A coalition of tea party organizations and conservative leaders will release a scathing letter Tuesday against the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill, calling the legislation so “defective” that senators need to scrap it altogether.

The letter, which includes nearly 150 signers, also urges senators to not only reject the underlying legislation, but any procedural votes that would be required for the Senate to begin working on the bill on the floor.

The signatories include former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), RedState.com editor Erick Erickson, and Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder and national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots. The letter is also signed by conservative and tea party leaders from more than 25 states - spanning from California to Iowa to Alabama to New Hampshire.

More: Tea Partiers Reject Immigration Reform - Seung Min Kim

Notice who the leaders are - Allen West (former Congressman), Eric Erickson (never elected to anything), then various leaders of Tea Party orgs. All with proven track records of repelling minority voters. So even if this passes, it will do so with the GOP’s most stridently racist groups kicking and screaming. This will completely swamp any chance of it convincing minorities that the GOP is what it is.

A Travis County district court judge ruled this week that a Houston-based tea party group is not a nonprofit corporation as it claims, but an unregistered political action committee that illegally aided the Republican Party through its poll-watching efforts during the 2010 elections.

The summary judgment by Judge John Dietz upheld several Texas campaign finance laws that had been challenged on constitutional grounds by King Street Patriots, a tea party organization known for its “True the Vote” effort to uncover voter fraud.

Houston Chronicle story

Revelations the past few days that the Internal Revenue Service has been giving special attention to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status have converged with the news that the Justice Department has been seizing phone records of The Associated Press. Reaction from both camps has been outrage seasoned with constitutional fervor.

Not to overstate, but nothing less than free speech is at stake, about which no one should be confused.

Briefly, the IRS singled out specific groups with words such as “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names for special scrutiny, including asking for donor lists. Needless to say, this would have a chilling effect on donors who prefer anonymity, but it also smacks of intimidation. The implication: Criticize the government and you will pay. Literally. The targeting, moreover, was not a rogue operation by some random field agents in Cincinnati, as originally claimed, but, according to The Washington Post, involved IRS officials in Washington.

“Outrageous” was the term President Obama used Monday during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Obama promised to get to the bottom of it even though, as president, he can’t directly contact the IRS about a tax matter. This is owing to the legacy of Watergate, when then-President Richard Nixon used the IRS to intimidate his perceived enemies. The unavoidable comparison is, well, unavoidable.

Obama can rattle some cages, though, given his administration’s almost daily scandal production, he’s going to be a busy zookeeper for the foreseeable future. No sooner had the Benghazi hearing concluded than the IRS story broke, followed by reports of the Justice Department probe. The latter’s investigation pertained to reporters’ phone records over a two-month period affecting four bureaus, including the AP’s congressional office, and more than 20 lines potentially used by hundreds of reporters and, significantly, their sources.

More: Kathleen Parker: Far Right and the Mainstream Media Now Have a Common Cause

Let’s be very clear: because the Internal Revenue Service holds so much private data, and because it can make people’s lives absolutely miserable, it is of paramount importance in our political system that it both is, and is perceived as, an apolitical entity. If it discriminated against tea party groups that attempted to register as 501(c)4 social welfare organizations, then that’s a grave offense, and it needs to be investigated thoroughly and dealt with severely.

(Source: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

But the particular bias people are angry about is the opposite of the bias they should be angry about. The problem wasn’t that the IRS was skeptical of tea party groups registering as 501(c)4s. It’s that it hasn’t been skeptical of Organizing for America, Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA and Heritage Action Fund registering as 501(c)4s. The IRS should be treating all these groups equally and appropriately — which would mean much more harshly.

More: The IRS Was Wrong to Target the Tea Party. They Should’ve Gone After All 501(c)4s.

If the IRS can do this to right wing movements they can do it to left wing movements and either way it’s just plain wrong.

Hey, guess what? Conservatives now have a real scandal to tout! They’ve been complaining for a while that the IRS singled out tea party groups for audits, and it turns out they were right. Today, the IRS fessed up:

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups…”That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out. About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

In this case, conservatives will undoubtedly demand more information about how this happened, who was involved, and when top officials found out about it. And this time, they’ll be right to.

More: Finally, a Real Scandal for Conservatives to Chew On

FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe has a warning for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and other GOP incumbents up for reelection in the 2014: don’t expect Tea Party support just because you’re already in Congress.

“It’s utterly contrary to Republican philosophy, we believe in competition, we believe in open democratic processes and I think that leads to better candidates,” Kibbe tells Top Line.

Kibbe singles Graham out as one of his Super PAC’s major targets in the midterm elections, citing Graham’s criticism of the filibuster over the Obama administration’s drone program led by Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) as a major reason for replacing him.

“The way he lashed out against Rand Paul…he’s begging for a primary,” says Kibbe, who continues on to say that he hopes to replace Graham with someone “who is worthy of that seat.”

YahooNews

Feeling betrayed by the Republican Party and its leaders, tea party groups in Ohio appear to be uniting and moving toward either a split from the GOP or action to punish Republican candidates who fail ideological purity tests.

A series of events, culminating with the April 26 election of Matt Borges as chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, spurred a flurry of meetings and conference calls among tea party leaders last week to plot a course of action heading into the 2014 statewide election.

Options being discussed, according to Seth Morgan, policy director for Americans for Prosperity, range from breaking off into “a third party, to an insurrection (within the Republican Party) and everything in between.”

Tom Zawistowski, executive director of the Portage County Tea Party who lost his bid for the Ohio GOP chairmanship by a 48-7 vote of the party’s state central committee, met on Saturday with Don Shrader, chairman of the Constitution Party of Ohio, to explore uniting in a party committed more to principles than winning elections.

After the chairmanship vote, Zawistowski said he made it clear that if the state GOP did not focus on enacting conservative policies, “we would either find a political party to join or we would start one of our own,” saying his meeting with Shrader “is the first step in that process.”

More: Tea Party Has Had It With GOP

Researchers at William & Mary and the University of California-Davis somehow convinced nearly 12,000 FreedomWorks members to take a survey exploring their ideological and policy positions in order to analyze how the attitudes of the most ardent members of the Tea Party compare to those of other non-Tea Party aligned Republicans. The results must be sobering to the establishment GOP-types like Karl Rove and Eric Cantor trying to re-brand the party as slightly right-of-sane.

First, as the authors point out, Tea Party members and supporters now constitute a majority of the current Republican Party, not a minority faction. Their study finds that two-thirds of Republican identifiers strongly support or support the Tea Party, slightly higher than the roughly half of Republicans who say they support the Tea Party in other public polling from NBC/Wall Street Journal.

Second, Tea Party supporters are much more politically active than other Republicans:

For example, in 2008 Tea Party Republicans performed 1.42 activities for the presidential and congressional tickets on average, compared with only .41 activities by non-Tea Party Republicans. In 2010, with only congressional races at the national level, Tea Party Republicans performed on average 0.68 activities versus only 0.12 by non-Tea Party Republicans. Tea Party supporters are responsible for almost all of the total campaign activity performed by party supporters on the Republican side.

Third, on every contentious issue from reducing environmental regulations and repealing Obamacare to taxes and even banning abortion, Tea Party supporters are far more right-wing than other Republicans.

More: The Tea Party Is Killing the Republican Party

more at nbcnews.com