Trapper's Swamp

The Republicans have been focusing their attacks on ACORN, "a collection of community-based organizations in the United States that advocate for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues", who have been so successful at registering these voters that in their minds, ACORN is responsible for reducing them to a minority party. So much so that the Defund ACORN Act was passed in both houses of Congress with broad support from the Democrats.

What the Republicans probably did not expect is the unintended side effect of a broadly-written bill that will apply not just to ACORN, but also to "any organization that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency", according to Huffington Post.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who's Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.

The language of this bill could make it unconstitutional, as it specifically targets a group and punishes them legislatively without the benefit of a trial, making it a bill of attainder. Bills of attainder are very specifically barred by the US Constitution. Besides the constitutional gaffe, this bill shows how deperate the Republicans are, and in passing it have hypocritically chosen to ignore the massive amounts of fraud that defense contractors have committed repeatedly.

Glenn Greenwald interviewed Rep. Grayson, and penned another great piece on this bill:

[T]he bill passed by both the Senate and House to de-fund ACORN is written so broadly that it literally compels the de-funding not only of that group, but also the de-funding of, and denial of all government contracts to, any corporation that "has filed a fraudulent form with any Federal or State regulatory agency."  By definition, that includes virtually every large defense contractor, which -- unlike ACORN -- has actually been found guilty of fraud.

I spoke with Rep. Grayson this morning regarding the consequences of all of this.  He is currently compiling a list of all defense contractors encompassed by this language in order to send to administration officials (and has asked for help from the public in compiling that list, here).  The President is required by the Constitution to "faithfully execute" the law, which should mean that no more contracts can be awarded to any companies on that list, which happens to include the ten largest defense contractors in America.

Before being elected to Congress, Grayson worked extensively on uncovering and combating defense contractor fraud in Iraq, and I asked him to put into context ACORN's impact on the American taxpayer versus these corrupt defense contractors.  His reply:  "The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq."

Greenwald hit the nail on the head: anyone who support defunding ACORN without also advocating for the defunding of fraudulent defense contractors is intellectually dishonest, hypocritical, have no respect for the US Constitution and morally bankrupt. But that is not the point.

If the Republicans are truly the small-government advocates they claim they are, they will have to defund these defense contractors. But they won't, and we can expect the Democrats to help them out by not implementing this law. After all, the money is too good for either party to do so. It shows everyone who are the real overlords of Washington, and it is not the elected officials. That is perhaps the best unintended side-effect of the passage of the Defund ACORN Act.