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Reform Now -- By: Robert Costa

For a moment on Monday, the Senate was mostly empty: a few staffers haggling by the door, a handful of senators milling about. Then Sen. Mike Johanns (R., Neb.) took the floor to speak in support of his amendment to H.R. 3288, a housing and transportation spending bill. Johanns?s amendment was short, as was his speech, and both shared one simple goal: to stop ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, from receiving federal housing grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

?I had started to work on the amendment late last week, and filed it on Friday,? Johanns tells NRO. ?I?ve been looking into these issues for a long time. There?s a history there.? Still, he says, ?I had no idea if the amendment would get bipartisan support.?

A couple minutes into his remarks, Johanns looked up and got his answer. ?The senators started to file in,? he says. ?I took it very seriously, that this amendment was going to be a bipartisan effort. I wasn?t sure at first about the final vote count, then, as the votes built, and statement after statement came in support, I knew this would not break on partisan lines. I was very, very thankful. It was a clear statement from the Senate: You can?t break the law and expect to get federal benefits.?

Johanns?s provision ended up passing, 83 votes in support and seven in opposition. It was a blow to ACORN, to be sure. Yet Johanns?s amendment was just the latest of many recent disasters for the ubiquitous community organizers. As John Fund points out in the Wall Street Journal:

Last week, 11 of [ACORN's] workers were accused by Florida prosecutors of falsifying information on 888 voter registration forms. Last month, Acorn's former Las Vegas, Nev., field director, Christopher Edwards, agreed to testify against the group in a case in which Las Vegas election officials say 48 percent of the voter-registration forms the group turned in were 'clearly fraudulent.' ACORN itself is charged with 13 counts of illegally using a quota system to compensate workers in an effort to boost the number of registrations. (Acorn has denied wrongdoing in all of these cases.)

Last Friday, the Census Bureau announced that it would no longer work with the group on the 2010 census, after video evidence of alleged impropriety was published on BigGovernment.com. Damning  video of questionable tax-advice conferrals between ACORN employees and documentarians posing as a prostitute and a pimp have been clandestinely recorded in at least four cities (Baltimore, New York, San Bernardino, and Washington, D.C.). ACORN employees happily provided advice on acquiring entitlement dollars to the professed sex-industry entrepreneurs -- even after being told that their brothel would be staffed by illegal-alien prositutes as young as twelve years old. ?You can claim them as dependents,? the ACORN rep ghoulishly counseled.

?These problems with ACORN have been around for a long time,? says Johanns. Speaking about the videos, he adds that ?if it was a one-off event, with one employee, you could make the argument that the employee simply wasn?t paying attention. But, when you evaluate the video shot at so many different ACORN offices, the theme is the same: Here is how to break the law.?

With H.R. 3288 now heading back to the House, Johanns says it is time to ?look across the entire federal budget to find pockets where ACORN has been able to get money. My amendment, to be germane, had to relate to this budget.? House Republican leader John Boehner (R., Ohio), has followed Johanns?s advice, announcing Tuesday that he will introduce legislation (the Defund ACORN Act) to sever all ties between the federal government and ACORN.

?Congressman Boehner?s efforts are right on target,? says Johanns. ?ACORN shouldn?t get a dime of federal money, either from a federal department or a federal budget process. This needs to stop. Keep in mind that this issue will now go to conference, where similar language does not exist in the House bill. The conference can choose to ignore the action of the Senate.?

If House Democrats ignore his amendment, Johanns says Republicans and concerned Democrats will be relentless in opposition. ?Talk about a volcanic eruption,? he says. ?Every House member and senator who opposed funding for ACORN would be on every single local radio station in America talking about how outrageous that is. For now, we?ll continue to bring these issues up and seek support from the public.?

House Republicans are already speaking up. Nonetheless, Johanns cautions that when bills go to conference, things can get complicated. ?Conferences are mysterious things,? he says. ?You could end up with a strong vote on the Senate floor, that?s not the problem. The problem is that there?s not much you can do with a conference report. There?s very little debate, no amendments. You?re stuck with what you get.?

