Friday, November 11, 2016

The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute, Constitutional Jurisprudence Clinic at Chapman Law School, Public Interest Legal Foundation and Cleta Mitchell and other lawyers at Foley & Lardner have filed a cert. petition (appendix) asking the Supreme Court to review True the Vote’s case against the IRS for the IRS’s illegal targeting of conservative organizations:

True the Vote won a major victory before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit back in August, when that Court reinstated its claims against the IRS itself, holding that they were not moot even after the IRS finally granted True the Vote’s application for non-profit status, because the IRS has not demonstrated that it has ceased its illegal conduct. But the D.C. Circuit also held that the individual IRS officials involved in the unconstitutional targeting scheme, including Lois Lerner and the former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, were immune from suit for what one of the judges described as their “egregious unconstitutional conduct.” That aspect of the case is what True the Vote is asking the Supreme Court to review. There are sympathetic courts elsewhere in the country that seem to recognize the problem if the perpetrators of this unconstitutional targeting scheme are not held to account. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio stated in parallel litigation that “among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen—Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian—should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds.” And the district court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan has allowed lawsuits to proceed against IRS officials by other organizations who fell victim to the same targeting scheme that caught True the Vote in its net.

We close the brief with a reminder from Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: If the laws be continually disregarded with impunity, “the alienation of the American People’s affections from the Government [will be] the natural consequence.” Lincoln was addressing mob rule by private citizens, of course, but the danger is even more pronounced when the lawlessness is engaged in by those at the highest levels of government. We expect to learn sometime in January whether the Supreme Court will take this case.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/11/the-irs-scandal-day-1282true-the-vote-asks-supreme-court-to-ok-lawsuits-against-lois-lerner-former-i.html