Ignoring the Facts on the IRS
...Perhaps not surprisingly, the ACORN listing appeared in a different section of the BOLO lists than the one for tea-party organizations. The former appeared on the list under the rubric “TAG,” which the materials released by the Democrats themselves indicate was intended to designate organizations to be weeded out for being involved in “abusive tax avoidance transactions” or “activities [that] are fraudulent in nature.” The listing appeared after hidden-camera video showed ACORN employees advising a couple, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, about how to evade taxes and prevent authorities from discovering their activities, which they claimed included human trafficking and child prostitution. It comes as no surprise that, after Congress voted in 2009 to pull ACORN’s federal funding, the IRS would make moves to avoid granting tax exemption to offshoots of the original, corrupt organization. Tea-party groups, by contrast, had done nothing to merit special scrutiny.

By contrast, tea parties remained under the “Emerging Issues” heading of the BOLOs. That’s where groups whose applications related to “significant current events” or for whom “no established tax law or precedent has been established” were listed. Unlike several others listed on that tab, tea-party groups saw their applications automatically elevated to IRS higher-ups for scrutiny. Even the higher-ups couldn’t do their work because, we now know from their testimony, officials even more senior prevented them from carrying it out. So tea-party applications languished, some for over three years, while officials at the top level of the IRS worked diligently (in a charitable reading) to establish a precedent for them, or simply slow-walked them beyond both a midterm and a presidential election.

Cummings and Levin are also drawing attention to the term “emerge.” A source close to the investigation tells National Review Online that the term was added to the BOLO list as a means of ferreting out applications not from liberal organizations in general but from one specific progressive group in particular....

...The IRS initially granted tax exemption to the progressive group “Emerge America” but revoked that status in the spring of 2010 when it came to the attention of agency officials that the group is devoted to training women to run for office as Democrats. The group has several state offshoots, including “Emerge Maine” and “Emerge Nebraska”; screeners were instructed to flag those applications because the agency was in the process of revoking the exemption of their parent group. ...