As Donald Trump’s third year as president neared its end, he appeared at one of the religious right movement’s biggest annual events and declared, “I will never allow the IRS to be used as a political weapon.”
Even at the time, the declaration was unfortunate: Former White House chief of staff John Kelly claimed that Trump “repeatedly” tried to get the Internal Revenue Service to go after his perceived political enemies. As Trump’s fifth year as president gets underway, the president’s 2019 quote looks even worse.
It’s been a few weeks since Trump, crossing a dangerous line, sicced the IRS on Harvard University, putting the future of the school’s tax-exempt status in doubt. Late last week, the president went a step further, declaring by way of his social media platform, “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!”
There was some ambiguity in the phrasing. Was Trump making a prediction about an IRS investigation? Was he telling the IRS what to do with the university’s tax exemption? Was he making an announcement about a decision that had already been made?
The answers to these questions were far from clear, but as The New York Times reported, the rhetoric did not go unnoticed in Cambridge.
Harvard University signaled Friday that it would resist President Trump’s renewed threat to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, a move for which it said there was “no legal basis” as the president escalated his bitter dispute with the nation’s oldest university. Harvard stopped short of explicitly pledging a legal challenge to a revocation of its tax status, a change that would upend the university’s finances. But a spokesperson for the university said in a statement that there was “no legal basis to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status.”
Similarly, Harvard University President Alan Garber told The Wall Street Journal that such a move would be “highly illegal.”
That’s true. As the Times’ report noted, federal law “prohibits the president from directing the I.R.S. to conduct tax investigations” — a line Trump has already apparently crossed — and a Bloomberg News report added that the IRS code “prevents presidents from interfering with the federal tax agency’s decisions.”
Whether there will be any accountability for the president’s apparent indifference to these restrictions remains to be seen.
But just as important is the fact that Harvard isn’t the only target. A few weeks ago, in response to a question about other entities’ tax-exempt status, Trump told reporters “we’re looking at” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal, relying on multiple sources, also reported that administration officials are “exploring ways of challenging the tax-exempt status of nonprofits.” In case anyone’s forgotten, when Richard Nixon tried to sic the IRS on his perceived political opponents, it was seen by members of Congress as an impeachable offense. Indeed, it was literally included in the articles of impeachment. Nixon, however, took these steps in private. Trump’s public posturing is far more brazen. As a recent analysis from The New York Times explained: In the years after President Richard Nixon enlisted the Internal Revenue Service to investigate his political opponents, Congress passed a series of laws to make sure the agency would focus on collecting taxes and not use its vast powers to carry out political vendettas. But President Trump has moved swiftly to suppress that independence in the first few months of his second term and, tax experts and former agency officials warn, return the I.R.S. to darker days when it was used as a political tool of the president.
Before he became vice president, JD Vance told a national television audience, “If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we’d no longer live in a free country.” Expect to hear that quote quite a bit in the coming weeks and months. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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