Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,8
common ground to pass legislation, it intensified the gridlock in Congress.
The success of rage donating also gave rise to another problem: scams and scavengers on both the left and the right. I remember clearly the frustration of my colleague Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, whose image was used repeatedly in fund-raising pitches during the height of his work on the Select Committee on Benghazi, which was investigating the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on an American diplomatic facility in Libya. Ads would appear telling viewers to “help Trey Gowdy” by donating money. But none of that money ever actually went to Representative Gowdy’s campaign or any campaign that we knew of. Every time he turned around there was a new ad on the internet. His campaign never got a dime of it. He felt terrible that there were people all across the country sending in money and we had no idea where it was actually going.
Despite the downside of nonprofit political engagement, the practice is likely here to stay. Monetizing political anger may have become too lucrative for politicians to give up. Whether we like it or not, the practice of politicizing nonprofit entities is now a driving force in American politics. But it is one that potentially poses an existential threat to the Republican Party.
An Uneven Playing Field
While American voters may be aware of nonprofit engagement in elections, they may not realize just how much that engagement favors progressive candidates and causes.
During my work on the House Oversight Committee, I had an opportunity to take a meeting with someone who had done a deep dive into the public filings of certain nonprofit charities.
“There’s something really fishy about the way these charities are raising money,” the woman told me, pulling out graph after graph of fund-raising numbers for some of America’s biggest nonprofits. A veteran of many nonprofit audits herself, the woman had approached my office in 2016 with information she wanted the House Oversight Committee to look into. “If I were working for the IRS, I would be auditing every one of these,” she said, pointing to a list of large, high-profile charities. The one thing these charities all had in common? They were all associated with progressive politics.
This wasn’t the first time I had been shown evidence of the Democrats’ success in using nonprofits as political weapons. The seeds of this practice—acorns as it were—were first planted in my mind back in 2009.
I was a freshman member of the House Oversight Committee at that time, but we had jurisdiction of the upcoming census. Democrats had controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the years leading up to the census, which meant they got to dictate the terms under which it would take place.
In an effort to find 1.4 million temporary workers to conduct the census, the government partnered with hundreds of nonprofit organizations to help count a U.S. population in excess of 300 million people. Among these groups was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which was a collection of local charity organizations operating under a national umbrella.
Ostensibly, ACORN was created to advocate for low-income families. But by the time the group engaged with the census, it already had a long history of fraudulent voter registration efforts dating back to 1998 in Arkansas, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. In 2007, Washington State filed felony charges on a number of ACORN employees for falsely submitting in excess of seventeen hundred fraudulent voter registrations there. The organization also had a history of wage violations. On top of that, ACORN had covered up a $1 million embezzlement scandal by the brother of one of its founders.
In spite of all that history, the left-leaning ACORN had received $48 million in federal grants and contracts between 2005 and 2009, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit. That same audit found that “of 22 investigations and cases of election and voter registration fraud and wage violations involving ACORN or potentially related organizations from fiscal years 2005 through 2009, most were closed without prosecution. One of the eight cases and investigations identified by the Department of Justice resulted in guilty pleas by eight defendants to voter registration fraud and seven were closed without action due to insufficient, or a lack of, evidence.”
None of that stopped the U.S. Census Bureau in early 2009 from partnering with ACORN to send workers door-to-door counting every person in the country. These would be from the same pool of workers accused of submitting false