’ve noted so far indicating that there is something of a seamless relationship between the PAC and the 501(c)(4) organization – Tea Party Patriots Inc, which, according to its Form 990 for the year ended May 31, 2013, paid Jenny Beth Martin $272,010 to be its President. Apparently she still has that job. On September 1 I got an e-mail from Jenny Beth Martin in her capacity as Co-founder and National Coordinator of TPP Inc (the social welfare organization) that indicated:
Your gift today will be sent immediately to the front lines to enable our grassroots volunteers and staffers to contact these voters and move them to the polls to fire Harry Reid. If we succeed this year, we will shock the political world. And most importantly, we will halt the Obama agenda for the next two years.
Some Numbers
TPP Inc raised just over $20 million in the year ended May 31, 2013. It spent all of that plus just over $350,000 of the surplus raised in the previous fiscal year. Less than $500,000 of that went out in the form of grants to the grass roots organizations. The largest grant $100,000 went to the Georgia Integrity Project, a massive statewide precinct organization project. Quite a bit went for fundraising – over eight million.
The rest is a bit difficult to tease out from the Form 990 although over three million in office expense is pretty dramatic. At any rate the massive amounts of money being spent at the national rather than grassroots level makes me wonder whether the actual plan was to set up a platform for the PAC.
More current numbers are available for the PAC (Tea Party Citizens Fund) thanks to OpenSecrets.org. In the 2014 election cycle TPCF has raised and spent around $13 million. TPCF has its own fundraising expenses but they run lower on a percentage basis than TPP. Also the e-mails I have been getting imply that expenditures are leveraging the efforts of Tea Party volunteers. You can check out what races they are backing here. Less than 10% of the expenditures trace to specific campaigns with nearly half of that having gone to the unsuccessful attempt to knock Thad Cochran out in the primaries.
When combined with the spending by TPP, I sometimes wonder if the real point of the activity is to make money for consultants with any political or social welfare outcomes being incidental, but that is a pretty cynical viewpoint.
Did Lois Lerner Have A Point?
The IRS has to collect over two trillion dollars, which is a pretty big job, so it would be better if it did not get caught up in side issues. Still Lois Lerner was in charge of exempt organizations and there are rules that the IRS was accused of ignoring. There is a lot of diversity in the grassroots Tea Party groups, but I have a hard time seeing the self proclaimed flagship as anything but a political organization based on how it has been behaving lately. Does that make the scandal any more or less scandalous? What do you think?
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