We learned last week that the Bush campaign was very quietly pushing a new scheme to rope “friendly congregations” into a political machine. It was (and is) a pretty simple plan: BC04 asked congregations nationwide to ignore legal restrictions and distribute Bush campaign literature, register voters, and spread the GOP gospel. An email from Bush’s Pennsylvania campaign office tells congregants how they can help.
“I’d like to ask if you would like to serve as a coordinator in your place of worship,” says the e-mail, adorned with the Bush-Cheney logo, from Luke Bernstein, who runs the state campaign’s coalitions operation and is a former staffer to Sen. Rick Santorum, the president’s Pennsylvania chairman.
“We plan to undertake activities such as distributing general information/updates or voter registration materials in a place accessible to the congregation,” the e-mail says.
The Bush scheme raised all kind of red flags, most notably federal tax law restrictions on houses of worship intervening in political campaigns. BC04 invited churches into the scam, but it failed to let people know that they might be placing their church’s tax exemption in jeopardy.
So, in the wake of the controversy, congressional Republicans came up with a new and even more cunning scheme. If federal tax law prohibits tax-exempt ministries from engaging in partisan activities, then it’s time to change federal tax law.
In fact, House Republicans have crafted a series of new provisions — which were magically written immediately after Bush’s campaign scheme made headlines — to make it easier for ministries to engage in partisan politicking without penalty. They’re pretty ridiculous (the proposals and the lawmakers).
The Safe Harbor for Churches provision…would greatly reduce the tax penalties for either one or two deliberate political endorsements in a calendar year and would also allow a church to make as many as three “unintentional” political endorsements in a calendar year without penalty. It does not define “unintentional.”
Let’s put this in practical terms. Tax-exempt ministries already know they aren’t legally permitted to intervene on behalf of political candidates. If the new GOP provisions became law, a church could work on Bush’s behalf and get caught, but there’d be no consequences. The same church could do it again and get caught, but still no punishment. This could happen a third time, but still face no penalties whatsoever, so long as church leaders said it was an accident each time.
Even if a church was somehow found to have “deliberately” violated the law three times, the church could lose its tax-exemption under the GOP plan — but only for one year. The law-and-order party is effectively telling tax-exempt institutions that the law has no meaning and won’t be enforced, even when broken flagrantly.
Put another way, if you, John and Jane Taxpayer, violate federal tax law “unintentionally,” you can face an audit and possible felony charges. If a church violates tax law repeatedly, they’re completely safe from punishment, because the GOP says so.
This plan has 20 congressional backers — all Republicans and all of whom signed on immediately after the Bush-church controversy came to public light. Worse, Tom DeLay has put the bill on a fast track so it can be passed and implemented immediately.
Naturally, I think this is a terrible mistake, but there may be unintended consequences that the GOP hasn’t considered. Does Tom DeLay realize how many predominantly African-American churches there are in the U.S.? Does he really want each of them organizing on John Kerry’s behalf in states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri? Hmm.
For that matter, if the law is applied equally to all tax-exempt groups, does the GOP expect other left-leaning groups like the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the League of Conservation Voters, People for the American Way, and the NAACP — all of which are not legally permitted to get involved in the campaign under existing law — to just stay on the sidelines after Congress has given them the green light to help Democrats at every level nationwide?
Note to GOP: Be careful what you wish for.