ACLU’s Response to Trump’s ‘Religious Freedom’ Order Is Basically ‘LOL’
‘No discernable policy outcome,’ rights group says
by DAVID AXE
In a ceremony at the White House rose garden on May 4, 2017 — just hours before House Republicans voted to take health care away from millions of Americans — Pres. Donald Trump made a big show of signing an executive order purporting to give tax-exempt churches more leeway to directly intervene in politics.
The American Civil Liberties Union had promised to sue over the order’s apparent violation of the separation of church and state. But then the rights group got around to actually reading Trump’s much-touted order … and essentially laughed out loud.
“Today’s executive order signing was an elaborate photo-op with no discernible policy outcome,” ACLU director Anthony Romero said in a statement. The order was, in Romero’s words, “a textbook case of ‘fake news.’”
No need for the ACLU to sue … yet.
Trump was pretending to target the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law named for then-senator Lyndon Johnson that bars tax-exempt organizations including churches from engaging in explicitly political activities such as endorsing candidates.
As churches are not legally required to report much in the way of financial information to the federal government — and because anyone donating to a church can claim a write-off on their own taxes — churches could become clearing-houses for limitless, anonymous political donations. Hence the Johnson Amendment.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had appealed to hardline evangelical voters by pledging to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment. But that requires legislation. And legislation still needs 60 votes in the Senate, where there are currently only 52 Republicans. No sane Democrat would vote to end the Johnson Amendment.
And even if Trump somehow managed to shove a repeal through Congress, any resulting law — or absence of law — would be subject to lawsuits citing the longstanding separation of church and state, a fundamental constitutional principle.
In other words, Trump is unlikely to repeal the Johnson Amendment by legislation, so he penned an executive order, instead. But executive orders cannot cancel law. Indeed, Trump’s May 4 order directs that the executive branch “does not take adverse action against any … house of worship … consistent with law.”
And the law is clear. No politics by charities.
Romero all but chuckled in his statement. “What President Trump did today was merely provide a faux sop to religious conservatives.”
“After careful review of the order’s text we have determined that the order does not meaningfully alter the ability of religious institutions or individuals to intervene in the political process,” Romero added.
Even the conservative National Review more or less agreed with Romero’s assessment of Trump’s fake-news ploy. “Trump has signed a religious-liberty executive order that … is constitutionally dubious, dangerously misleading and ultimately harmful to the very cause that it purports to protect.”
If Trump wants to stand any chance of freeing churches to participate in politics, he’ll need to write law, National Review explained. Law, it turns out, is hard.
Ignore the hand-waving charlatan in the White House. Focus on Congress, where Republicans are hard at work legally seizing Americans’ health care.
Stay defiant.
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