Nina Gershon

Whatever guises the discredited Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, assumes in the future, taxpayers now have less reason to worry about being conscripted into funding them. This past Friday, a Manhattan federal appeals court ruled that Congress last fall had acted within its authority in deleting funds for the radical nonprofit community network. In overturning a lower court, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals determined the appropriations cutoff had not punished ACORN without trial and thus was not in violation of the constitutional ban on bills of attainder. The decision was partial; the appeals court sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon to decide whether ACORN's free speech and due process rights also had been violated. Even on those grounds, the plaintiffs' case looks shaky.

The scandal-ridden Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, needs money. And more than ever it's counting on the federal government to deliver it. A December 11 ruling by a federal judge in New York overturning a funding ban in the current budget may well reopen the floodgates. Ironically, it's the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that stands in the way. On December 16, the department filed a memorandum opposing the New Orleans-based nationwide radical nonprofit "anti-poverty" network's claim that it had been unjustly singled out for a funding cutoff for Fiscal Year 2010. In other words, the government, for a change, was protecting taxpayer interests. Whether those interests prevail in court depends on interpretations of the Constitution's ban on bills of attainder and its protection of due process and freedom of association.