CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS SAY HOUSE PLAN PROTECTS RIGHTS
opposed by thousands of religious and nonprofit leaders, who warn that it could blur the line between charity and politics.
The change could turn churches into a well-funded political force, with donors diverting as much as $1.7 billion each year from traditional political committees to churches and other nonprofit groups that could legally engage in partisan politics for the first time, according to an estimate by the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
The Senate will begin voting as early as today on its own version of the sweeping tax rewrite, which the leaves the ban untouched, and differs in other key ways from the House version. The Senate bill has yet to garner enough support from Republicans to pass along party lines, with Republican senators raising concerns about the bill’s cost and approach, including how small businesses are treated and the elimination of the Affordable Care Act requirement that most Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty.
Among those on the fence are Sen. James Lankford, R-okla., who has expressed concerns about the bill’s impact on the budget deficit but favors ending the 1954 ban. In a possible sign of the horse trading to come to try to secure votes, a spokesman for Lankford said on Sunday that the senator was working to insert language into the Senate bill to roll back the ban, and believed it had a good chance of being included
If the bill passes the Senate, lawmakers will still need to resolve key differences between the House and Senate bills, including whether to make the tax cuts for individuals permanent, as the House bill does, or temporary, as in the Senate legislation. Leaders will also need to decide what to do about popular tax breaks, like the mortgage interest and state and local tax deductions, which each bill treats differently.
With time running out for Republicans to deliver a major legislative victory after nearly a year of stalemate on the party’s top agenda items, lawmakers appear poised to agree to last-minute changes and tweaks to try to ensure the bill’s passage so it can be delivered to Trump by Christmas. Lawmakers returned to Washington with just a handful of legislative days left and big issues to contend with, including the need to pass a funding measure to keep the government open beyond Dec. 8 and action to protect the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.
The need for a Republican legislative victory is giving comfort to those on the religious right that the final bill sent to the president will include the House language, which was drafted with significant input from evangelicalgroups.sudden The movement toward their goal appears to trace back to a January 2016 meeting that Trump, then a presidential candidate, had convened at his Trump Tower office in Manhattan with evangelical leaders he was courting.
That meeting helped lead to a campaign pledge by Trump to repeal the ban, known as the Johnson Amendment, and set the stage for its inclusion in the tax code overhaul that passed the House.
Critics warn that the change could dramatically increase untraceable political spending and lead to the creation of “sham churches” to take advantage of the new avenue for political spending, which — unlike donations to candidates, “super PACS” and party committees — would allow donors to deduct contributions.
Thousands of religious leaders, as well as groups and denominations like the United Methodist Church, the National Council of Churches and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, say rolling back the Johnson Amendment would be the biggest threat to the stability and mission of their organizations in a generation. Charities and houses of worship whose members, staffs and boards of directors now span the political spectrum predict that they will be pressured to take sides in political campaigns. Nonprofits and religious groups that receive government funding worry that politicians or donors will pres- sure them for endorsements in exchange for continued funding.
“It will bring the partisan divide to our doors,” said Jatrice Martel Gaiter, the executive vice president of external affairs for Volunteers of America, a ministry and social service provider that receives about 70 percent of its funding from the government. “If the Senate doesn’t stop this, there will be havoc in the nonprofit sector.”
Christian conservative leaders contend that the provision in the House bill was drafted narrowly to avoid any such abuse, and they cast the issue as a matter of constitutional rights, rather than politics.
Both sides agree that repealing or dialing back the Johnson Amendment seemed improbable at best as recently as a year and a half ago. That was when Trump’s surprising embrace injected new life into it, and helped spark an alliance that benefited his campaign and the religious right.
For evangelical leaders, it was an important signal that Trump — despite his two divorces, lack of religiosity and alleged mistreatment of women — might do more to advance their long-stalled agenda than more traditional Republican politicians. And for Trump, it expanded his reach into conservative Christian communities that had been skeptical of him, but are a critical base of Republican support.
“That’s the way the world works. The world is transactional. What can we pursue that is mutually beneficial?” said Tony Perkins, a leading figure on the Christian right who is the president of the Family Research Council. His group has been working against the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “The awareness was building, but the real catalyst of this conversation was Donald Trump.”
Conservative Christian leaders say Trump seized on the issue at the January meeting in his office. He asked “why Christian organizations and churches did not speak out more on the public policy issues,” said Jerry A. Johnson, the president and chief executive of the National Religious Broadcasters.
The assembled leaders responded in part by pointing to “the chilling effect of the Johnson Amendment,” Johnson said. He attended the meeting, but later endorsed one of Trump’s primary opponents, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-texas, who was the first choice of many evangelical leaders.
Cruz later dropped out of the race, effectively ceding the nomination to Trump, who formed a 25-member evangelical executive advisory board after he became the party’s presumptive nominee. At its first meeting in June 2016, attendees said, it became clear that repealing the Johnson Amendment would become a centerpiece of his campaign to win over the religious right.
Trump “cited a specific conversation he had with a pastor whom he’d met along the journey who didn’t feel he could endorse him, but he wanted to,” said Johnnie Moore, a Christian publicist who was appointed to Trump’s evangelical board. Trump said the Johnson Amendment, which threatens religious organizations and charities with loss of their tax-exempt status if they endorse or oppose political candidates, had created a situation in which “some of his most committed supporters were careful about the language they used publicly about him,” Moore said. He added that the candidate “appeared to be genuinely upset that the federal government would attempt to bully these organizations in this way.”
In a speech to hundreds of conservative Christians on June 21, 2016, Trump made his first public vow to repeal the Johnson Amendment, predicting that its elimination “will be my greatest contribution to Christianity — and other religions.”
At his behest, the repeal effort was included in the Republican platform for the first time. “Nobody else would even think about doing it,” Trump boasted, explaining it was “for the evangelicals,” without whom, he said “I could not have won this nomination.”
Less than two weeks after his inauguration, Trump renewed his commitment to the cause, vowing in a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in February to “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”
The Republican congressional leadership, for whom the Johnson Amendment had not been a top issue, followed the lead of the new president. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-texas, chairman of the tax code-writing House Ways and Means Committee, announced in a March speech that the tax plan being hashed out by his committee would “repeal the damaging effects of the Johnson Amendment, once and for all.”
Not waiting for Congress, Trump included a provision aimed at weakening the already anemic enforcement of the amendment in a May executive order billed as “promoting free speech and religious liberty.” It directed the Treasury secretary, who oversees the IRS, not to pursue enforcement efforts against any “individual, house of worship or other religious organization” for speaking about “moral or political issues from a religious perspective.”
The order was almost immediately challenged in federal court by the nonprofit Freedom From Religion Foundation, which said the order gave preference to “religion over nonreligion.”
The Johnson Amendment traces its origins — and its name — to Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson and his 1954 re-election campaign. Concerned that his electoral prospects could be diminished by attacks from a pair of conservative nonprofit groups, he slipped a provision into a tax code overhaul to bar certain nonprofit groups from participating in political campaigns.
There is only one known instance of a church losing its tax-exempt status for running afoul of the law, despite ample documentation of churches explicitly endorsing or opposing candidates. And a 2016 poll found that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose churches or pastors endorsing candidates in their official capacities.
Nonetheless, conservative Christian leaders have increasingly seized on the Johnson Amendment as an example of what they see as government hostility to religion in the public square.
“The law has a chilling effect on free speech,” said Michael Farris, the president of the Christian conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom.