Marble Falls Every once in a while, Google Alerts will pull something up that surprises, when they are acting not like a contemporary search for mentions of ACORN, but more like the Wayback Machine archiving the internet. Recently, they ran something from the Minneapolis Star Tribune and its political column almost fifteen years ago. The headline got right to the point:
Bachmann takes aim at ACORN ties to banks
The Minnesota Republican blames the mortgage crisis on anti-discrimination measures in the Community Reinvestment Act.
October 16, 2009 at 4:11PM
Remember the housing meltdown in 2007-2008? Former Congresswoman and Tea Party zealot, Michele Bachmann, always looking for a way to apologize for big business and banks, regardless of their malfeasance, was beating her usual drum and trying to scapegoat ACORN for the banks’ perfidy. The guts of her screed were as follows:
According to Bachmann’s tally, three of the donor banks were in Minnesota: Northeast Bank ($2,000 this year), BankFirst ($250 in 1999), and Firstar (unspecified amount in 1993). The backstory: In a brief she has been pressing since last year’s financial meltdown, Bachmann argues that a good part of the blame for the mortgage crisis can placed on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which sought to encourage private banks to make loans in low-and moderate-income neighborhoods. While some viewed this as a remedy for discrimination, Bachmann sees it as a government edict to make shaky loans. And one way to avoid the watchful gaze of the government bureaucrats, Bachmann told [Glen] Beck, is to give money to ACORN: “So a bank, instead of making outright loans to people who are poor credit risks, could give money to ACORN in order to get this positive Community Reinvestment Act rating,” she said. The three Minnesota banks, which got ratings ranging from satisfactory to outstanding, told regulators their donations were made to foster economic development in the communities where they do business.
This wasn’t unusual at the time, of course. Somehow in Bachmann’s fever dream for a couple of grand in donations to ACORN’s operation in Minnesota many years before, some of her local banks were “buying” a better CRA rating. Wild stuff, but, as I say, typical of the time and her crazy.
I began to wonder what happened to Bachmann? She was the Lauren Bobert and Majorie Taylor Green of her day, all wrapped in one. She even mounted a quixotic campaign for president in 2012, when Obama won his second term. After that humiliating defeat, she resigned her seat in Congress in 2014, where she had been the first woman Republican to be elected in Minnesota, and, thankfully, faded from view.
Well, at least out of sight and sound of most of us. It’s a walk on the wild side to read her Wikipedia entry. Turns out, frighteningly, “since January 1, 2021, Bachmann has been dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University.” That’s Robertson as in Rev. Pat Robertson, the moral majority and radio evangelical preacher and conservative firebrand. Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia was originally named the Christian Broadcasting Network University. One shutters to think of this toxic brew of Robertson’s legacy and Bachmann in an educational setting engaged in the poisoning of young minds.
All I can say is that ACORN is still standing and doing its work, and Bachmann for all her sound and fury is preaching to her small choir. Nothing but the good times then and now!