Cut off ACORN's seed money

Last Friday the Census Bureau decided to cut ties with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the controversial community and political organizing group. On Monday the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to exclude ACORN from funding under the Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill. On Tuesday House Republicans announced legislation to end all federal funding for ACORN.

ACORN, an unabashedly leftist community organizing group for which President Obama served as an attorney and ally in the 1990s, became something of an issue in last year’s presidential campaign as credible reports surfaced of fraud in voter-registration drives. And, the Obama campaign paid an ACORN affiliate $800,000 to conduct a get-out-the-vote campaign during the primaries.

It apparently took a concealed-camera “sting” operation by young conservative activists to stir up real outrage. Two young adults visited several ACORN offices posing as a prostitute and pimp seeking to establish or expand their business. In some of the offices ACORN employees offered advice on how to game the home loan system, evade taxes and hide the status of underage undocumented prostitutes (in San Bernardino the ACORN employee’s advice may have been tongue-in-cheek rather than serious).

Maybe it was the sex angle or the illegal-enterprise angle , or maybe it was the visual evidence, but this little sting attracted widespread attention, leading to some government defunding.

The real question, however, is why ACORN had ever received so much as a dime of the taxpayers’ money in the first place. Because ACORN, founded in 1970, has a number of branches and subsidiaries and a rather opaque organization chart, it is difficult to tell just how much money the outfit has received. Some put the recent figure at $1 million to $2 million per year. California Republican Rep. Darrel Issa claims ACORN has received $53 million since 1994.

Although a branch of ACORN is organized as a non-profit, non-partisan group, it has advanced only leftist proposals, from raising the minimum age to pushing for welfare “rights” to demanding more domestic spending to pushing for more subprime loans, a prime cause of the financial crisis that precipitated the current recession.

The simple rule should be that taxpayers should not be forced to fund any political groups, whether right-wing, left-wing, libertarian, socialist or militant moderates. Sadly, a plethora of groups with political agendas get federal funding, meaning those who disagree — at least some taxpayers in all cases — are forced to fund their adversaries. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “to compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”