Johanns?s colleague, Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) -- the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee -- has, in the wake of the Johanns amendment, urged a new investigation into ACORN and written letters to Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) and the inspector general of HUD. Johanns says such calls for investigations are necessary. ?Look,? he says. ?I?ll give folks the benefit of the doubt. But if there are serious allegations, there needs to be an investigation.?

And President Obama should be the first to speak up on the issue, Johanns says. ?We have an extremely proactive president who has criticized bonuses and big salaries. He?s a president who has gotten really involved in health-care reform. I can?t imagine that he will allow this to go by without a comment on ACORN. It?s enormously important that the president weighs in. The American public is waiting for that. President Obama has got to say: If you violate the law, you pay the consequences for that, and put his support behind whatever investigation is being done.?

?This is not a little group that skimmed money off a grant and got caught doing it,? Johanns adds. ?This is an organization that has nearly 70 people who have been accused of violating voter-regulation laws, and, according to a House minority report, is operating a shell game across America.? (In July, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) issued a report by the minority staff of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that found that since 1994, ACORN had received more than $53 million in federal funds.)

Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) agrees that more investigations are needed. He tells NRO that his concern is ?not new and not limited to the revelations of the investigative reporters? that led the Census Bureau to drop its relationship with ACORN. ?Last year, I sent a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey expressing my concerns about ACORN and voter fraud. We?ve seen some of those problems in Harris County, Texas, with election officials.? It?s increasingly clear, he says, that ACORN is involved in numerous ?unsavory activities.?

?We need a full-fledged investigation to take place, to find any other places where financial support has been salted into legislation,? says Cornyn. ?I?m not sure we can say with clarity where ACORN?s advocates had explicitly or under some cover funneled money the organization?s way.?

Will Congress continue to work in a bipartisan fashion to combat ACORN?s abuses? ?Congress tends to be responsive to the news cycle. If this vote [on Johanns?s amendment] had occurred two weeks ago, I?m not confident that we?d see this bipartisan support.? Following the heap of negative news coverage, ?the ACORN advocates,? says Cornyn, ?were embarrassed.?

?We need to continue our efforts and find where money may have been stashed away for other ACORN activities,? Cornyn adds. ?The stimulus package had instances where money was funneled to ACORN, though the organization wasn?t named as the main beneficiary.? On Tuesday, more Republicans joined the chorus. The Hill reports that Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Tex.) -- the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee -- is now calling for the FBI and Department of Justice to investigate ACORN?s alleged misconduct. Johanns himself sent a letter late Tuesday afternoon urging Attorney General Eric Holder to look into ?any related entities, affiliates or subsidiaries over whom the organization would have, or may have, exercised dominion, control, or manipulation.? Cornyn also issued a statement asking Holder to ?conduct a broad criminal investigation into ACORN?s operations.?

Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), says Republicans will continue to highlight ACORN as an example of how ?it pays to have friends in high places.?

For the six Democrats and one independent who voted against the amendment -- Senators Durbin, Burris, Casey, Gillibrand, Leahy, Sanders, and Whitehouse -- the soft-spoken Nebraskan Johanns has only this to say: ?It was a chance to show real leadership. Each of them will have to explain their vote.?

?ACORN is an important constituency with liberal-activist and other groups that have no means of getting charitable contributions or income commensurate with their aspirations,? says Cornyn. ?Their only hope is to divert taxpayer dollars.? The NRSC sent out a press release on Tuesday chiding New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand for her vote against Johanns?s amendment. ?She has some vulnerability if the right candidate runs,? says Cornyn. The no-vote from Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) is also raising eyebrows. ?Did Bob Casey Just Commit Political Hara-Kiri?? asks CQ Politics. Even a Republican is under fire: Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas), missed the vote on the Johanns amendment, since she was in Dallas for a fundraiser at the home of football legend Roger Staubach. Her no-show has already become an issue in her gubernatorial campaign against Texas?s incumbent GOP governor Rick Perry (more here).

Both Johanns and Cornyn tell NRO that this story is far from over. ?I will pursue these efforts in the Senate, to look into their practices,? says Cornyn. ?A little scratching, some shoe-leather work -- we?ll do all of that to make sure we protect the U.S. taxpayer.?

-- Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at National Review Institute.

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Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on September 16, 2009 (boomark / email).