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Michelle Malkin: Another Bogus ACORN Lawsuit
ACORN is doing what it does best: playing the victim, blaming everyone else for its self-inflicted wounds, perpetuating false narratives and defending the entitlement industry to the death.
On Thursday, the disgraced welfare-rights organization filed suit over a congressional funding ban passed in September after nationwide undercover sting videos exposed ACORN’s criminal element.
The group and its web of nonprofit, tax-exempt affiliates have collected an estimated $53 million in government funds since 1994. This pipeline is apparently a constitutionally protected right. According to ACORN’s lawyers at the far-left Center for Constitutional Rights, the congressional funding ban constitutes a “bill of attainder” — an act of the legislature declaring a person(s) guilty of a crime without trial.
Now cue the world’s smallest violin and pass the tissues: ACORN’s lawyers say the group has suffered cutbacks and layoffs as a result of the punitive funding ban. The congressional persecution means ACORN can no longer teach first-time-homebuyer indoctrination classes and — gasp — the loss of an $800,000 contract to conduct “outreach” on “asthma.”
Message: The demons in the House who defunded ACORN (345 of them, including 172 Democrats) are cutting off oxygen to poor people!
“It’s not the job of Congress to be the judge, jury and executioner,” CCR lawyer Jules Lobel moaned as he equated the House’s act of fiscal responsibility with the death penalty.
“It is outrageous to see Congress violating the Constitution for purposes of political grandstanding,” CCR legal director Bill Quigley seethed without a shred of irony.
“Congress bowed to FOX News and joined in the scapegoating of an organization that helps average Americans going through hard times to get homes, pay their taxes and vote. Shame on them,” ACORN head Bertha Lewis piled on in an affidavit lamenting the loss of state, local and private foundation grants, which she blamed on the resolution. It “gave the green light for others to terminate our funds, as well.”
What ACORN’s sob-story tellers leave out is the inconvenient fact that nonprofits were bailing on ACORN long before undercover journalists Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe and BigGovernment.com publisher Andrew Breitbart entered the scene. Internal ACORN records from a Washington, D.C., meeting held in August noted that more than $2 million in foundation money was being withheld as a result of the group’s embezzlement scandal involving founder Wade Rathke’s brother, Dale — reportedly involving upward of $5 million.
Rathke admitted that he suppressed disclosure of his brother’s massive theft — first discovered in 2000 — because “word of the embezzlement would have put a ‘weapon’ into the hands of enemies of ACORN.” In other words: The protection of ACORN’s political viability came before the protection of members’ dues (and taxpayers’ funds).
A small group of ACORN executives helped cover up Dale Rathke’s crime by carrying the amount he embezzled as a “loan” on the books of Citizens Consulting Inc. CCI, the accounting and financial management arm of ACORN and its affiliates, is housed in the same building as the national ACORN headquarters in New Orleans. It’s also home to ACORN International, now operating under a different name, which Wade Rathke continues to head.
ACORN brass cooked up a “restitution” plan to allow the Rathkes to pay back a measly $30,000 a year in exchange for secrecy about the deal. ACORN’s lawyers issued a decree to its employees to keep their “yaps” shut. Dale Rathke kept his job and his $38,000 annual salary until the story leaked to donors and board members outside the Rathke circle.
In June 2008, the left-wing Catholic Campaign for Human Development cut off grant money to ACORN “because of questions that arose about financial management, fiscal transparency and organizational accountability of the national ACORN structures.” In November 2008 — ahem, more than a year before the congressional ACORN funding ban was passed — CCHD voted unanimously to extend and make permanent its ban on funding of ACORN organizations.
“This decision was made because of serious concerns regarding ACORN’s lack of financial transparency, organizational performance and questions surrounding political partisanship,” according to Bishop Roger Morin.
Did ACORN’s lawyers call that withdrawal of funding “political grandstanding” and “scapegoating,” too?
The lawsuit over the congressional funding ban is just the latest desperate legal measure to distract from ACORN’s long-festering ethics and financial scandals. ACORN’s attorneys have sued Giles, O’Keefe, Breitbart and former ACORN/Project Vote whistleblower Anita MonCrief. And they’ll sue anyone else who gets in the way of rehabilitating the scandal-plagued enterprise’s image.
It took decades to build up its massive coffers and intricate web of affiliates across the country. It will take months and years to untangle the entire operation. And it will take time, money and relentless sunshine to dismantle the government-subsidized partisan racket.
ACORN can never be “reformed.” It is constitutionally corrupt. Sue me.
