As the IRS scandal thickens, targeted groups are coming out to describe their ordeals in dealing with that most-reviled of government agencies. The Ohio Liberty Coalition was one of the groups targeted by the IRS, and Tom Zawistowski of the OLC recently sat down with Cato’s Caleb Brown to discuss the experience.
Among the many lessons we can take from this scandal is to realize how bureaucrats enforcing vague government regulations can chill free speech. Campaign finance laws are filled with vague regulations–such as whether an ad is the “functional equivalent of direct advocacy”–and they are anything but harmless to political speech.
In assessing applications for (c)(4) status, the IRS looked for whether political campaigning was an applicant’s “primary activity.” Due to the vagueness of this term, “rogue” IRS agents were free to harass applicants for the “content of their prayers” and other uncouth requests.
Advocates for campaign finance restrictions often do not understand how political speech can be killed by a thousand cuts as much as it can by one fatal blow. Some FEC regulations clearly prohibit certain types of spending. Others tell would-be speakers to judge whether their ads “in context, can only be interpreted by a reasonable person as advocating a candidate’s election or defeat.” Complying with these regulations ultimately comes down to a silly “magic words” test–that is, a search for words such as “vote for,” “elect,” “support,” etc.
Some campaign finance advocates who understand what Citizens United was actually about–that is, a non-profit corporation prohibited from showing a movie critical of Hillary Clinton on Pay-Per-View–concede that Citizens United should have narrowly won the case. Rather than allowing all corporations to spend independently in elections, as the case turned out, they argue the Court should have carved out an exception for “genuine ideological organizations,” “voluntary media choices” (Pay-Per-View), or some other vague criterion that would ultimately have been enforced by bureaucrats at the FEC. We can now can see how such vague standards are applied and abused.
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