Cummings on Citizens United and the Tea Party Controversy

Readers interested in a non-inflammatory piece on the Tea Party controversy should take a look at “Citizens United Spurs Social Welfare,” published in Tax Notes Today (subscription required) and authored by Jasper L. Cummings, Jr.  Jack is legal counsel in the Federal Tax Group of Alston & Bird and has an impressive record of legal service, including academic service as an acting assistant professor of tax at NYU and as a visiting professor of law at my home school, the University of Houston Law Center.  In the article, Jack discusses the predictable rise in the use of social welfare organizations following Citizens United, and offers a measured perspective reflecting willingness to consider the best intentions of the Internal Revenue Service in regulating section 501(c)(4) entities in the wake of Citizens United.

In the piece, Jack presents a “short summary” of his article advancing the following points:

(1)  To “expect an explosion of independent expenditures on federal elections after Citizens United” was reasonable.

 

(2)  To expect that section 501(c)(4) entities “would receive a significant amount in additional contributions for such spending” was also reasonable.

 

(3)  The new level of funding politically oriented 501(c)(4)s “could be so different in quantity that it would explain and justify a new look at the woefully inadequate published tax guidance for those organizations, and, in the meantime, at the administration of the tax law as it existed.”

 

(4)  “We know now that the IRS did not carry out that new look in the right way,” but because of the “politically charged” nature of the relevant issues, “it is reasonably possible that the new look itself might have been a proper response to changing circumstances, as opposed to evidence of political bias.”

Electronic cite:  2015 TNT 43-10

JRB