The Fight for Freedom of Speech

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 5, 1999 | by John Elvin

Some of us grizzled ancients who still can hobble down to the general store to gather with fellow fossils around the cracker barrel for a bit of nostalgic reminiscence recall that, once upon a time, kids were taught that you could tell a "bad" country by the way it used the force of government to stifle dissent. In those rather innocent pre-Watergate days, the United States was portrayed as being at the top of the list of "good" countries because of freedom, in particular the freedom to call a politician a pinstriped polecat when circumstances seemed to warrant.

Since Watergate, the reactions to revelations that challenge those assumptions have evolved from astonishment in the early days to a conditioned shrug today. The president is rumored to have used the IRS to hassle political enemies? So, what else is new?

It's an attitude that plays into the hands of the social engineers and political opportunists who are working to create a regimented, robo-America where the government says, "Jump!" and citizens ask, "How high?" The good news is there are a few pockets of resistance. Insight readers of course are aware of the work of Judicial Watch, to name one group that puts action behind its words. And our attention recently was called to a report on efforts of the Landmark Legal Foundation, another organization that goes beyond mere opining and deploring.

Landmark has sued the IRS in an effort to determine whether there's any truth to the alleged misuse of the IRS in audits of groups such as the National Rifle Association and individuals such as Paula Jones. According to an account of the lawsuit in the Wall Street Journal, it seeks the names of "anyone who had requested audits or investigations of [Internal Revenue Code Section] 501(c)(3)tax-exempt organizations."

The "sole constant in this case has been the IRS' bad faith," the Journal editorial observes. The IRS has fought the request tooth and nail "but cannot or will not explain why [the information] should be kept secret," and so Landmark now has asked to depose agency officials in an attempt to get the answers it seeks.

A federal judge, Henry Kennedy, currently is deciding whether IRS officials will be accountable to the public via the courts. (Let's leave for another day the question of why a government of the people is so lacking in transparency that these matters wind up in court, or why our trusted servants in Congress haven't already ferreted out the information that Landmark seeks.)