Rollins: Lawsuits seek to push back against IRS abuse

This piece originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle on August 7, 2013.

This week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation joined a class-action lawsuit led by the Citizens for Self-Governance against the Internal Revenue Service.

The foundation is one of the many nonprofit, nonpartisan groups that may have been unfairly targeted by the IRS nationwide, and we believe it is time to hold this federal agency accountable for what looks troublingly like disregard of the rule of law.

Last year, the IRS released foundation documents – by accident, it claims – to an outside group that monitors charities and nonprofits. The list included extremely confidential donor information that by law the IRS is not allowed to release. This is information that the foundation doesn't even make available to its own analysts. Eventually, this list wound up in the hands of the press and was widely disseminated.

We joined this lawsuit because it's important to get to the truth on what happened to us and to others. We know that the Texas Public Policy Foundation is not the only group that may have been unfairly targeted by the IRS.

Across the country, conservative organizations are coming forward with appalling accounts of government intrusion and harassment. This includes well-established groups and small start-ups alike. What they all have in common, however, is that they dissent from the administration's policies.

Dr. James Dobson, a Christian radio talk show host and author who has founded and worked for nonprofit religious organizations for the past 36 years, was threatened last year with losing tax-exempt status for a nonprofit he started in 2011, Family Talk. The IRS contended that Dobson's group was political because it criticized President BarackObama. What's more, the agency said because Family Talk did not represent all viewpoints it could not be considered an educational organization.

When Dobson threatened the IRS with a lawsuit, the agency backed down. But what about smaller groups that lack the resources to push back against the federal government?

Consider the San Fernando Valley Patriots of California, a tea party group that gave up on seeking tax-exempt status last year after the IRS asked it to detail how it "conducts or promotes" illegal activity. One of the group's leaders testified before Congress in June that she was given 20 days to answer a long list of such questions or else face "penalties of perjury."

Then there is the case of a pro-life group in Iowa. The IRS ordered the group, under penalty of perjury, not to stage protests outside Planned Parenthood clinics. When the group explained it simply planned to pray outside the clinics, the agency sent a letter demanding an explanation of how "prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood are considered educational."

Not only is the IRS willing to harass private citizens and their associations, it is also willing to change laws arbitrarily, as it has with the Affordable Care Act.

As written, the federal health care law allows tax subsidies only for health insurance plans sold on state-based exchanges, not those operated by the federal government.

Texas, along with 35 other states, has opted not to create an exchange – something the administration had not planned on. To get around this inconvenience, the IRS illegally issued a rule to allow subsidies to be issued through federal exchanges, in brazen disregard of the plain language of the Affordable Care Act.

Oklahoma's attorney general has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the IRS rule, and a group of businesses and individuals has filed a similar suit. The group's argument boils down to the claim that the IRS rewrote this part of the law because it was convenient, and in so doing violated the Constitution.

James Madison famously wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Less well-known is the line that follows: "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

But angels do not govern men – and increasingly, in this country, neither do laws.

Instead, unelected bureaucrats govern us, whose biases – exemplified by the abuses of the IRS – are becoming substitutes for the rule of law.

We have granted excessive power to the IRS and transformed it into an instrument of arbitrary, pervasive government. The time is long past to roll back that power and constrain this runaway agency. It is time, in other words, to push back.