As everyone knows, some IRS agencies flagging "tea party" groups as possibly being politically motivated entities trying to wrongly claim tax-exempt status is the worstest thing that has ever happened, except for all the other worstest things, because the IRS may have made some of these people fill out some extra paperwork and filling out forms is like kryptonite to the tea party crowd. Forget your domestic espionage and indefinite detention and your good drone/bad drone debate—the IRS asked political questions when trying to determine whether groups seeking tax-exempt status were political. Those monsters.

There's still not much evidence that "extra scrutiny" translated into actually denying applications. On the other hand:



[T]he IRS does publish the names of groups that have received special scrutiny and been approved for tax-exempt status. They recently released a list of 176 organizations that have been approved since 2010, so Martin Sullivan checked each one to figure out if it was liberal or conservative. Here's what he found: • 122 conservative

• 48 liberal/nonconservative

• 6 unknown

So since 2010 there have been well over twice as many conservative groups as liberal groups that the IRS has granted cherished tax-exempt status; that doesn't suggest that the supposed agency-wide efforts to silence conservative groups was very successful. It does match up with the tea party's rush into the political landscape during that time period, and perhaps gives a bit of insight as to why certain IRS functionaries felt they were dealing with a substantive, identifiable political push that might have been translating into an abuse of tax-exempt status on the part of certain parties.

As I've said before, you won't get much argument from me that the IRS team screwed up in attempting to group certain sets of applications based on apparent political affiliation. Nor, however, is there much evidence that this one action by the bookkeeping brigades was part of a wider gubbermint conspiracy—or even that there was anything to it other than "we're going to ask you some more questions in order to verify you're not primarily a political group."

