By Jon CassidyAs long as there is privacy in politics, even way out at the margins, such as with some home school coalition that mails out endorsements by newsletter, then the progressives will call it a hiding place for subversive elements and dark money. This is why their movement is coming to resemble the Inquisition.The first victims of the Inquisition were the heretic Waldensians, proto-Protestants who insisted on Biblical primacy and rejected the supremacy of the Pope and his priestly hierarchy. Much the same, the new heretics are those groups who insist on Constitutional primacy and reject presumptuous authorities and their self-serving doctrines written in strange tongues.The Center for Competitive Politics, along with the Institute for Justice, is one of the leading national advocates for the heretics, challenging state authority to go rummaging through the papers and donation records of private associations that have little or nothing to do with the campaigns of elected officials. So it’s fitting that California Attorney General Kamala Harris, on no more textual authority than Torquemada had in the Bible, is demanding that CCP turn over donor records filed in confidence with the Internal Revenue Service. Federal law specifically prohibits state authorities from accessing the 501(c)(3) donor records kept by the IRS, but Harris is demanding them anyway from CCP and Americans for Prosperity, one of the free market advocacy groups associated with Charles and David Koch.
