Congressional Dish

In this episode, highlights from the House Ways and Means Committee IRS scandal hearing. IRS staffers made a list of keywords including Tea Party, 9-12, Patriot, etc. to help them find social welfare groups applying for tax exempt status that were actually political in nature. This is the scandal you've been told about; the real scandal is how many of them have been approved. Background How IRS "streamlining" in the 1990s led to mismanagement In January of 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous Citizen's United case that corporations count as people and that corporation donations count as speech, making them protected by the Constitution. This opened the floodgates to large amounts of corporate money making its way into U.S. elections. At the same time, the IRS saw a sharp increase in the number of groups claiming tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code. Groups that qualify do not have to pay taxes to the U.S. government and, more importantly to political groups, do not have to