More than 200 Florida tea party groups will soon decide if they are eligible and willing to join either of at least two nationwide class-action lawsuits alleging harassment, intimidation, and discrimination by the Obama administration's IRS.
On Tuesday morning, Citizens for Self-Government (CSG), a grassroots conservative organization based in Washington, D.C., announced that NorCal [i.e., Northern California] Tea Party Patriots had filed a lawsuit against the IRS in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. The court's jurisdiction includes Cincinnati, home of the IRS office where the anti-conservative and anti-libertarian discrimination campaign is believed to have originated.
We believe it's imperative that citizens make a frontal assault on the federal government, Mark Meckler, CSG's founder and president, told Sunshine State News shortly after the press conference announcing the suit. The federal government shows no indication that it's interested in policing itself.
The suit has been filed as a class action, and already dozens of groups around the country have contacted CSG to find out how they can join. Meckler said he expects the Sunshine State to be well-represented among the plaintiffs.
Florida's a very tea-party-rich state, he told SSN. In our database there are over 200 tea party groups [in Florida], and we've been in contact with all of them, so I do suspect we will have some joining the suit going forward.
Meckler declined to name any of the Florida groups he was contacting. He says CSG is still vetting any particular group's accusations, and will announce class participants as they join the action.
NorCal Tea Party's suit reads like the testimony offered in recent weeks by dozens (if not hundreds) of conservative organizations around the country, including three Florida groups recently profiled by SSN.
Their mission was to educate themselves and their fellow Americans and thereby improve social welfare, which they believe is advanced through fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets, the complaint says. However, under pain of denial of tax-exempt status, the IRS and its agents singled out groups like NorCal Tea Party Patriots for intensive and intrusive scrutiny, probing their members associates, speech, activities, and beliefs.
The group, which applied for tax-exempt status in 2010, was required to produce every email it ever sent, names of every donor who had given more than 10 cents, full copies of every speech given at its events, and the minutes from its private board meetings. It took two years and 25 pounds of paperwork before NorCal Tea Party had its status as a tax-exempt entity approved
Would-be plaintiffs can inquire about joining the suit by visiting a website set up expressly for that purpose: www.SueTheIRS.com
Meanwhile, at least two Florida tea party leaders tell SSN their organizations are in contact with the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative public-interest law firm which is expected to be filing its own class-action suit in the coming days. Since 2010, ACLJ has already represented at least 27 targeted groups in individual actions against the IRS.
Our membership, our funding, and our ability to raise funds to conduct seminars has been suppressed because of IRS intimidation, Tim Curtis, chairman of the Tampa 9-12 Project and a self-described constitutional Democrat tells SSN. Our purpose is to press the issue that the IRS is out of control and has completely overstepped its bounds. Our hope is that in doing this someone will be held accountable.
Curtis had previously told SSN that the probing questions the IRS sent to his organization, after and in addition to their filling out the required 17- to 18-page application, had intimidated many would-be supporters from joining his organization.
I know for certain there were people who were more than just reticent [to be involved with the 9-12 Project], he recounts. They were telling me, 'Tim, I would love to, but I own a business, and I'm concerned.' 'Tim, I'd love to be involved, I'd love to come out, I'd love to volunteer, but I'm not so sure that nothing's going to happen to me if I do.'"
Jason Hoyt, an activist associated with several tea party efforts in Central Florida -- including an organization for which he was to serve as executive director before the IRS bombarded it with invasive inquiries and slapped a personal audit on its would-be chairman tells SSN he's also in contact with ACLJ and considering whether to join its upcoming suit.
Echoing Curtis, Meckler emphasized that there's more at stake in these suits than the principle that citizens should not face ideological discrimination by their government.
We want to make the groups harassed by the IRS whole. They spent money in preparation of these applications, hundreds if not thousands of hours preparing their responses to the IRS, he explained. And while it's hard to quantify, [these groups] should recover damages for the public donations they could and would have received had they been given their tax-exempt status when they were supposed to.
Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews.com or at (954) 235-9116.
