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In a victory for taxpayers, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed ACORN another defeat, this time in a lawsuit that sought to overturn a federal law that banned tax funding of the disgraced radical advocacy group for whom Barack Obama once worked.
The high court denied an ACORN appeal, effectively ruling that Congress was legally entitled to cut off federal taxpayer funding of the left-wing organization. The court denied ACORN’s petition for “certiorari,” or legal review, in ACORN et al. v. United States (docket 10-1068) without comment, as is its custom.
“Congress in its wisdom was absolutely right to stop federal tax dollars flowing to the nation’s most notorious Saul Alinsky-inspired gangster group,” said award-winning investigative journalist Matthew Vadum.
Vadum is author of the new book “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.” A senior editor at Capital Research Center, a think tank that studies left-wing advocacy groups and their funders, Vadum assembled the information in the book from nearly three years of research and hundreds of interviews.
After winning in court initially, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now had asked the high court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which found that the funding cutoff enacted in 2009 was not a “bill of attainder” forbidden by the Constitution.
ACORN had advanced the novel legal argument that Congress had no power to stop funding the group unless lawmakers could prove it had done something wrong.
“Imagine if the court case had gone the other way,” Vadum told WND. “Every liberal group from Honolulu to Key West could have brought ACLU lawyers to congressional appropriations hearings to whine about the supposed unfairness of not being able to feed at the public trough. That’s nuts.”
As revealed in “Subversion Inc.,” the ACORN network has taken in an astounding $79 million in federal funding, not just the $53 million figure previously reported.
The book also reports that at least 54 individuals associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud.
ACORN itself was convicted of felony voter registration fraud in Nevada in April. Sentencing is scheduled in Las Vegas for Aug. 10.
Scandals put ACORN in the national spotlight in 2008 and 2009.
In 2008, it was discovered that ACORN founder Wade Rathke covered up a $1 million embezzlement by his younger brother, Dale Rathke, the group’s chief financial officer, for eight years. Instead of firing Dale, Wade kept his brother on the ACORN payroll for that entire period.
In 2009, ACORN employees were caught red-handed on undercover video in a sting trying to help two conservative activists, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, establish a brothel that would have employed underage girls smuggled into the country from El Salvador.
Although the national ACORN organization filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Election Day last year, ACORN is restructuring itself in time to help reelect President Obama next year, according to Vadum.
ACORN has incorporated its state chapters under new names including New England United for Justice, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, with largely the same people working in the same old ACORN offices.
ACORN’s voter mobilization arm, Project Vote, is conducting business as usual out of ACORN’s Washington, D.C., office. In the 2010 election, Project Vote ran a nationwide get-out-the-vote drive headed by senior ACORN executive Amy Busefink, now a felon convicted of voter fraud. Busefink was also involved in ACORN’s 2008 national voter registration drive. Authorities threw out more than 400,000 voter registrations during that canvassing effort.
ACORN Housing is conducting business as usual after changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America.
ACORN International (a.k.a. Community Organizations International) is now operating in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Kenya, Dominican Republic and India under the leadership of Wade Rathke. Rathke was fired by ACORN in 2008 for his role in the embezzlement cover-up.
Because of the potentially criminal activity documented in this explosive book, copies of “Subversion Inc.,” by Matthew Vadum have been sent by the publisher, WND Books, to all 535 members of the House and Senate in hopes of prompting further investigation of ACORN and its tentacles.
