Kentucky’s senior senator, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, made a floor speech last week that caught our attention. It concerned the First Amendment, and more specifically the just end of an Obama-era practice that offends it.

McConnell heralded an announcement by the IRS that it will no longer demand lists of private donors to certain nonprofit organizations – specifically, those to which donations are not tax deductible. McConnell said, correctly, that there is no legitimate purpose for the IRS to compile such information about private individuals. There is no accounting reason, since the contributions can’t be deducted on tax filings; and there is no other provision of law that makes contributors’ identities a public matter.

Lurking near the surface of this is the battle between Democrats and Republicans over freedom to contribute to political causes. Democrats have long sought to limit the amount of money corporations and private individuals can spend to participate in the political process. Their argument is that money freely spent is a corrupting influence.

But in truth spending limits are a means to secure that advantages of Democratic incumbency by neutering the ability of conservatives to get their message out amid a mostly hostile media environment.

McConnell has been a key player in a series of court actions challenging on First Amendment grounds efforts to limit citizens’ freedom to make political contributions. He ultimately found success in a 2010 Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United. The high court ruled that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from restricting spending by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations to advocate regarding political issues and causes.

Democrats loathe the ruling, mostly because it levels the political playing field. Stymied in court, the Obama administration turned to the IRS to pursue a different approach: intimidation. The agency began demanding advocacy groups submit lists of their private donors, despite having no legitimate reason to compile that information.

McConnell says this information was used to bully donors to conservative advocacy groups. The IRS had to settle a lawsuit in 2014 after an employee illegally leaked a donor list to a liberal advocacy group, which promptly weaponized it in an effort to bully private contributors. In another incident in politically correct Silicon Valley, a top executive was hounded from his job after his donations to politically disfavored entities became public.

McConnell noted that the now-scuttled IRS policy flies in the face of a Supreme Court ruling in the 1950s defending the rights of the NAACP. The NAACP sued Alabama after the state demanded the civil rights organization provide a list of its donors. The court said forcing private organizations to disclose their donors is little different from requiring people with particular views to wear armbands or special clothing advertising their beliefs to the world.

Justice John Harlan, who wrote the opinion, said, “Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many cases be indispensible to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.” Or in today’s world, conservative ones.

McConnell is dead on when he observes that neither the IRS nor any government agency has any business compiling information about the political activities and preferences of law-abiding private citizens. This is far from the only abuse of IRS authority under former President Barack Obama (remember Lois Lerner and the systematic persecution of conservative groups seeking nonprofit status?) but it is one of the most glaring.

It is only proper that the IRS has ended this practice. It is one that the agency should never revisit.