Breaking badder

Finally! RT @foxnation: Study finds IRS suppression of Tea Party swung 2012 election http://t.co/Ng2pVrRS2x
— digby (@digby56) November 12, 2013

Stop the presses! Fox News has just learned that the Washington Examiner published five weeks ago a report according to which American Enterprise Institute hack Stan Veuger published on June 20th a hypothesis that the IRS swung the 2012 elections Barack Obama's way in what remains the all-time Greatest Obama Scandal of Forever by their relentless two-year persecution of 501(C)(4) organizations with the words "Tea" and "Party" in their names:

Tea party, from the flickr of Alberto.Gar.

the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes-more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million.... Unfortunately for Republicans, the IRS slowed Tea Party growth before the 2012 election. 

Now, you might imagine this would be impossible, as 501(C)(4) groups are social welfare organizations, not political organizations—that's why they are entitled to ask IRS for tax-free status, and allowed to keep their donor lists secret, in the first place. So how could they possibly have an impact on an election?

But apparently they are permitted to do some political organizing, as long as it doesn't distract them from their primary focus:

What that means in practice is that they must spend less than 50 percent of their money on politics.... And much of is being dished out by conservative groups. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, conservative nonprofits spent more than $263 million during the 2012 campaign, while liberal counterparts spent close to $35 million.  (Washington Post, May 13 2013)

Because of this brutal and unflagging harassment, in other words, the conservative social welfare groups were only able to come up with about seven and a half times as much money as the liberals, totally handicapping their efforts to get some kind of fair shake in the race to defeat Obama, with predictable results:

As Toby Marie Walker, who runs the Waco Tea Party, which filed for tax-exempt status in 2010 but didn't receive approval until two months ago, recounted recently: "Our donors dried up. It was intimidating and time-consuming." The Richmond Tea Party went through a similar ordeal, and was only granted tax-exempt status in December, right after the election--three years after its initial request. Its chairman explained the consequences: the episode cost the Richmond Tea Party $17,000 in legal fees and swallowed time the all-volunteer network would have devoted to voter turnout, outreach in black and Latino neighborhoods and other events to highlight the constitution and "the concept of liberty."

You think that didn't have an impact? In McLennan County, where Waco lies, Romney was able to defeat Obama by only a margin of 64.3 to 34.5%, scoring barely better than Ted Cruz did that day in his virgin Senate race. In Richmond City, the discrepancy was so great that Obama actually won, 77.1% to 21.4%, in spite of the fact that non-Hispanic white people make up a good 39.8% of the population. How do you explain such a lopsided result? It was the troubles of the local Tea Party social welfare organization, unable to devote the less than 50% of its resources that it would have been proper to allot to its outreach in black and Latino neighborhoods, which could easily have turned the tide, right?

Tea party from the Christians for Biblical Equality, with a bit of a slow clap for the existence of such an organization.

Well, maybe, but I'd just like the record to note that another thing that happened in 2012, in addition to the IRS persecution of the Tea Party, was this here blog, using all the weapons at my command to trick people into voting for Obama against their better judgment. October alone could have done the job. But does the American Enterprise Institute study that? Fat chance.