Democrat Senator: The IRS Should Do Something About Republicans Controlling The House

And the “something” the Senator, Chuck Schumer, wants done is a crack down on all those tea party groups with their ridiculous notions about free speech:

Arguing that Tea Party groups have a financial advantage after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, Schumer said the Obama administration should bypass Congress and institute new campaign finance rules through the IRS.

“It is clear that we will not pass anything legislatively as long as the House of Representatives is in Republican control, but there are many things that can be done administratively by the IRS and other government agencies—we must redouble those efforts immediately,” Schumer said.

“One of the great advantages the Tea Party has is the huge holes in our campaign finance laws created [by] the ill advised decision [Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission],” Schumer said. “Obviously the Tea Party elites gained extraordinary influence by being able to funnel millions of dollars into campaigns with ads that distort the truth and attack government.”

The Obama administration proposed new IRS restrictions on campaign related activity by tax-exempt groups last November. The rules would crack down on “candidate-related political activity,” which includes advocacy “for a clearly identified political candidate or candidates of a political party” and communications that are “made within 60 days of a general election (or within 30 days of a primary election) and clearly identify a candidate or political party.”

To be clear, the tea party groups Schumer is complaining about follow the same set of rules and laws everybody else has to. There isn’t some special exemption in the law for right-of-center groups. Left-wing groups can, and do, operate exactly the same way “tea party” groups do.

“Our opponents know the single most dangerous thing to give us is the right to vote,” Vice President Joe Biden said, jabbing at Republicans, in a Martin Luther King Day address.

That’s not true, of course. The only people Republicans want to deny the vote to are people who cannot legally vote. But I would point out that Democrats seem to think that free speech, and free association, are pretty dangerous things for the public to have given their incessant push for harsher restrictions on political activity.

It’s amazing that a United States Senator would stand up and tout an IRS crackdown aimed at a partisan outcome. It seems to me that, once upon a time, a politician making public calls for government policies aimed at marginalizing a specific political movement would have faced criticism from all sides of the political arena.

I’m reminded of something Michael Goodwin wrote in a recent column about the took, The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720:

The authors, according to a Wall Street Journal article, don’t accuse investors of being irrational. They included Isaac Newton and believed new corporate structures would protect them and that trade with the New World marked a global transformation.

In the long run, they were right. But caught up in market mania and blind faith in momentum, they dramatically overpaid for stocks.

That is common bubble behavior, but a similar mania can happen in political movements and turn them into bubbles, too.

For example, one of the book’s authors told the Journal that a clear sign of a market bubble is when investors discount all evidence that doesn’t fit their belief.

He called that a “hinge point” that leads investors to a “binary framework where anybody who disagrees with them is demonized.”

That perfectly describes the cult of Barack Obama and the bubble of liberalism he embodies.

It seems Democrats are at that stage now. They’re right, and anyone who might see the world differently is a racist or an extremist who should be silenced and/or marginalized.