After questioning Democratic senator Chris Murphy and Republican senator Ron Johnson for a while about how to confront the Islamic State, Chuck Todd switched gears this morning on Meet the Press: He asked Johnson what he thought of three bills before the Senate to revoke the tax-exempt status of the National Football League.
“We have far higher priorities,” Johnson said, while Todd repeated that there are bills to get rid of the carveout. “We are mortgaging our children’s future, we are facing a threat of Islamic jihad . . . ”
Pressed on how he’d vote, Johnson said, “I’ll take a look at the bills. That is so low on my priority list that I don’t even think about it.”
As Philip Klein recounted Friday at the Washington Examiner, the NFL’s tax exemption has been a longtime target of fiscal hawk Tom Coburn, and does seem to represent a bizarre handout (the NFL is classified as a 501(c)6 trade organization, basically thanks to a special statute). But it’s a handout that doesn’t even represent a statistical rounding error for the federal government, and the recent controversy over the NFL’s inconsistent handling of domestic-violence allegations has merely sparked more political interest in doing something to punish the organization. Perhaps, as Johnson would acknowledge, the tax exemption is a bad idea, and perhaps it should be done away with for the sake of principle — but he’s right to say it should be extremely low on the priority list of the world’s greatest deliberative body.
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