Levin’s Conservative Manifesto, Part 2: Environment

ENVIRONMENT

Eliminate the special tax-exempt status granted to environmental groups, since they are not nonpartisan charitable foundations.

I had to do some non-trivial research here in order to understand the underlying issues and legal constraints on such organizations.  Like a lot of governmental nonsense this is really boring stuff, but put simply the IRS allows tax-exempt status for some non-profit groups if they meet certain requirements related to their activities and what they do with the money that they raise. The IRS 557 publication states:

The organization will not, as a substantial part of its activities, attempt to influence legislation (unless it elects to come under the provisions allowing certain lobbying expenditures) or participate to any extent in a political campaign for or against any candidate for public office.

Then the section on Lobbying Expenditures states:

In general, if a substantial part of the activities of your organization consists of carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, your organization’s exemption from federal income tax will be denied.

As mind-numbing as this stuff is, it is vital to understanding the subsequent discussion with respect to abuses and interrelated groups so let us briefly define the three main types of IRS-allowed groups that we will be examining: 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and 527.  501(c)(3) organizations can accept tax-deductible donations if the organization refrains from anything political, but if they cross the line into politics they lose their highly-desired ability to accept those deductible donations.  A 501(c)(4) organization is like a 501(c)(3) group but is permitted to be politically active as long as it is true to the organization’s purpose, however that political activity cannot be its primary focus.  The price that a 501(c)(4) group pays for the permitted political activity is a loss of the deductible donations.  The third group, a 527 organization, can support “issue advocacy” but cannot support or oppose a specific candidate without falling under some additional regulations.  Like the 501(c)(4) groups, donations to a 527 group are not tax deductible.  As you may already suspect, part of the game involves multiple related groups.

In 2004, the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee published a report on the actions of several environmental groups who manage to maintain their tax-exempt status even though they are breaking the rules.  The groups singled out included The League of Conservation Voters, The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace.  One problem pointed out in this report is the interconnected web of 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and 527 groups, with the latter two groups receiving money funneled from the 501(c)(3) organization (which is permitted to receive deductible donations).  None other than the very liberal Washington Post featured the Sierra Club as a good example of this potentially illegal web:

Perhaps no one better illustrates the host of interlocking roles than Carl Pope, one of the most influential operatives on the Democratic side in the 2004 election.  As executive director of the Sierra Club, a major 501c (4) environmental lobby, Pope also controls the Sierra Club Voter Education Fund, a 527. The Voter Education Fund 527 has raised $3.4 million this election cycle, with $2.4 million of that amount coming from the Sierra Club. A third group, the Sierra Club PAC, has since 1980 given $3.9 million to Democratic candidates and $173,602 to GOP candidates.

 These activities just touch the surface of Pope’s political involvement. In 2002-03, Pope helped found two major 527 groups: America Votes, which has raised $1.9 million to coordinate the election activities of 32 liberal groups, and America Coming Together (ACT), which has a goal of raising more than $100 million to mobilize voters to cast ballots against Bush. Finally, Pope is treasurer of a new 501c (3) foundation, America’s Families United, which reportedly has $15 million to distribute to voter mobilization groups.

 ‘I am in this as deeply as I am,’ Pope said, ‘because I think this country is in real peril.’

The US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report, titled POLITICAL ACTIVITY OF ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS AND THEIR SUPPORTING FOUNDATIONS concludes:

This report does not represent the totality of environmental groups engaged in political activity in this election year or prior election years. It does not even represent all the actions taken by the environmental groups that are highlighted in this report each election year. However, this report provides examples of some of the actions taken by these groups and clearly questions any claims these groups make concerning being “non-partisan.”

…

Moreover, these groups’ activities demonstrate the concern expressed in the Washington Post article regarding political money this election year – money “slithering through on other routes as organizations maintain various accounts, tripping over each other, shifting money between 501(c)(3)’s, (c)(4)’s, and 527′s.” 

