Bailout exposes partisan excess

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: September 29, 2008

Demonstrating either a skeptic’s unbelief or an Epicurean’s stoicism in response to the Treasury Department’s prophecy of an economic earthquake, Democrats sought to feed their friends taxpayer billions from the federal bailout bill amid a clash of ideologies. By defeating provisions that would have directed federal money to sharply partisan housing groups, Republicans performed the notable public service of reducing insult amid an injurious shakedown and revealing unvarnished cynicism beneath Democrats’ veneer of feigned patriotism.

Entering the weekend, drafts of the historic $700 billion bailout included requirements that 20 percent of profits from the sale of distressed mortgage assets be deposited in the Housing Trust and Capital Magnet funds. Through these funds, money would have been funneled to, among others, Acorn, a low-income housing advocacy group and frequent front for partisan election shenanigans. Republicans successfully and rightly axed this from bailout legislation before the House rejected the bill Monday.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now draws about 40 percent of its revenue from taxpayers and this year will spend $16 million to register Democrats to vote in November, presumably for one of their own, former Acorn community organizer Barack Obama, among others. Several Acorn workers have been convicted of voter fraud and the organization has been investigated in five states.

Among the tricks in Acorn’s grab bag, according to the Wall Street Journal, exchanging crack for votes: “In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey.”

Democrats might at least have appropriated the latter appellation for the bailout, or for the Community Reinvestment Act, passed under President Carter in 1977 and expanded under President Clinton two decades later. That provided the subprime tableaux, forcing banks to lend money to people whose income and capital previously had been considered insufficient to warrant a loan. Acorn, naturally, was a key proponent of the Community Reinvestment Act. So, naturally, Democrats thought that group should profit from the law’s failure.

Certainly, Republicans have been guilty of similar profligacy. Little noticed has been the Bush administration’s use of the Transportation Security Administration, created after 9/11, as a network to advance well-connected cronies into jobs vital to preventing another terrorist attack. It also cannot be forgotten that Bush himself is the chief proponent of the bailout bill, which disdains free-market economics in Keynesian fashion.

Bush and others neglectful of the framers’ vision would do well to mind the principles delineated in America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Governments, the declaration stipulates, derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” When a form of government “becomes destructive” of the unalienable rights, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

That threshold remains remote but is less removed than it was a month ago. Only a fourth of Americans support the bailout, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll. Half oppose it, some angered at government’s reach for their wallets and others likely aware of the bill’s deeper socialist implications. Politicians unaware of their constituents’ plunging trust in government would demonstrate wisdom by awakening to the red-hot heat of the fire with which they play.