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ACORN’s Empire Will Expand Under Obama’s Health-Care Plan and Financial Rules
Congress recently voted to cut off federal housing funds to controversial group ACORN. But since most federal money goes to ACORN-related entities and affiliates, not ACORN itself, Congress’s action is expected to have little practical effect. ACORN’s chief defender in Congress, House Banking Committee Barney Frank (D-Mass.), claims that the cut-off is unconstitutional. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) suggests that Congress’s action was purely symbolic, and not expected to have any effect on ACORN.

Indeed, ACORN’s empire is likely to expand thanks to pending legislation to broaden its and its affiliates’ ability to shake down banks. ACORN, a beneficiary of many welfare and war-on-poverty programs, is a “creature of the Community Reinvestment Act” (CRA), which allows groups like ACORN the ability to shake down banks seeking to obtain regulatory approvals, by accusing them of making insufficient low-income loans.

The Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis, because it forced banks to make risky, low-income loans. Yet Obama is now proposing a new agency to more stringently enforce it without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness. Obama’s Congressional allies are working to expand the CRA’s reach and make it “explicitly race-based.”

ACORN may also benefit from the Obama health-care plan, which contains subsidies for community organizers like ACORN. While funneling money to community organizers like ACORN, Obama’s health care plan would raise taxes, break promises, harm people with insurance, explode the budget deficit, destroy many inexpensive health-care plans, and take away important freedoms....