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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Suing Congress to Keep ACORN Funded Written by Bruce Walker The Center for Constitutional Rights announced on Thursday that it would be filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of ACORN in an attempt to prevent Congress from voting to defund the scandal-ridden organization. In addition to a petition to stop Congress from exercising its appropriation power, the lawsuit would seek a temporary restraining order against Congress to halt the already enacted defunding. Jules Lobel, an attorney with the Center said “It’s not the job of Congress to be the judge, jury, and executioner. We have due process in this country, and our Constitution forbids lawmakers from singling out a person or group for punishment without a fair investigation and trial.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has a very interesting view of the Constitution itself. The political decision of Congress to appropriate monies or enact laws is not controlled by due process of laws (which is a judicial issue) but rather with adherence to the Constitution. The appropriation power itself is in Article I and this power is limited to certain enumerated powers (none of which remotely deal with the activities of ACORN) and to those laws and appropriations which are necessary and proper to the limited enumerated powers. What sorts of things does ACORN do with tax dollars? It uses its federal funds to fight foreclosures, which is to say that it takes tax dollars from all of us and uses those dollars to take sides in civil foreclosure actions against the mortgage holders. The reason for courts is to make sure that civil actions like foreclosures follow the law and that the rights of private parties are protected from abuse. ACORN determines that because one party is the defendant in a foreclosure action and another party is the plaintiff than the defendant is entitled to legal advocacy at the taxpayer’s expense. Congress is not ending the funding for ACORN because of the biased use of tax dollars, though. Congress is ending the funding of ACORN because of egregious, videotaped, and clear mischief by ACORN employees who were shown abetting immigrant child prostitution, tax evasion, and even possible homicide. Lobel believes, apparently, that ACORN has a constitutional right to tax dollars and that the deprivation of these dollars is a judicial, rather than a legislative, action. This is also a very curious reading of the Constitution. The Constitution not only gives the House the sole privilege of originating bills for raising revenue, but defines the requirements for their enactment: Passage of a bill by both houses of Congress and which is either signed by the president, not signed but not vetoed, or vetoed and overridden by a two thirds majority in both houses. The Center for Constitutional Rights is not alleging that Congress did not meet the clear requirements of the Constitution to enact laws, including appropriations or un-appropriations, but the Center is rather saying that the Constitution itself is wrong: Congress has a requirement to look at its legislative processes as if those were judicial processes. Lobel also speaks as if a decision by Congress not to appropriate funds for a particular activity was tantamount to the imposition of a death sentence when he described the congressional action against ACORN as Congress acting as “judge, jury, and executioner.” In our republic and under our Constitution, there is no right to federal funds at all. The denial of those funds is not an extraordinary situation, equivilent to a death penalty case, but rather it reflects the normal status of citizen taxpayers who provide the federal government with that wealth which it then spends. What Lobel, the Center, and ACORN all want courts to find in our Constitution is their private right to compel Congress to take money away from some taxpayers and to give that money to these activist groups and their employees. If there is a constitutional question of deprivation of property without due process of law, surely it is the expropriation of tax dollars by Congress from some citizens and the distribution of those tax dollars as political booty to other citizens. Congress and our federal court system has drifted so far away from the first intentions of our Founding Fathers of limited federal government that lawsuits seeking judicial injunctions against Congress to compel it to continue to fund corrupt private citizens can be seriously discussed. The more “elastic” the Constitution, the less secure the proper purposes of government.
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#1. To: farmfriend (#0)
This suit should be thrown out of whatever court it's filed in. ACORN = nuts
Yeah but what are the odds?
This suit, prima facie, sucks.
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