When Ed Painter told his wife he was thinking about speaking at a tea-party rally outside the state Capitol to decry the recently revealed IRS abuses against conservative non-profit groups, she told him it sounded like a bad idea.
After all, he might get audited.
But his wife’s concern wasn’t the first time the Dalton resident had to consider how the IRS might view his exercise of his right to political speech, he told me during last week’s rally as he held a sign reading, “Telegram — From: IRS — To: All US Citizens — You Are Next!”
In January 2012, while in Charleston, S.C., for the GOP presidential-primary debate, Painter heard tea partyers “from across the country telling us their stories” of unusual IRS scrutiny for their applications for tax-exempt status.
At the time, Painter was among a group of northwest Georgia conservatives consulting a lawyer about seeking tax-exempt 501(c)4 status for the Murray County Tea Party Patriots. After hearing about the demands being put on other tea-party groups nationwide, he said, “We quit. We actually didn’t even pursue it.”
Not having 501(c)4 status “affected [our] ability to organize and to be more effective spokespeople from the grass-roots,” Painter continued. If IRS agents were trying to chill conservative speech, he said, they succeeded.
“They don’t have to actually do it [to everyone], they just have to do it to one person,” he said. “Whatever they’ve actually done affects 10 times as many people.”
Painter was among some 200 Georgians who attended the May 21 rally. They heard from an assortment of speakers including tea-party organizers, Fair Tax advocates, congressional candidate Bob Barr, U.S. Senate candidate Karen Handel, state Rep. Scot Turner of Holly Springs, and “Southside” Steve Rickman from the Regular Guys radio show. Most of them called for avoiding future IRS misdeeds by reducing the size of the federal government and/or reforming the tax code so that the agency had less discretion in dealing with taxpayers.
Gov. Nathan Deal, who also addressed the crowd, suggested more punitive action is needed in the IRS case. So far, the only reported disciplinary measures are the departure of the agency’s interim director on a time frame set before the scandal became public, and paid administrative leave for the head of the agency’s division overseeing tax-exempt organizations.
“Too often when government oversteps its bounds, someone resigns or someone’s hand is slapped, with the hope the public will simply forget about what happened,” Deal said.
As he did earlier this month at the state Republican convention in Athens, the governor assured the audience Georgia’s Revenue Department would not audit citizens “based on who you voted for, or what your political beliefs are.”
The rally took place in the middle of a workday with temperatures in the upper-80s, but it attracted more people than most other tea-party gatherings in Atlanta of late. Whether other recent rallies were smaller due to the chilling effect Painter described or a more general loss of enthusiasm, the size of last week’s crowd is a sign the movement may be finding its footing again due to outrage that grows with each day’s revelations about the IRS targeting.
Referring to the inclusion of “patriots” among the words IRS employees used to flag tax-exempt-status applications for further scrutiny, radio host G-Ski Rocks (a.k.a. the “Hip Hop Conservative”), urged the audience to fight back.
“The dictionary definition of ‘patriot’ is a person who supports, loves, defends their country,” he said.
“It’s patriots that get up in the morning and work hard for this country. It’s patriots that lay down their lives,” he said. “Let’s not allow them to take the word ‘patriots’ and destroy it.”
