Four years ago, Franklin Graham wrote an angry letter to President Obama complaining that the IRS had investigated the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), which he heads. The reason, he claimed, was that the organization had run national ads urging people to “cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel.”
Now let it be said that ads like that do approach the line drawn by the so-called Johnson Amendment, under which non-profit organizations wishing to retain their tax exemptions may not endorse or oppose candidates for public office.
In fact, as Graham admitted, the IRS notified the BGEA after the election that its tax exemption was still intact. So the complaint boiled down to nothing more than piling on the IRS at a time when the agency was under attack for targeting conservative political organizations.
Perhaps because of this brouhaha, Donald Trump campaigned last year on a promise to “destroy” the Johnson Amendment. To be sure, last’s week’s executive order didn’t even threaten to do that.
What it did do was give a presidential seal of approval to the very kind of speech that the IRS deemed acceptable in the case of the BGEA.
To wit, it prohibited penalizing individuals and religious organizations that speak “about moral or political issues from a religious perspective, where speech of similar character has, consistent with law, not ordinarily been treated as participation or intervention in a political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) a candidate for public office by the Department of the Treasury.”
We now have before us last week’s House of Representatives vote rolling back provisions of the Affordable Care Act in in order to give a trillion-dollar tax break to rich folks.
I see no reason why, say, the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is doctrinally committed to health coverage as a human right, shouldn’t take out national ads urging people to vote for candidates “who base their decisions on biblical principles and oppose the Obamacare repeal bill.”
Perhaps some other religious organizations — the National Council of Churches and the Union for Reform Judaism, for example — would want to do the same.
And I’m wondering how President Trump would feel about they’re doing so.