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Grover Norquist: White House Ordered IRS to Stop Tea Party Groups
Tuesday, April 7, 2015 05:13 PM
By: Courtney Coren
The Obama administration ordered the IRS to shut down tea party and conservative groups so they wouldn't be a threat to the president's chances of re-election, conservative activist Grover Norquist alleges in his latest book.
Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, makes the case for a fairer, simpler tax system in "End the IRS Before It Ends Us," which was released Tuesday, as he also makes a case for what happened during the IRS-tea party scandal, according to review by Paul Bedard of The Washington Examiner.
The tax reform advocate makes his case for the White House's involvement based on studies on the electoral system, while showing what was happening with the IRS and tea party groups in the years leading up to 2012, and how the agency's efforts slowed the growth of the tea party movement.
"Had the tea party repeated and built on their activism of 2009 and 2010 in 2011 and 2012, Obama would have lost the election. What happened to the tea party boost? It didn't grow from 2010. It appeared to weaken," Norquist writes.
However, he says that it isn't because the tea party fell "down the stairs. It was pushed."
Norquist cites a study on the tea party movement showing that an extra 5.8 million more Republican voters went to the polls to vote in the 2010 midterm elections, giving the Republicans control of the House, because of the effort of tea party groups.
By contrast, former IRS official Lois Lerner claimed that she was given orders to "do something" to prevent conservative groups from receiving funding to do the same thing before the 2012 election after the Supreme Court's decision on Citizens United, Norquist also cites.
The Citizens United decision prevents restrictions on political spending by corporations, associations, or labor unions, allowing for a significant increase in donor spending.
"Everyone is up in arms because they don't like it," Lerner said about the Supreme Court decision during a speech at Duke University in October 2010, Norquist cites.
"The Federal Election Commission can't do anything about it. They want the IRS to fix the problem. The IRS laws are not set up to fix the problem ... so everyone is screaming at us right now: Fix it now before the election," she is quoted as saying.
Norquist claims that after that, the IRS started working to do what it could to curtail the growth of the tea party movement and keep voters from voting for presidential contender Mitt Romney in 2012 by putting tea party groups through extensive scrutiny and slowing down the processing time for nonprofit approval.
"In our modern kneecapping, President [Barack] Obama was Tonya Harding. The American people who had voted strongly in 2010 and threatened the president's chances of winning ... [re-election]," Norquist writes.
The conservative activist contends that slowing down the process for tea party groups to acquire tax-exempt status kept groups from getting off the ground and may have prevented others "by stopping them from organizing."
California Rep. Darrell Issa, who used to head the House Government Oversight Committee, made similar allegations about Lerner in July while appearing on Fox News Channel.
"She was an active participant in trying to undo what she saw — and the president saw — as the damage of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision," Issa said.
"The president doesn't like what the Supreme Court says. She doesn't like it, and they think they're going to overturn it," he added.
