Obama IRS enemies list targeted Hispanic Republicans

May 17, 2013

By John Seiler

As I pointed out in an earlier post, the Obama IRS enemies list against conservatives and libertarians discredits his so-called 2012 election “victory.”

And remember how we were told, ceaselessly, that Republicans had to do more to win Hispanic votes, because Obama got 72 percent, Romney 28 percent?

It turns out that a big reason for GOP failure is the Obama IRS enemies list also targeted Hispanic Republican groups:

“The Internal Revenue Service scandal involving the apparently unjustified targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups has also hit home with the Hispanic community.

“George Rodriguez, former president of the San Antonio Tea Party, said that when the organization applied for non-profit status, leaders were intimidated by IRS workers with excessive paperwork and meddling questions.

“’They asked us all sorts of things that were out of the norm,’ Rodriguez, now head of the conservative South Texas Alliance, told Fox News Latino. ‘We knew these questions were not the norm and we had our suspicions about them.’

“The complaint from the San Antonio group is just one of many nationwide leveled against the federal agency, which surfaced last Friday when Lois G. Lerner director of the IRS’s exempt-organizations division, let slip  that low-level IRS staffers had given extra scrutiny to conservative groups with words such as ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their names.

“The public slip started a furor among conservative groups and pundits and forced U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to announce that the Justice Department would open a criminal investigation into the matter. 

“Rodriguez said the group received a questionnaire from the IRS with ‘well over 50 questions,’ including inquiries into who the group met with, where they held their meetings, who was in attendance and what the subject of their internal emails were.

“’They should have been worried about the numbers, not who we were meeting with,’ he added. ‘It was flat-out dirty politics.’”

Dirty politics. Dirty election. Dirty IRS.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I didn’t want Mitt Romney as president, and I don’t want to re-run the 2012 election.

And certainly Republicans need to do more to attract Hispanic voters. Despite the Obama IRS enemies list harassment of Republican Hispanics, especially Hispanic Tea Party groups, in recent years the party still managed to elect Sen. Ted Cruz (pictured above), Sen. Marco Rubio, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. Except for Rubio, who seems to me to be a Dan Quayle-type lightweight, the others are serious politicians and even presidential material.

But it’s hard to present your case when the dirty IRS is breathing down your neck. If the GOP doesn’t now turn this to its advantage, the way Democrats turned Watergate to their advantage in 1974 and 1976, then the party should shuffle off to the elephant graveyard.