Today’s environmental groups are simply political machines reporting millions in contributions and expenditures each year for the purpose of raising more money to pursue their agenda. Especially in this election year, the American voter should see these groups and their many affiliate organizations as they are – the newest insidious conspiracy of political action committees and perhaps the newest multi-million dollar manipulation of federal election laws.

Since the game involves collecting that easy-to-get deductible money through a 501(c)(3), then funneling it through to more political groups, there must be serious transparent and auditable firewalls placed between the groups.  More to Levin’s point, the regulations clearly state that a group “may qualify for exemption from federal income taxes if it is organized and operation exclusively for one or more of the following purposes”:

• Religious
• Charitable
• Scientific
• Testing for public safety
• Literary
• Educational
• Fostering amateur sports competition

Since a group like Greenpeace is obviously not one of those organization types it seems fairly clear that it should not qualify for tax-exempt status.

Eliminate special statutory authority granting environmental groups standing to bring lawsuits on behalf of the public, since their main purpose is to pursue the Statist’s agenda through litigation.

The definition of “legal standing” seems fairly cut and dry at first and as is typical it only got complicated once judges started redefining the term to better suit their own particular ideologies.  The idea of legal standing is simply that in order for you to sue you have to be someone who is being harmed or will be harmed by the law and that a favorable court decision must be likely to redress the injury.  For example, I would not have the legal standing to simply step up and sue to overturn the D.C. laws that severely restrict firearms, but Dick Anthony Heller, being subject to those laws, had standing to bring that landmark case (Heller v D.C.) which ultimately overturned many of the D.C. laws as being in violation of the second amendment.

While the Supreme Court denied standing for environmental groups in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), saying that among other things it was a violation of the Separation of Powers, they did allow standing in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw (2000).  In his dissent, joined by Justice Thomas, Justice Scalia wrote:

We have certainly held that a demonstration of harm to the environment is not enough to satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement unless the plaintiff can demonstrate how he personally was harmed. E.g., Lujan, supra, at 563. In the normal course, however, a lack of demonstrable harm to the environment will translate, as it plainly does here, into a lack of demonstrable harm to citizen plaintiffs. While it is perhaps possible that a plaintiff could be harmed even though the environment was not, such a plaintiff would have the burden of articulating and demonstrating the nature of that injury. Ongoing “concerns” about the environment are not enough, for “[i]t is the reality of the threat of repeated injury that is relevant to the standing inquiry, not the plaintiff ’s subjective apprehensions,”

Article III’s mention of “cases” and “controversies” has been defined by the courts since the very beginning (i.e. President Washington and Chief Justice Jay) as being a requirement that the plaintiff suffer injury or a legitimate threat of injury.  In this case the plaintiffs did not make that case effectively, though the majority did not see it that way.

In another case, Massachusetts v. EPA (2006), Justice Roberts issued a scathing dissent based upon a lack of standing associated with the Court granting special status to Massachusetts:

Before determining whether petitioners can meet this familiar test, however, the Court changes the rules. It asserts that “States are not normal litigants for the purposes of invoking federal jurisdiction,” and that given “Massachusetts’ stake in protecting its quasi-sovereign interests, the Commonwealth is entitled to special solicitude in our standing analysis.” Ante, at 15, 17 (emphasis added).

The nuances of legal standing are complex and I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of this, but the fact is the environmental movement has succeeded in having the courts redefine the definition of standing in order to bring many of their suits.

Fight all efforts to use environmental regulations to set governmental industrial policies and diminish the nation’s standard of living, such as “cap-and-trade” to regulate “man-made climate change.”

This one is hard to argue against. 

The environmental movement is as much about left wing politics as it is about the earth.  You may have heard many environmentalists described as “watermelons”, meaning that they may be green on the outside but are red (politically) on the inside.  There is a lot of truth to that.

What I have observed is that if you have a group of people, all of whom are informed about the science (or lack thereof) of anthropogenic climate change, the dividing line between the believers and the skeptics is which side of the ideological spectrum that they are on.  Many leftists realized years ago that a sure path to the soft-tyranny that they seek is to hide their real motives in an environmental agenda.

Cap and trade is about politics, not the environment.