Senate Conservatives Fund compared Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to the Internal Revenue Service on Monday, accusing them of “declaring war on conservatives” in the same way the IRS applied increased scrutiny to some tea party groups applying to tax exemptions.
SCF, a conservative group backing a primary challenger to McConnell, has been attacking the senator for months and accusing him of not being conservative enough. Boehner was added to the list after he last week, when he lashed out at outside conservative groups who were opposing the budget deal, saying they had “lost all credibility” and were “misleading their followers.”
“What these leaders are doing to conservatives is no different from what the IRS got caught doing to them this summer,” SCF executive director Matt Hoskins wrote in a fundraising email. “They’re using their power to discriminate against people they see as a political threat.”
SCF also cited the firing of Paul Teller, the executive director of the Republican Study Committee, a group of the most conservative Republicans in the House conference, for leaking information to outside groups, as a malicious action against conservatives. Neither Boehner nor McConnell is a member of the RSC. SCF also pointed to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is backing McConnell, “blacklisting” Jamestown Associates, who is consulting for the RSC.
“There’s no question anymore about where the Republican leadership stands,” Hoskins wrote. “They hold the grassroots in contempt and are working to destroy us.”
The campaigns of Boehner and McConnell dismissed the comments.
“There are only two organizations in America dedicated to misleading the American people into believing it is Republicans, not Barack Obama and Senate Democrats who are responsible for the reckless liberal agenda in Washington: The DSCC and SCF,” McConnell’s campaign communications director Allison Moore told The Daily Caller. “They are indistinguishable in almost every way except the DSCC is honest about their intent to elect liberal Democrats whereas SCF has the audacity to claim they’re working for conservatives as they exclusively attack our own.”
“This fundraising ploy only downplays the IRS’s illegal actions and empowers those on The Left who would have the American people believe it’s a ‘phony’ scandal,” Cory Fritz, Boehner’s campaign communications director, told TheDC.