True the Vote, one of the conservative nonprofits targeted for intrusive scrutiny by the IRS, filed a notice of appeal Thursday signaling it will ask judges to throw out a lower court’s ruling that found the IRS’s targeting had already stopped, and tossed their case.
The group, however, says there’s no evidence the IRS has changed its behavior. They want the courts to impose an order forbidding targeting in the future.
“The IRS targeting scandal is not over and neither is our effort to seek justice in the federal courts,” said Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote.
District Judge Reggie Walton ruled in October that the IRS had stopped its targeting and had granted True the Vote its charitable organization status, so there was no longer any actual injury to True the Vote or most of the other tea party groups that had sued the tax agency.
But Ms. Engelbrecht said the IRS hasn’t proved it has stopped targeting in “any verifiable manner.”
“Until the court fully addresses the IRS’s wrongdoing, the risk of future political abuses without consequences will only compound,” she said.
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Her appeal was filed in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
True the Vote tries to clean up voter rolls of names that should no longer be listed, and to recruit poll workers to watch for shenanigans on Election Day. They have clashed with advocates who are pushing for more lenient rules in voting.
True the Vote is organized as a 501(c )(3), or charitable organization. Most of the other tea party groups challenging the IRS were seeking 501(c )(4) status, commonly referred to as social welfare status. They have different tax treatments and different rules governing what activities they can do.
Judge Walton did allow two charitable organization applications to proceed with their cases because the law gives the IRS 270 days to process 501(c )(3) requests, and the agency is long delinquent for the two groups.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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