A difficult case to argue, but still the right one

Talk about playing to a tough room.

Stephen Spaulding, legal director and senior policy council for Common Cause, went before the Finance Committee of a Republican-majority Senate Monday to argue that the Internal Revenue Service, accused of targeting right-leaning political organizations for special scrutiny, should be authorized to write and enforce new rules about political finance disclosure.

His timing was especially interesting given the Justice Department's recent announcement that it will not prosecute IRS officials for their handling of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. Such selective "attention" might fall short of illegal; it certainly doesn't come up short of wrong.

In any case, and regardless of the prevailing sentiments or IRS misconduct, Spaulding's case is sound on the merits.

It concerns (as has been discussed here before) so-called "social welfare" organizations which, because of dubious qualifications for tax exemption, can shield the identities of donors. As a result, they are in effect little more than "conduits for secret political spending" -- hundreds of millions of dollars worth.

Because of ambiguous regulations and little or no enforcement of what regulations there are, political campaigns can now be supported in virtually unlimited amounts from nameless, faceless slush funders hidden from public view under the ominously Orwellian cloak of "social welfare."

This black hole of public accountability should be of concern to every citizen, whether one supports or opposes limits on campaign spending a la McCain-Feingold. This is not about quotas but disclosure, about knowing who's paying whom. It can be and has been exploited by any party, any political organization anywhere along the ideological spectrum; it can be manipulated by a Rove or a Carville, and camouflage money from a Soros or a Koch.

Common Cause's proposed solution is not for campaign finance limits per se, but for strict limits on, and complete accountability for, how much such tax-exempt organizations can spend for political activity. In other words, you can be a social welfare organization or you can be a PAC; you shouldn't be allowed to function as the latter disguised as the former.

Without such new regulations, Spaulding told the committee, "major political groups will continue to masquerade improperly as social welfare nonprofits -- solely to keep political spenders anonymous. This deprives the American people of the information they need about who is trying to influence their votes, and to whom their elected officials may owe a debt of gratitude after Election Day."

Another, perhaps less immediately obvious, benefit of such strict rules is that if tax-exempt social welfare organizations can't spend much on political action, then their ideological leanings become essentially moot -- except, of course, for the issue of their tax exemption.

That's another debate for another day.

This story was originally published October 27, 2015 at 4:20 PM with the headline "A difficult case to argue, but still the right one."