Any organization granted a tax exemption for “social welfare” activity under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code can collect unlimited and undisclosed contributions but if the group is spending most of its money on political activity, then it loses its status and has to report how much it got and from whom, according to tax experts.

Last Friday, the FBI revealed that the IRS was focusing on conservative groups for further review of their tax-exempt status. News reports first said the targeting was done by IRS agents in the Cincinnati office trying to cope with a flood of applications for 501(c)(4) exemptions. It turned out that on June 29, 2011, Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division overseeing tax-exempt groups, had learned of the targeting and insisted that the search be broadened to all political and lobbying groups, but, according to the New York Times, the IRS branch employees kept it narrow.

The revelation provoked Obama to say at a press conference last Friday, “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous. It is contrary to our traditions.” He said that “people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed.”

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the FBI is “coordinating with the Justice Department to see if any laws were broken in connection with those matters related to the IRS.”

On Monday, two Senate committees, both run by Democrats, announced they’d hold investigations while House committees run by Republicans have vowed to do the same.

“The IRS’s actions are disgraceful, and [it] attacks the very heart of our democracy,” Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) said in a statement. “It warrants a full congressional and criminal investigation.”

Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) echoed his outrage. “I’m deeply disturbed by reports that the IRS targeted certain groups,” he said in a statement. “I’m eager to review the Inspector General’s report later this week. If some at the IRS took actions that were politically motivated, they must be held accountable, along with those at the highest levels of the agency. We must make sure that the IRS maintains its integrity as an impartial agency.”

In the 2012 election, Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) was in the crosshairs of millions of dollars spent in negative advertising by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt group. The advertising never mentioned Bishop’s Republican opponent, Randy Altschuler, but painted the five-term LI  congressman as a scoundrel embodying “everything that’s wrong with Washington.”

Rather than comment on what it felt like to be outspent by a 501(c)(4), Bishop expressed his concern about the IRS’ apparently politically motivated audits.

“I am deeply troubled by reports that some IRS employees applied undue scrutiny to certain groups seeking  tax-exempt status,” said Bishop in a statement. “The enforcement authority of the IRS was designed to operate independently of this kind of political pressure. I expect the report to be issued this week by Treasury Department’s Inspector General will be the basis for immediate action and strong, comprehensive measures to ensure fairness and impartiality at the IRS.”

John Gomez, who ran against Israel in 2010 on the Republican and Conservative lines, had the full support of Long Island’s Tea Party, he said. But he had an uphill battle trying to level the playing field financially.

“Steve Israel was sitting on $4 million—I had $50,000,” Gomez recalled. By the election, he said he’d raised about half a million dollars and had to respond to letters from the Federal Election Commission charging him with campaign fund-raising violations that he later overturned in court. He likens what he went through with the FEC to what Tea Party groups faced with the IRS audits.

“Strategically, it’s a way to slow these organizations down,” Gomez says. “You can’t spend time organizing and disseminating information because this is really what your purpose is: to make people aware that the government is out of control.”

Steve Flanagan, director of the Conservative Society for Action, one of the first Tea Party groups founded on LI more than four years ago, shared Gomez’s concern. “If any of these allegations are true, we’re talking about a serious abuse of power here,” he said.

Before the news broke about the IRS audits, the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, based in Washington, DC, sent out an urgent fund-raising request to its supporters past and present. One recipient was an 89-year-old woman who provided this reporter with her mailing. Among its calls to “provide critical financial and tactical support to principled conservative candidates at every level,” it said: “We can’t stand by and allow Obama, the Democrats and so-called ‘moderate’ Republicans to transform the United States into a weak, dependent, second-rate nation.”

From the wording above, it’s hard to say that this group is engaged in purely “social welfare.” But that’s what the tax-exempt battle apparently is about.

From a historical perspective, the White House has used the IRS to political ends for decades, starting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who employed it against Sen. Huey Long (D-La.) and Rep. Hamilton Fish, a New York congressman. During the Eisenhower administration, the IRS gave the FBI the tax returns of key members of the American Communist Party.

