Judge rules that Congress can’t block payments to ACORN

Late on Friday, federal Judge Nina Gershon ruled that a bill passed in Congress to cut off federal funding to ACORN, inspired after conveniently-edited embarrassing videos of the group were posted by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, is an unconstitutional ‘Bill of Attainder.’ That means the law punishes the group prior to any judicial or administrative finding that they committed any criminal acts. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the case before Judge Gershon, celebrates the finding:

According to Jules Lobel, CCR Vice-President and Cooperating Attorney: “This historic decision by the Court affirms the fundamental constitutional principle that the Congress cannot be judge, jury, and executioner.”

CCR Legal Director Bill Quigley added, “This ruling protects not only ACORN but all other organizations or individuals that Congress unfairly targets. The clearly partisan push by the far right to punish those it politically disagrees with has ended here.”

via Historic Win for Constitutional Rights! Injunction Granted in CCR Lawsuit on Behalf of ACORN | Center for Constitutional Rights.

Meanwhile, Obama-haters who think our President could not have been elected without acts of voter fraud committed by ACORN on his behalf, well, let’s just say that they has a sad.

Take Robert Stacy McCain for instance:

It’s this kind of Through-the-Looking Glass weirdness — where people have a right to taxpayer money — that boggles the mind. The caterpillar smoking the hookah may understand it, but I evidently didn’t do enough dope back in the day, because this makes zero sense to me.

ACORN doesn’t have a right to federal funding, Stacy – ACORN has a right to be paid for services rendered pursuant to a contract agreed to by both parties. Unless ACORN has been found to be in breach of that contract. So, it’s not that you didn’t do enough dope, it’s that you’re not an attorney, and you’re being willfully ignorant of the law.

Michelle Malkin, meanwhile, also has more sound and fury than analysis to share. She first posts a link to the question of whether or not the act cutting of ACORN was a ‘bill of attainder’ from Eugene Volokh. Eugene’s ultimate analysis is literally, “I don’t know.” So, it would sound here like we have a complicated legal question that the judiciary needed to address. A judge has found that the bill is not constitutional.

I’m not sure how this helps Michelle’s case at all when a legal thinker who is considered to be a fair guy by right and left agrees that there is an open question here. But Michelle doesn’t really care about fairness. For the partisan hack analysis of the question, she turns to Hans von Spakovsky, the voter suppression guru who could not get confirmed to the Federal Election Commission by the Senate because of the Alberto Gonzales-worthy performance he gave during his confirmation hearing (see Dahlia Lithwick). Hans, who now works for the Heritage Foundation, also refused to cooperate with an internal Justice Department investigation into the Bush-era efforts to make the DOJ a tool for Republicans trying to win elections (see Murray Waas).

Hans takes issue with the Congressional Research Service’s report that found the bill is not constitutional, and this is funny because partisans always hold up CRS’s non-partisan analyses when they are useful to their political ends, and then tear them down as the outputs of a partisan agency when they are not useful. But Hans’s analysis includes some great whoppers like this one:

Nonprofits like ACORN have no vested property or contractual right to receive federal contracts or grants.

Of course, that’s not the issue here – ACORN was able to show the judge that it was *not getting paid for completed work under existing contracts.* This would be like if the Congress passed a bill that said Blackwater couldn’t get paid for work it did last year because it’s an evil company. When Congress took up the question of Blackwater and other contractors’ roles in providing security services, it instead tried to pass a bill that said the State Department needed to beef up its own corps of security guards.

That leaves the final scurrilous attack – that Judge Gershon is some filthy liberal appointed by President Clinton to make policy from the bench. To that, all I can note is that the sadly-no-longer-existing conservative broadsheet that I once toiled for, the New York Sun, saluted Judge Gershon in an editorial for her fair handling of a complicated terrorism trial that came before her. I guess she’s only too liberal when she’s ruling against your pet outrage-a-thon that has nothing to do with the reality that President Obama was fairly elected to the highest office in the land last year by the American people.

Meanwhile, if you want to keep up the ACORN nutsiness, go read about how Rep. Steve King of Iowa, one of the empty heads of steam behind the Defund ACORN Act, secreted away acorn-shaped cookies in his pockets from a White House dinner. He then stored them at home in his freezer, possibly so he could hold them up before the White House chef during a hearing he will chair of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the 112th Congress.