— Michelle Malkin is author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. Click here for more information. She can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
» wrote on 11.16.09 @ 06:57 AM
Here we go again. Smoke screen to make us forget all the wonderful wars, economic melt down, corruption in high places, Enron, Haliburton, KBR. Chalabi, hands-off food safety, environmental denial, tax breaks for the rich, Veteran abuse, WMDs, etc. of the last administration.
» wrote on 11.16.09 @ 07:26 AM
The liberals are out of control, and this company should be shut down—The students voted Obama in, and now we pay the price..foolish
» wrote on 11.16.09 @ 09:47 AM
How come every time a liberal organization or person is outed for its deceit, theft and overall bad behavior, the lefties best defense is, yea, but look at what the other side did? Isn’t Mr. Dexter’s response just a smoke screen to try to make us forget/overlook the corruption outlined in this article? Get real people. Each side is corrupt and ALL corruption should be exposed and stopped. Until we all understand that no side is without fault and that everything needs to be looked at, we, the people, will be the losers.
» wrote on 11.16.09 @ 05:44 PM
Absolutely spot on, Deb. The Dexter comment is blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda. There is corruption a-plenty to go around. That’s what happens when money and self-interest get in the way of charity and ideals and true concern for the plight of disadvantaged. Money corrupts. And people who feed off other people’s money are most prone to corruption. Left, right, center. No one and no group is immune…
» wrote on 11.16.09 @ 05:47 PM
Of course Ron,you are wrong. There are no wonderful wars. But the current President did say he would put all his efforts into the war in Afghanistan. What up? Enron suffered its own defeat, but took down a lot of innocent people with it. Such a complex implosion of Enron happened much too soon after the Bush presidency started. Such protection of companies such as Enron, Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, et al go back many years. Fanny and Freddie policies were the result of the Clintonistias and their desire to give everyone who wanted a house a house. Stated income on loan apps. Geesh! There is so much guilt here, that to direct it all to Bush and big business is naive at best. There are enough unintended consequences waiting out in the next several years from the current administration to begin printing up placards now.
» wrote on 11.16.09 @ 06:22 PM
Malkin says ACORN has received a bit more than $3 million a year in taxpayer funds over the past 15 years and some of this has been embezzled. In contrast, the Wall Street Journal in a recent editorial found a way to blame ACORN for the entire recent financial meltdown, more like $3 trillion. (Their argument is that ACORN started it all by pushing for cheap housing.) I guess in spilling all this e-ink on the $3 million, Malkin puts the odds against the WSJ being right at about a million to one. I agree.
» wrote on 11.16.09 @ 07:32 PM
Michelle Malkin’s article is part of an extremely misleading smear campaign by the extreme right. Her flippant dismissal of a major legal issue is very offensive. An act of Congress declaring hundreds of thousands of hard-working and honest Acorn members no longer eligible for funding for important community work is an outrage. What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Corporations that get government contracts for much more than Acorn has ever received regularly get investigated for crimes or regulatory violations. That doesn’t seem to bother Congress… Of course Acorn should be held to account for any problems it has, but tarring-and-feathering hundreds of thousands of honest people as “constitutionally corrupt” because of the offenses of a couple people is ridiculous.
The smear campaign against Acorn was begun in earnest a few years ago by corporate lobbyist Rick Berman. Before believing what you have heard about Acorn I strongly advise you to look up MSNBC reporter Rachel Maddow’s recent series of videos exposing the smear campaign (links to the videos are actually posted on http://www.acorn.org). If you have even a shred of belief in democracy and truth those videos will make your blood boil. Just for the record, I am not nor have I ever been affiliated with Acorn (or MSNBC). I’m just very offended by the smear campaign and by how few reporters have really looked into the story properly. You might also want to learn a bit more about Michelle Malkin and Rick Berman at http://www.sourcewatch.org (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Michelle_Malkin and http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Berman).
Acorn is a very large organization with an extensive positive track record of helping low- to moderate-income people across the United States help themselves with issues such as discrimination, affordable housing, education, or better public services. Like any large organization it has had occasional issues to deal with. But the positives outweigh the negatives by a ridiculously large margin. It has helped millions of low to moderate income Americans apply to register to vote, and they have worked for many years to try to educate home buyers about the deceitful practices of some mortgage lenders. Maybe if we had had more Acorn and less corporate lobbying, we might have avoided the financial crisis!
» wrote on 11.18.09 @ 05:05 AM
The only journalist in the world to understand what is happening and the guts to write about it. Michell is by far the best. Honest, smart and brave.
» wrote on 08.29.10 @ 11:11 PM
I still believe Malkin is a human being, despite evidence to the contrary.
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