Some coincidences live in infamy.
It would have been hard Monday for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan)
not to understand how Bill Ayers felt the day the World Trade
Center and Pentagon were attacked. Unforgiving history records
that on Sept. 11, 2001, the retired domestic terrorist’s “I don’t
regret setting bombs” comment ran in a New York Times
profile.
While obviously of a much lesser magnitude, the House Judiciary
Committee chairman’s May 4 statement exonerating ACORN couldn’t
have come out at a worse time. “Based on my review of the
information regarding the complaints against ACORN, I have
concluded that a hearing on this matter appears unwarranted at
this time,” Conyers said in a statement aired that night on CNN’s
“Lou Dobbs Tonight.”
Just hours earlier his fellow Democrats in Nevada, Secretary of
State Ross Miller and Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto
dropped a bombshell. ACORN and two former senior ACORN employees
in the state, they announced, had been charged with a total of 39
felony counts related to voter registrations.
“By structuring employment and compensation around a quota
system, ACORN facilitated voter registration fraud in this
state,” said Masto. “Nevada will not tolerate violations of the
law by individuals nor will it allow corporations to hide behind
or place blame on their employees when its training manuals
clearly detail, condone and, indeed, require, illegal acts in
performing the job for the corporation.”
Nevada alleges that last year ACORN paid canvassers between $8.00
and $9.00 per hour to register people to vote, but canvassers who
fell short of the quota of 20 voter registration forms per shift
were fired. This illegal policy was “clearly outlined in the
training materials the organization used to train new employees,”
according (pdf) to the state.
Nevada claims ACORN also offered canvassers additional
compensation in the form of a bonus program called “Blackjack” or
“21+” that paid canvassers a $5.00 bonus. Each canvasser who
brought in 21 or more completed voter registration forms per
shift would receive the bonus. Such schemes are illegal in the
state because they give canvassers an incentive to file
fraudulent forms.
Nevada alleges the bonus program “was created by employee
Christopher Edwards, the Field Director for the Las Vegas
office,” and that ACORN timesheets show the group’s management
knew about it and “failed to take immediate action to terminate
it.” The state claims that ACORN’s Deputy Regional Director Amy
Busefink knew about the bonus program and “aided and abetted the
scheme by approving” it.
An initial hearing in the criminal case has been scheduled for
June 3 in Las Vegas.
But no hearing has been scheduled by Conyers.
When on Wednesday this reporter asked Conyers spokesman Jonathan
Godfrey to explain the decision not to move forward with a probe,
he declined to do so and instead emailed the same statement that
was aired on CNN earlier in the week.
It’s unclear what exactly crystallized Conyers’s thinking, but
his reversal is all the more puzzling given the enthusiasm the
23-term congressman showed for holding an ACORN hearing mere
weeks ago.
On March 19, after hearing the testimony of GOP lawyer Heather
Heidelbaugh about ACORN’s many misdeeds, Conyers
said the allegations were “a pretty serious matter.”
Heidelbaugh testified the nonprofit group violated a host of tax,
campaign finance, and other laws. She said the presidential
campaign of Barack Obama sent ACORN its “maxed out donor list”
and asked two of the avowedly nonpartisan group’s employees “to
reach out to the maxed out donors and solicit donations from them
for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”
Heidelbaugh said the New York Times had the donor list
story but editors there spiked it the month before the election,
a claim she repeated on “The O’Reilly Factor” two weeks later.
The newspaper
told the Philadelphia-based Bulletin that “political
considerations played no role in our decisions about how to cover
this story or any other story about President Obama.”
Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on
the committee’s panel on the Constitution, civil rights, and
civil liberties, said the Obama campaign’s alleged involvement
with ACORN might violate federal election law. “ACORN has a
pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election
laws,” he said.
He also slammed the Old Gray Lady herself. “If true, the New
York Times is showing once again that it is a not an
impartial observer of the political scene,” Sensenbrenner said.
“If they want to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, they
should put Barack Obama approves of this in their newspaper.”
Heidelbaugh also testified that ACORN has rendered
protest-for-hire services for other left-wing groups and
extracted donations from the targets of demonstrations by shaking
down those targets as part of its “muscle for the money” program.
Back on March 19, Conyers seemed genuinely disturbed by the
claims. He pushed the chairman of the subcommittee Sensenbrenner
is ranking member of, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), to hold
his own hearing.
A blasé Nadler said he “would certainly consider a hearing on
ACORN, if I ever hear any credible allegations.” Referencing
Heidelbaugh’s testimony, Conyers replied, “Whoa. Wait a minute.
This is a member of the bar here that got a successful partial
injunction against ACORN.”
