As the GOP pushes to rescind funding for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents, at least one congressional Republican appears surprisingly zealous about empowering the IRS to police the speech rights of America’s nonprofits.
House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) issued an open letter on August 14 calling for proposals to increase regulations on the political speech and activities of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) non-profits.
While Smith seems to frame his efforts as intended to address left-wing political groups and foreign spending in American elections, his efforts will backfire on Republicans.
Giving IRS agents extra weapons to police and punish non-profit speech and expecting them to train their guns on the Left seems as wise as the late PJ O’Rourke’s admonition that giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. And trying to ferret out foreign donations to non-profits that engage in political speech would require reversing the Trump administration’s reforms that limited the exposure of non-profit donors to the IRS.
Worse than the further weaponization of the IRS, the additional regulation and paperwork contemplated in Smith’s approach can be expected to drive more grassroots groups out of participation in civic life. The IRS’s current regulations are already vastly over-broad and indecipherable to those who don’t have a specialist attorney to assist them.
More red tape won’t harm the left’s political apparatus, which will continue to have the legal firepower to identify loopholes in federal regulations. The new rules will simply create additional traps for those grassroots groups that already struggle to afford compliance with existing federal regulations.
To reform American elections, Representative Smith should focus on the one good idea contemplated in his letter: limiting non-profit participation in the administration of American elections. In 2020, voters saw mass spending by the left on “gifts” to local election administrators. But these gifts turned out to be Trojan horses designed to benefit Democrats.
That is the area that deserves additional scrutiny, and that can be addressed with little harm to Americans’ rights to free speech and their freedom of association.
Tony McDonald is an attorney from Austin, Texas who advises grassroots organizations on compliance with state and federal regulations on political participation.
