Don’t Buy the ‘Social Welfare’ Defense of the IRS

May 14th, 2013

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.