President Richard Nixon had the IRS audit muck-raking reporters who were critical of him, such as Newsday’s Bob Greene. And President Ronald Reagan used the IRS to challenge the tax-exempt status of the non-profit Mother Jones magazine, forcing one of the leading left-wing publications in the country to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend itself. It won.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-Dix Hills) at a news conference in Hicksville on Monday, April 29, 2013.

A Long Island congressman is proposing legislation to help reduce a massive backlog of claims in the Department of Veterans Affairs, where vets are waiting an average of 273 days.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-Dix Hills) said his proposed End the VA Claims Backlog Now Act will help about 890,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including some veterans making first-time claims who wait an average of 327 days.

“It’s unfathomable that the average wait time for veterans to start receiving benefits is 273 days,” Israel said Monday during a news conference at the VFW Hall in Hicksville. “The VA must do better, and that’s why I’m introducing legislation that would greatly reduce this backlog.”

Israel, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, added that for veterans living in a metropolitan area, the average wait for disability compensation is a staggering 642 days—a statistic that evoked gasps from the crowd of veterans in attendance.

This bill would give provisional benefits to those veterans filing for disability if their claims aren’t processed within 125 days. “If it is not adjudicated within 125 days [the affected veteran] automatically gets a 40 percent disability rating, no matter what,” said Israel.

Veterans disability ratings are assigned in 10 percent increments, ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent disabled—the higher the rating the more severe the disability, and the higher the monthly compensation, according to NOLO Network, a legal advice website.

Tireak Tulloch, a Brooklyn native who was deployed to Iraq twice and served a combined eight years in the Marine Corps reserve, credited Israel with signing a petition by the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America calling on President Barack Obama to end the backlog.

Tulloch, a leadership fellow with that nonpartisan veterans’ organization, recalled that Obama has said that it was necessary to shoulder some of the burden that veterans are made to bare and to continue to honor them, bringing strength to both the service men and women and to our nation as a whole.

“We need the president to stay true to these words,” said Tulloch. “As of last week we have over 880,000 veterans with pending claims in the VA system, and of that, over 610,000 [are] in the backlog. This is completely unacceptable and we must do more.”

Israel emphasized that there’s no reason why the bill shouldn’t be met with overwhelming bipartisan support.

“In a few weeks all of my colleagues will be marching in the Memorial Day parades, waving flags and talking about our obligation to veterans,” said Israel. “It’s time to put their money where their mouths are. It’s time to pass this bill.”

President Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union address of his second term Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013.

President Barack Obama laid out more than a dozen new initiatives Tuesday in the first State of the Union address of his second term, packing an array of issues into the hour-long speech, including four—climate change, immigration, veterans and gun control—of particular importantance to Long Islanders, a few of whom were in the audience.

Obama started off flat while discussing his budget and tax reform proposals, but he worked his way up to an emotional plea for Congress to enact new restrictions on firearms sales to reduce the number of gun deaths nationwide. He sounded encouraged by current immigration reform talks among lawmakers, but the president oscilated between urging the Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to negotiate a compromise on the upcoming deficit reduction plan known as sequestration, and threatening to use executive orders if Congress doesn’t act on global warming.

“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen, were all just a freak coincidence,” Obama said, referring in part to the Oct. 29 hurricane-nor’easter hybrid that ravaged LI and the Northeast. ”Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late.”

The president remained vague on most of his proposals, choosing to paint a broad picture of the goals he’s setting for the year to come, but did get into some specifics while discussing immigration and, to a lesser degree, gun control.

“Senators of both parties are working together on tough new laws to prevent anyone from buying guns for resale to criminals,” the president said, before rallying for a vote on the bill. ”Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets, because these police chiefs, they’re tired of seeing their guys and gals being outgunned.”

Among those top cops was John Aresta, the Malverne village police chief, whose uncle was among six murdered in the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre. He was invited to attend by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola), whose husband was killed and son injured in the same shooting spree that launched her to the national stage to advocate for gun control.

“I personally don’t see a reason why anybody would need a 30-round clip or a 10-round clip for an assault rifle,” Aresta had told Fox Business News  last month shortly after New York State passed sweeping new gun control laws in the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre in December.