A fortnight later Conyers reiterated his support for an ACORN
probe, telling the Washington Times he still wanted to
do it and he “probably will.” Conyers, whom the article called an
“unlikely champion” for ACORN opponents, rejected arguments from
fellow Democrats that his committee should steer clear of the
issue.
“That’s our jurisdiction, the Department of Justice,” he told the
newspaper. “That’s what we handle – voter fraud. Unless that’s
been taken out of my jurisdiction and I didn’t know it.”
Alas, it was too good to be true. The investigative zeal of the
Judiciary Committee chairman soon waned.
It was always hard to believe that the ultra-liberal Conyers, who
is very sympathetic to ACORN’s policy goals and who as recently
as October called the radical group “a longstanding and well
regarded organization that fights for the poor and working
class,” really wanted to investigate his longtime ally in the
leftist movement.
Conyers, who received a 100% rating from ACORN in its 2006
legislative scorecard, showed how truly in sync he was with ACORN
when he spoke at the group’s national convention last June 22.
“I’m through with deregulation,”
said Conyers. “It doesn’t work because the capitalist
predators who are waiting unregulated are going to take advantage
of it.”
Last fall Conyers seemed on hair-trigger alert, ready to pounce
on anybody who tangled with ACORN. After media reports surfaced
that one ACORN worker was assaulted by an irate homeowner, some
ACORN workers were threatened, and two ACORN offices might have
been vandalized, Conyers speculated –in the absence of any
evidence that the incidents were connected— that a massive
anti-ACORN conspiracy might be afoot.
“If true, these reports appear to describe possible federal
crimes such as criminal civil rights crimes [sic] including
conspiracy to deprive the victims (and others) of federally
protected constitutional rights, mail and wire offenses, and
other more basic offenses such as assault and battery,” Conyers
wrote in an Oct. 20 letter urging the attorney general and the
FBI director to act.
“Depending on the circumstances and the possible involvement of a
group of individuals, the conduct also raises serious questions
under the federal RICO law,” he wrote.
Yet the allegations of racketeering made against ACORN at the
Judiciary Committee hearing in March don’t seem to interest
Conyers.
There is so much about the Alinskyite group that a congressional
probe could explore.
Former ACORN employees say ACORN makes no effort to remove bogus
voter registrations. “There’s no quality control on purpose, no
checks and balances,” Nate Toler, who worked on an ACORN voter
effort in Missouri told the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
“The internal motto is ‘We don’t care if it’s a lie, just so long
as it stirs up the conversation,’” he said.
When accused of breaking the law, ACORN’s usual approach is to
deny, deny, deny, and then accuse somebody, usually Republicans
or law enforcement officials, of racism and voter suppression. In
early October when the group’s Las Vegas office was raided on
orders from the state’s Democratic attorney general and secretary
of state, Matthew Henderson, ACORN’s southwest regional director,
was glib.
“The raid was a stunt designed perhaps to make them look tough on
voter fraud,” Henderson said. “We don’t think fraud is a rampant
problem. This was a politically motivated stunt, that is all
there is to it because those new voters can reshape the
electorate of Nevada.”
On the May 6 edition of the Glenn Beck Program, after a
heated interview about the new charges in Nevada, the host
ejected ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson from the studio following
an off-camera altercation. “I threw him out of the studio, get
the hell out of my studio,” Beck told viewers he said after
Levenson accused him during the commercial break of being “afraid
of black people.”
Although ACORN is an enthusiastic supporter of government
regulation of the economy, it can’t tolerate being burdened by
those same regulations. In 1995, it sued California for an
exemption from the law that requires it to pay its own employees
a minimum wage. With a mendicant fervor, ACORN argued that
keeping its employees in poverty helps to boost their zeal to
help the poor. It lost.
The group also supports the continued imposition of equal
employment opportunity laws on the rest of America, but argued it
shouldn’t have to comply with those same laws. The Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission had to sue ACORN to force it
comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the crown
jewel of the civil rights movement’s legislative accomplishments.
The taxpayer-subsidized ACORN network, which owes millions of
dollars in back taxes, also played a role in the subprime
mortgage mess that has undermined Americans’ support for free
market problem-solving and set off a worldwide chain of financial
troubles.
Then there’s ACORN’s eight-year-long coverup of the
million-dollar embezzlement by founder Wade Rathke’s brother.
When ACORN board members Marcel Reid and Karen Inman demanded to
see the financial documents last year, they were expelled from
the group. Reid and Inman have since become whistleblowers and
formed a group called ACORN 8 that aims to reform ACORN.
And let’s not even get started on ACORN’s history of
union-busting.
Surely Conyers has all, or at least some, of this information.
What happened in recent weeks that changed his mind?
