Months ago, the House Financial Services Committee reported a bill to reform Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE’s), specifically FannieMae and FreddieMac, which specialize in providing affordable housing.

Reporting errors in these publicly traded GSE’s in the millions and billions raised the threat of another Enron and Congress responded with reforms to create an independent regulator.

The Republican chairman, Mike Oxley of Ohio, and the ranking member, Barney Frank of Massachusetts , agreed on a provision that mandates that Fannie and Freddie give 5% of their after tax profits to affordable housing advocates such as ACORN.  The total figure is somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion – that’s with a B, billion.

The problem here in addition to the obviously offensive idea of forcing a publicly traded company, or any company for that matter, to give their after tax profits to anyone is that ACORN engages in political activity against Republicans.  Specifically, they engage in well-documented voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities.

Fortunately, there is Ed Royce.  Royce offered an amendment in the committee mark-up to strip the provision out but it failed 53-17.  Royce didn’t quit there.  He and other conservatives on the committee went to then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay and DeLay agreed to keep the bill from getting to the floor as long as that provision remained.  Then, he resigned.

Oxley claimed that the concerns raised by Royce, et al, were illegitimate and unfounded.  In spite of the fact that Royce allies got ahold of Florida ACORN’s political plan that specifically identified Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida, a moderate member of the Financial Services Committee in a swing district as a target of their political activities.

After several weeks of negotiating, an agreement was reached that would prevent any groups that engage in political activity from receiving money from this slush fund.  Now remember, according to Oxley Royce’s concerns were illegitimate – but guess what the response to the agreement was from the ACORN, et al?  Not only do they oppose the change, they now oppose the entire bill.

The bill should come the floor in the coming weeks and in order for Royce, et al, to be successful, Oxley has to be actively supportive but his ally Barney Frank has already promised to remove the changes.  This Jonestown-like provision, giving $1 billion a year to our opponents is insanity and another reason to scratch your head about what is going on in Washington .

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.