Conservative group takes on IRS a decade after Obama-era scandal and ‘vague’ standard

More than a decade after Tea Party tax exemptions were denied, a conservative group is continuing to fight a “vague” standard at the IRS.

While leftists have repeatedly attempted to smear President Donald Trump and his supporters as “fascists,” it has been conservatives who’ve taken the brunt for their beliefs under Democratic Party leadership. As with practicing Christians and involved parents demonized by then-President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, organizations are still feeling the impact of the IRS long after President Barack Obama’s administration in a way that “chills … speech.”

Speaking on behalf of the Texas-based nonprofit Freedom Path that was founded in 2011 over opposition to Obamacare, Lex Politica CEO Chris Gober discussed the suit Freedom Path, Inc. v. IRS with Fox News Digital ahead of a status report before a Washington, D.C. district court as the scandal exposed under Lois Lerner has yet to truly be resolved.

“We applied for tax-exempt status back in 2011,” explained Gober, whose firm represents the America PAC. “Largely nothing happened for a long time. And then, all of a sudden, about a year and a half later, we got a request from the IRS to say, ‘We need more information, and we need you to disclose your donors to us.’ And it was just a very, very odd request. And we basically told them to pound sand. It wasn’t too long afterward that the Lois Lerner scandal came to life.”

“People don’t realize that the IRS is still using the exact same tests and the mechanisms that they used to target conservatives back in 2010 and 2011. Those are still on the books, exactly the same way they were then,” continued the attorney. “You have a lot of the same government bureaucrats, the non-political bureaucrats that have been there at the IRS and were there during the Lois Lerner days that are still there. In fact, a lot of them have been promoted.”

Lerner admitted in 2013 that she had singled out applications for tax exemptions for organizations that had “Patriot” and “Tea Party” in them, leading to her resignation. The head of the Tax-Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements division from 2007 t0 2010, who reported to her, has since been named acting commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities division.

The ongoing suit seeks a review of the constitutionality of the IRS’s 11-factor “Facts and Circumstances Test of the Revenue Ruling because the test is vague, overbroad, and chills its speech.”

“It is just this really ambiguous test that, in particular, allows an IRS agent to basically just decide on their own if they want to treat [nonprofit communications] as political or not,” said Gober. “It’s really no test at all. It’s so open-ended, broad, and subjective that anybody, depending on what you want the result to be, you can get to that result using this test, and that’s our problem with it.”

Likening the case to similar tests that have been struck down, as with Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 where the Supreme Court ruled corporations and unions could exercise the First Amendment with unlimited financial support of political campaigns, the attorney asserted, “What we’re seeing is this almost exact same test has been struck down for use by the Federal Election Commission, but the IRS kind of sits there and says, ‘Oh, that doesn’t — those cases don’t apply to us.”

“We’re still going to apply this rule as we see it.’ And so we’re trying to kind of effectively get the IRS to follow the same rules that the Federal Election Commission has to follow. We are trying to get that tossed out once and for all,” he went on. “What we want is those rules tossed out, and then the IRS have to come back and create a new rule to define what is considered political campaign intervention versus issue advocacy.”

Acknowledging the broad impact of the case for other organizations similarly stymied, Gober said to Fox News Digital, “This isn’t just about one organization — this is about whether unelected bureaucrats can use tax law to silence political speech they don’t like. Every conservative group in America should be paying attention.”