"'It was pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe,' said Karen L. Kenney, the coordinator for the San Fernando Valley Patriots..."

"... a tea party group in Southern California that was sent an IRS questionnaire with more than 100 questions on it.... Some groups, including several interviewed by The Washington Post, were asked to provide names of donors or membership lists, which experts say the IRS cannot legally do."

The San Fernando group first submitted its application for nonprofit status in the fall of 2010, which was after the IRS’s Cincinnati-based “determination unit” had implemented its politically charged screening criteria. The group wrote the agency a $400 check to fast-track the process, but 19 months went by before the group heard anything, Kenney said.

So they stole $400 from this group! How many other $400s were pocketed on false pretenses?

That’s when the long list of questions arrived. Kenney said the group sent back a four-inch, seven-pound stack of documents before deciding that enough was enough. The group decided the questions were far too intrusive and could result in individual supporters being targeted.

“We couldn’t sic the IRS on our members,” Kenney said....

This is reminiscent of the way the state of Alabama treated the NAACP back in the 1950s!

That was the Supreme Court's landmark case on the freedom-of-speech-based right of association. Ironically, the IRS behavior has been explained as a response to another Supreme Court free-speech case, Citizens United. From the first link above (which goes to the WaPo article "Groups that sought tax-exempt status say IRS dealings were a nightmare") :

Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS’s tax-exemption division, described the targeting campaign as a misguided attempt to deal with a wave of applications after the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited sums on politics.

How many times did Obama say that he was looking for ways to get around Citizens United? How hard did he try to equate "Citizens United" with evil corporations and the money's unfair effect on politics? And here his administration was going after grass-roots groups who were organizing not to lobby for corporate welfare, but to express ideas about limited government and the meaning of the Constitution!