IRS Commissioner Shulman’s Wife Is Left-Wing Campaign Finance Activist

Susan L. Anderson

Democrats have made much of the fact that ex-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who presided over the agency as it obstructed and harassed conservative non-profits, was appointed by President Bush. It turns out, however, that in one of many such unholy Washington alliances, Shulman is married to Susan L. Anderson, who is an Occupy Wall Street activist and a senior program adviser for the Washington-based group Public Campaign.

Public Campaign is nominally non-partisan, but is supported by left-wing groups like the Ford Foundation, the Streisand Foundation, and various labor unions. The focus of Public Campaign’s efforts is campaign finance; its slogan is “Clean Money, Clean Elections.”

The group produced a “holiday card” video in which one person said: “Sure my kids might get asthma because Congress keeps doing dirty energy’s bidding, but the Koch brothers need their third home.”

Public Campaign encompasses both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) entities:

Public Campaign is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)3 charitable organization. It has an on-going relationship with Public Campaign Action Fund, a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)4 organization.

How hard do you think it was for Public Campaign to get its 501 status approved by the IRS?

But that isn’t the key point. One of the Left’s major initiatives in recent years has been its effort to block conservatives from participating in politics through 501(c) organizations. Its campaign against the Citizens United decision and its bizarre war against the Koch brothers have been components of this strategy. This is what Public Campaign is all about. “Clean money” means money donated by Democratic Party supporters like George Soros and the labor unions, even if they have to extract it from unwilling donors by force. And Public Campaign has an entire section of its web site devoted to attacking the Koch brothers. This is also what the IRS’s effort to obstruct conservative applicants for 501(c) status was all about. We see here a perfect unity of ideology and strategy between Shulman’s IRS and his wife’s left-wing pressure group. Given that Shulman reportedly made more visits to the White House than any other member of the Obama administration, it appears that their strategy was Barack Obama’s, too.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses