Obama campaign takes fire over church conference speech

Sen. Obama's speech at last summer's United Church of Christ conference has managed to pull an IRS investigation according to the AP. Here's some interesting analysis from two sources:

John Wilson's IRS Probe Of Obama's Church Underscores Anxieties For Nonprofits underscores the difficulty charities and other nonprofits are facing with these subjective rules... something I've blogged about before.

Over at the Nonprofit Law Prof blog, there's a a great pointer to Jack Siegel's take on the situation. Quoting their quote of him:

We do think Congress must step in and write a prohibition on political campaign activity that addresses the reality of how churches and other Section 501(c)(3) organizations interact with political candidates. In addressing this problem, we would like to see Congress take an approach akin to that taken by the intermediate sanctions in Section 4958. That is, rather than penalizing the innocent entity or the entity that can't control a speaker once the speech has begun, the sanctions should focus on the speaker's conduct, penalizing the speaker. Many will argue that this raises First Amendment issues. We recognize that possibility, but are not convinced. Obviously, the speaker has a right to speak, but the speech in question is by invitation. Consequently, this is not silencing the speaker in terms of access to the public square.

A safe harbor for the charity in case the speaker slips into campaign mode would probably face a lot less resistance compared to the flip side: penalizing the speaker. I'd be very surprised if that idea ever got off the ground.