John Boehner’s Hysteria Leads Inevitably to Comedy
I wasn’t been following the ACORN non-story, a fake scandal peddled by Glenn “I May Have Raped and Murdered a Young Girl” Beck, until Congress decided to weigh in on the matter. And you know it wasn’t gonna be good: both the House and the Senate, including large numbers of Democrats including Joe Sestak and Arlen Specter, voted to defund the group that brings new voters, most of them from natural Democratic constituencies. This is, of course, typical Democratic idiocy that plays into Republican frames, identical to the time a few years ago when the Democrats voted to condemn MoveOn for running a newspaper ad questioning General David Patraeus’s honesty. Because, you know, the military never lies about anything, but I digress.
Anyway, the ACORN hysteria has taken a remarkably hilarious new turn under the stewardship of John “It’s NOT pronounced boner, it’s not it’s not it’s not” Boehner (and yes it is pronounced that way). I’m not sure which article about this is funnier, so i’ll start with ,a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/whoops-anti-acorn-bill-ro_n_294949.html”>Ryan Grim’s post at Huffington:
The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies 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. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.
In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex.
over at daily Kos, Adam B reminds us that a bill targeting one particular person or entity is unconstitutional, so they had to make the language broader. Much broader:
Really? “Any organization that has filed a fraudulent form with any Federal or State regulatory agency” can no longer receive federal funds? (And individuals who’ve merely been indicted for election law violations, whether or not the charges were proven?) The bill further defines “organization” as including ACORN and its affiliates, but it doesn’t say it only includes ACORN-related entities. So, gosh, I imagined, there’s a lot of entities that suddenly qualify.
Turns out a clever democrat, Alan Grayson, has been thinking the same way:
You see, regardless of what you think of ACORN, it is laudable to stop taxpayer money from going to organizations that commit fraud against the government. So as per the bill’s text, I’m going to put into the Congressional record a list of organizations who have committed fraud against the government or employs anyone who has.
Now, I’m just one person, and I can’t possibly find and list all of the organizations that fit this bill. So I need your help. Please nominate organizations and show me that they need to be in the record. To help, send me the name of the organization and proof in the form of a link to evidence that this organization should be in the Congressional record.
How much would you pay now? Don’t answer yet, because Glenn Greenwald adds HIS take, which makes it even funnier:
the 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.”
… But the broader they make the law in order to avoid the Constitutional problem, the more it encompasses the large corrupt corporations that own the Congress (and whom they obviously don’t want to de-fund). The narrower they make it in order to include only ACORN, the more blatantly unconstitutional it is. Now that they have embraced this general principle that no corrupt organizations should receive federal funding, how is anyone going to justify applying that only to ACORN while continuing to fund the corporations whose fraud and corruption is vastly greater (not to mention established by actual courts of law)?
Click here for the growing list of suggestions Grayson’s already received, and feel free to add to the list.
Now of course, there will be no real fallout from this. No federal contractor is going to get defunded. But it can potentially be used to expose not only how corrupt so many of these contractors are, but how hypocritical and hysterical the GOP is.
Too bad: I’d love to see the bumper sticker “it will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the air force needs to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”, come to life.
