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How Much Should We NOT Accept A Politicized IRS? This Is How Much! [1]

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Date: 2025-05-04

Look at it this way: If you accept the premise that we have a privatized election system, attempting to translate voter sentiment into viable and qualified candidates for public office, but doing a lousy job of it, one just has to look at the situation squarely. Short of an investigation by someone who has become aware of a political funding source, there’s really nothing to stop anyone, friend or foe, foreign or domestic from taking advantage of opportunities to influence who gets elected into American state legislatures and federal government. And be able to do it anonymously, through PACs, as long as they file the appropriate 501(c)(4) paperwork with the IRS.

[As if that wasn’t bad enough, the POTUS himself has created a private slush fund, in the form of a meme-coin (no paywall), that purports to provide exclusive access to the highest donors (no paywall). If that basic act of corruption doesn’t fundamentally undermine the purpose of citizens voting in a republic, I don’t know what does. Imagine the ‘favors’ he can rake in, at our expense, with a stroke of his executive order pen! “I’m the President, I can do whatever I want. The SCOTUS said so.” Or, “I’ll get my people to write an intelligence assessment that let’s me off the hook when you invade that country you want to invade. I’ll just defer to ‘my experts’ when the Press comes knocking. It’s worked pretty well so far, with my lawyers and kidnapping people I don’t like off American streets. I’ll be waiting for evidence of your donation.”]

For years the IRS has zealously guarded — supposedly on a non-partisan basis — information on what individuals or front companies, from around the globe are registering PACs to influence American elections.

This is done, according to the US SCOTUS in Citizens United v FEC (2010), because it construes political spending as ‘equal to’ political speech, despite numerous cogent arguments to avoid such facile tautologies, if only for the sake of not undermining the public trust in the republic we all once assumed was the one thing every American could agree on.

Even the appearance of corruption, for the Court traditionally, was a good enough reason to reject legal contortions that ignore the inconvenient differences between the political speech of citizens, and the extra-political organization and staying power that Capital, allowed into the political bloodstream, has to motivate and manufacture political constituencies that suit the people cutting the check, rather than the mere Motivation speakers seeking public office in the name of an Idea or a political party have, advocating a form of governance.

Yet…

Here we are, fifteen years after allowing anonymous capital access to our electoral system, creating manufactured constituencies, like the Freedom Caucus, and 12 years after Republicans raised a major stink with claims that the IRS was slow-walking 501(c)(4) tax-exemption applications (no paywall) from right wing organizations, with — these days — an Executive openly saying he’s planning to instruct the IRS to investigate schools, or people, or corporations (like ActBlue) for compliance with a presidential executive order, by having some DOJ flunky file an affidavit that claims an executive authority to do so. That gets transmitted to Trump’s flunky — auctioneer, actually — running the IRS, Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) and Presto!, even as the courts grapple with the predictable legal pushback, a lawless Executive will continue to push the IRS rank and file — the public servants that know better — putting them in a position to either do what they know is illegal, or lose their job, particularly after their positions are re-classified under Project 2025, which could be any day now.

One way to hit back at such frivolous ‘investigations’? Lawyers should aggressively begin filing to disbar DOJ and other attorneys that engage in defending such activities. On what basis? Because they could not have graduated law school without knowing they are being asked to defend and promulgate constitutionally-illegal orders. Jam up the lawyers to jam up the system they’re exploiting to undermine our Democracy.

This isn’t just a war between higher education and the Government, this is a war between professionals and the Government.

Lawyers, accountants, scientists, educators; our democracy is criss-crossed with professional organizations that exist to uphold ethical and professional standards in order to provide American civil society with the best advice their money can buy. It honors the purposely adversarial Nature of a justice system that demands a right to counsel that is independent of public authority.

Let the DOJ scrape the bottom of the legal barrel (no paywall) if they’re going to insist on abusing their Executive-branch power to open investigations into civil society.

Civil society has every right to react to this kind of abuse by any means necessary. MAGA may have the reins of government in their hands, but that doesn’t mean the professionalized civil society has to accept — in the actions of their members — extremist views that risk member’s careers, as well as trust in the profession itself — the very reason such professional organizations came to exist, beginning in the 19th century — in the eyes of the public they’re ultimately supposed to serve. They don’t need to accept Loyalty to individuals over fidelity to the Constitution every lawyer swears an oath to, and every professional does to it’s respective organizational charter. If only to protect the very nature of the profession they exist to represent. Confront and Deny civil participation with this rogue regime, and let it collapse under it’s own dead weight of incompetence.

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