New Orleans   The clock may be ticking on Jeff Sessions, the former Alabama Senator, as Attorney General. Reportedly he offered his resignation to the President in recent days as Trump tweeted his displeasure at the Justice Department’s modifications of his travel ban. Nonetheless, an order from his office seemed to come out of nowhere last week barring nonprofits and third-party groups from participating in any implementation and remediation ordered as part of financial and other settlements approved by lawyers with the Justice Department. Who saw this coming?

Well, anyone who has followed the obsessions that Sessions and his old Republican colleagues continue to have with all things ACORN and nonprofits as a whole, that’s who.

What is Sessions talking about? Frequently settlements with big companies include provisions for remediation that can only be appropriately implemented by nonprofits. The Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal included a requirement that the company invest $2 billion to fund zero-emission technology and the related support to achieve zero-emission cars in the future. Settlements from the banking catastrophes that triggered the Great Recession also routinely included remediation by nonprofits involved in financial education or housing counseling involving groups as disparate as the American Bankruptcy Institute, La Raza, NeighborWorks, and the Urban League, all of whom have long standing programs in these areas. Republicans see this as unrelated and a siphoning off of money to create slush funds to support the nonprofits.

And, here’s where the ACORN obsession comes in. The Nonprofit Quarterly quoted one of its late columnists, saying….

Subcommittee chairman Tom Marino (R-PA) grilled a Justice Department witness over whether anyone from the White House or some unknown outside group had guided Justice and the banks on the selection of the third-party implementers—again, the specter of the hand of ACORN all but flowing from Marino’s lips. Rep. David Trott (R-MI) concluded that the settlement agreement process “looks and smells a little bit like a slush fund” and raised suspicions about how the banks got access to the list of HUD-approved nonprofit counseling agencies (apparently unaware that they are on the HUD website). Marino then observed that the Justice Department’s prosecution of the banks on mortgage lending issues amounted to “using extortion to make banks appropriate funds to left-leaning organizations.”

Or as reported by the Huffington Post…

….as part of Bank of America’s $16.65 billion settlement with the Department of Justice in 2014 (a former subsidiary of the company, Countrywide Financial, was one of the most toxic subprime mortgage lenders), the bank could donate $100 million to community and legal groups. Such donations to approved groups would then count toward the settlement’s total value. Conservative groups portrayed the Obama administration as a shadowy slush fund for leftist organizations, hyping connections of the groups that received funding to ACORN, the Republican boogieman that was defunded after false accusations of wrongdoing.

You get it now?

No matter the fact that ACORN and other groups working in lower income communities saw their neighborhoods, families, and work thwarted by these nefarious corporate practices, the key issue for the Republicans is making sure that these communities remain impoverished and continue to be feeding grounds for corporate vultures.

Thank Jeff Sessions for keeping hate and harm alive and well.