Ken Berwitz

If I were a Republican strategist, I wouldn't know whether to express my outrage at Attorney General eric holder, or send him a thank-you note.  Maybe I would do both..

Excerpted from today's article in the New York Times:

Justice Department Says Acorn Can Be Paid for Pre-Ban Contracts

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: November 27, 2009

 

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has concluded that the Obama administration can lawfully pay the community group Acorn for services provided under contracts signed before Congress banned the government from providing money to the group.

 

The department’s conclusion, laid out in a recently disclosed five-page memorandum from David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, adds a new wrinkle to a sharp political debate over the antipoverty group’s activities and recent efforts to distance the government from it.

 

Since 1994, Acorn, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has received about $53 million in federal aid, much of it grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for providing various services related to affordable housing.

 

But the group has become a prime target for conservative critics, and on Oct. 1, President Obama signed into law a spending bill that included a provision that said no taxpayer money — including money authorized by previous legislation — could be “provided to” the group or its affiliates.

 

A Housing and Urban Development Department lawyer asked the Justice Department whether the new law meant that pre-existing contracts with Acorn should be broken. And in a memorandum signed Oct. 23 and posted online this week, Mr. Barron said the government should continue to make payments to Acorn as required by such contracts.

 

The new law “should not be read as directing or authorizing HUD to breach a pre-existing binding contractual obligation to make payments to Acorn or its affiliates, subsidiaries or allied organizations where doing so would give rise to contractual liability,” Mr. Barron wrote.

 

The deputy director of national operations for Acorn, Brian Kettenring, praised Mr. Barron’s decision.

 

“We are pleased that commitments will be honored relative to Acorn’s work to help keep America’s working families facing foreclosure in their homes,” Mr. Kettenring said.

 

Conservatives have long complained about Acorn’s voter drives in poor neighborhoods, citing instances in which workers fraudulently registered imaginary voters like Mickey Mouse. Acorn has argued that it is the real victim of such incidents, which its employees have often brought to the attention of the authorities.

 

Criticism of Acorn escalated in September, when two conservative activists released videos they had recorded using secret cameras of Acorn workers in several cities. The activists had posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking financial advice. Instead of raising objections, the Acorn employees counseled the couple on how to hide their illicit activities and avoid paying taxes.

 

Conservatives seized on the videos to criticize the group further, highlighting that the Obama campaign had paid an Acorn affiliate for get-out-the-vote efforts. Congress then enacted the ban on providing money to it.

Acorn has fired several of the employees depicted in the videos.

Let's cut straight to the chase.  ACORN is as dirty and corrupt a Democratic voter-registration machine as you can find anywhere.  Numerous lawsuits have been  filed, or successfully brought to completion, against ACORN in over a dozen states.  The ones that have been adjudicated usually result in ACORN admitting no wrongdoing, but firing a few workers (it's those little people, your honor, not us). 

That is exactly the strategy being used to try to fend off the fact that ACORN personnel were more than happy to help the apparent pimp and hooker to get housing, so they could run a prostitution ring with underage girls from El Salvador.  ACORN personnel offered such advice as what to call the business, so it wouldn't be found out as an illegal prostitution business which exploited children for sex.

If this had happened in just one office, a case could be made that it was a bad-apple situation and not anything that defined ACORN.  But it happened in office after office around the country.  That speaks for itself.

This organization is not a "victim" of anything but the fact that it has been found out. 

And let's disabuse ourselves of the absolutely fraudulent idea that only "conservatives" are against ACORN being funded.  That is exactly the kind of bogeyman the New York Times likes to raise, apropos of nothing.  Here's a challenge for you:  other than hardline Democrats, try to find anyone who wants money to go to ACORN, conservative or otherwise. 

The bottom line is that ACORN has no business getting any money from taxpayers.  And it has no business existing in its current form (which, I suspect, is the only form it has ever existed in). 

But we have an Attorney General, eric holder, whose background includes:

-Recommending presidential pardons for terrorists (the 16 FALN members),

-Recommending a presidential pardon for a multi-million dollar thief who fled the country to avoid prosection, but could to contribute plenty to then-President Clinton (marc rich). 

-Working as a senior partner at Covington and Burling, which specializes in defending and advocating for terrorists, often pro bono (presumably to get big law contracts with the countries that back these terrrorists up). 

-And, if that's not enough, this is the Attorney General who just made the unprecedented decision to give enemy combatant terrorists khalid sheikh mohammed and his pals, civil trials in New York City instead of military tribunals.

An Attorney General like eric holder, therefore, would have no problem making sure that the millions and millions of taxpayer dollars continue to flow to ACORN.

The 2010 elections cannot come fast enough.  And, thinking politically, the damage this catastrophic Attorney General is doing to the country could not come at a better time for Republicans.