Looks like the Democratic party might be corrupt from the top down as a new ethics complaint filed by the Center for Competitive Politics with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics has named Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennet, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.  According to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the complainants, here’s what’s at issue:

“The complaint documents how the senators improperly interfered with IRS adjudications to further their party’s electoral prospects. They pressured the IRS to undertake income-tax investigations of specific organizations, to find that specific organizations were in violation of the law, to reach predetermined results pertaining to pending applications by individual organizations for nonprofit status, and to adopt specific regulatory interpretations and policies to further their campaign goals.”

The other Senators named in the complaint include: Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Carl Levin (D-MI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Al Franken (D- MN), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Tom Udall (D-NM).

This is an issue that we have been harping on for at least a year. On May 14th, we published a letter that Bennet wrote to IRS Commissioner Shulman and a press release from his office specifically calling out conservative operative Karl Rove:

“For instance, long-time partisan operative Karl Rove is a senior official behind a 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ charity, yet it’s common knowledge that his organization exists to elect and defeat specific political candidates.  Elections operations such as Mr. Rove’s should not be allowed to masquerade as charities to take advantage of their tax exempt status and hide their donors from the public.  It’s the IRS’s job to enforce the tax code and make sure that ‘social welfare’ organizations are what they say they are.”

And, the left wonders why we argue for private political donations.