Professor Michelle Alexander was quoted in an Athens Banner-Herald article from her book "The New Jim Crow." The article focuses on the disenfranchisement of felons in states like Virginia, where more than seven percent of the adult population cannot vote due to felony charges. In Virginia, Gov. Robert McDonnell is taking steps to restore the right to vote to nonviolent felons.

Alexander's book calls on the idea that disenfranchising felons affects minorities most. She calls voting-rights restoration processes a “bureaucratic maze” that is “cumbersome, confusing and onerous.”

Professor Donald Tobin was quoted in a Lancaster Eagle Gazette article about the need to clear up certain rules in the Internal Revenue Service in order to more accurately determine if groups can be classified as social welfare groups. He said that while most groups are easily classified into the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt category, changes throughout the years have created some more difficult decisions for the IRS. He said when groups want to engage in political activity near an election, things get tricky.

In the article, Tobin said experts have been calling for improvements to the 501(c)(4) rules for a decade because there has been abuse by entities filing for the exemption. In addition, he said the IRS has shown it has been reluctant to enforce the rules and incompetent when it tried to do so.

“We need to figure out a way to fix it so people’s faith in non-partisan enforcement in our tax laws is restored while there’s a means of assuring that those provisions are not being abused,” he said.

Professor Donald Tobin was quoted by the Huffington Post in an article about nonprofits which are under scrutinization after claiming to be social welfare groups despite involvement in political activity. The article touches on the idea that there are varied definitions of what political activity actually is, and what must be reported by these groups.

The article says the IRS rules -- the ones that matter for purposes of tax-exempt status -- lay out a more expansive, and more subjective, range of relevant political activity. To downplay their own campaign efforts, groups like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS like to point publicly to only that political activity that falls under the Federal Election Commission's narrower, more circumscribed definition.

"The question is what definition are they using to determine whether their activity is political intervention," Tobin said.

Professor Donald Tobin was quoted in a Toledo Blade editorial about the "shrinking scandal" revolving around the Internal Revenue Service. The editorial focuses on the fact that while there was an uproar of opposition when news broke that the IRS was monitoring certain social welfare groups, the IRS actually should have been conducting these investigations. Many of the groups in question had strong political ties.

Tobin said although some of the IRS's methods were questionable, it is understandable that some of the groups were flagged for review.

“While some of the IRS questions may have been over-broad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked,” he said.
 

Professor Donald Tobin was interviewed on WTOP, a radio station in Washington, D.C., about the Internal Revenue Service's investigation into some social welfare groups flagged for possible heightened political involvement. Tobin said the investigation into some of these groups was justified based on their political activity, but the IRS went wrong by using partisan criteria to flag groups for further investigation.

"The key is the IRS shouldn’t be singling out groups for a partisan purpose. They shouldn’t be using a partisan criteria. But it also shouldn’t be avoiding the enforcement of the law," Tobin said. "And so what we needed was a non-partisan process that examined organizations, because there were a lot of organizations that were pushing the envelope regarding whether they were properly social welfare organizations."

Professor Donald Tobin was quoted in a front-page New York Times article about groups scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service because of political activity. While some groups lamented they were being investigated unfairly, the article sheds light on the fact that some of these groups were actually devoting a significant amount of their resources to supporting a political agenda. Tax experts and former IRS officials said these activities would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review, as Tobin notes in the article.

“Money is not the only thing that matters,” said Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division. “While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.”