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), the lone Republican among LI’s five-member Congressional delegation, wrote on Twitter that he was disapointed in Obama’s lack of focus on unemployment and deficit reduction, but co-authored an op-ed in Politico expressing support for ensuring background checks for all  gun purchases, with the exception of gifts between family members or temporary transfers for hunters. He noted national estimates that only four in 10 gun buyers are subject to such checks.

New York City got two mentions. Obama first touted the heroic nurses who evacuated newborn babies from the NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan during Sandy, signaling Menchu Sanchez by name. She was seated next to First Lady Michelle Obama. He later extolled the benefits of P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York and IBM, where students graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in computers or engineering—a model he wants emulated nationwide.

The emphasis on improving education to better the economy dovetailed with his reasons for supporting immigration, a hotly debated issue on LI, where undocumented Hispanic immigrant day laborers have repeatedly been victims of Suffolk County hate crimes in recent years.

“Our economy is stronger when we harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants,” Obama said, emphasizing that reform must include stronger border security, cutting waiting periods, attracting highly skilled engineers and ”establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship—a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and … learning English.”

But some immigration issues are easier to solve than others. Rep. Steve Israel (D-Dix Hills) invited as his guests Dania and Nick Marvos, a Little Neck couple who were in the process of adopting a 1-year-old boy named Ari from Russia until two months ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American adoptions of Russian children. The move was widely seen as retaliation for a recently passed U.S. law punishing Russian human rights violators.

“Waiting for news to see if we will be allowed to bring our baby home has been one of the most trying times in our lives,” Dania Mavros said in a statement released by Israel’s office. ”Devastating does not capture the emotional roller coaster that we are enduring every day.”

Congressman Israel said he is negotiating to help the couple complete the adoption process despite the new Russian law in an attempt to save their son-to-be from growing up in an orphanage. Thousands of other cases are also in jeopardy.

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) invited Dina McKenna of Lindenhurst, whose husband, Sgt. William McKenna, died in 2010 of cancer caused by his exposure to toxic fumes from burn pits the military used for disposing of hazardous waste in Iraq. Bishop had laws passed to curtail the use of burn pits and require the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve its treatment of soldiers exposed to them.

“All veterans whose health may have been affected by toxic burn pits must be accounted for and given the health care and support they have earned,” Bishop said in a statement.

Obama’s nod to veterans came as he promised to better defend against cyber attacks, end the more than decade-long war in Afghanistan “by the end of next year,” prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons and isolate North Korea for its provocations in testing nuclear weapons potentially capable of being fitted on inter-continental ballistic missles. He reiterated plans to strengthen U.S. missle defense to block such an attack.

The commander-in-chief also made clear that while the military will not be sending large numbers of troops abroad for Iraq-style occupations, he vaguely referred to special operations forces that will continue to hunt al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and wherever else they may be hiding. He made veiled reference to the continued deployment of predator drones despite recently renewed controversy over their use to kill American citizens working with terrorists, such as Westbury-native Samir Khan, the al-Qaeda propagandist killed in U.S. airstrikes alongside militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

“Where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans,” he said.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano, left, who went to Washington D.C. Tuesday to lobby for Sandy aid, meet with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Reps. Peter King and Steve Israel.

Seventy eight days after Sandy, the remaining $51 billion of the $60-billion northeast aid package finally passed the U.S. House of Representatives, sparking praise from Long Island lawmakers who two weeks ago were at war with the Republican majority that initially snubbed superstorm survivors.

“Tonight’s vote to provide $60 billion in Hurricane Sandy relief was an outstanding victory,” said Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), who famously blasted House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) for the delays. ”It is unfortunate that we had to fight so hard to be treated the same as every other state has been treated. But we did fight this bias against the northeast and thank god our residents won.”

Rep.  Steve Israel (D-Huntington) said, “New Yorkers can finally rest assured that help is on its way. I’m delighted that the House finally passed the Sandy relief bill, but the real heroes are the New Yorkers rebuilding their lives, homes, and businesses.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Conn. Gov. Dannel Malloy released a joint statement saying, “We are grateful to those members of Congress who today pulled together in a unified, bipartisan coalition to assist millions of their fellow Americans … at their greatest time of need.”

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he expects the bill to easily pass the Senate and be sent to the President’s desk for signing.