Roll Call Helps The Left Attack ALEC

How desperate is the left to push ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) out of business? Here’s how desperate: last night Roll Call breathlessly reported that “The former head of the IRS’ Exempt Organizations division has asked the agency to revoke the tax-exempt status of the conservative nonprofit ALEC.”

Sounds serious, right? And the Roll Call article implies that the guy they’re speaking of is an objective source:

Owens’ experience with this body of tax law and reputation at the IRS combined with new evidence that ALEC may have deliberately misled the agency on its annual federal filings could deliver yet another blow to an organization already facing a public relations crisis.

Not quite. The guy Roll Call is speaking of is none other than Marcus Owens, who is employed at Caplin & Drysdale, whose top representative tax litigation case just happens to be —

Common Cause. Yup, everyone’s favorite liberal organization, which is clearly affiliated with the Democratic party and even participated in a protest against the super PAC American Crossroads where the event flyer showed Karl Rove in an orange prison jumpsuit.

Is this the same Marcus Owens who supported Media Matters when Fox News accused Media Matters of using tax dollars to attack Fox, saying disdainfully, “Fox loses this round”?

It is.

Is this the same Marcus Owens who is using the group “Clergy Voice,” a purported “group of Christian clergy in Ohio,” as a client to file a complaint against ALEC?

How does he explain that no record of this “group’s” existence could be found in Ohio corporation records, Ohio charity records, or Guidestar’s national nonprofit database?

Doing our research, unlike Roll Call, we discovered that the Clergy Voice website notes that its members include clergy from the United Methodist Church. Strangely enough, Common Cause CEO Bob Edgar is an ordained United Methodist minister and has been active in left-wing clergy organizations such as the National Council of Churches, which has a long history of supporting Communist causes around the world.   

The forerunner of Clergy Voice, a group of left-wing clergy, filed complaints with the IRS alleging that conservative churches had illegally participated in partisan politics.

A conservative minister said that no IRS sanctions resulted from the complaints, but “conceded that the IRS complaint and the perceived threat to their tax-exempt status had a chilling effect on the religious-voter movement based in conservative churches.”

So Roll Call, which had the nerve to call Common Cause a “watchdog group” (more like a Democratic Party guard dog) wants to help a left-wing lawyer put ALEC out of business?

There’s a shocker.