A spokesman for the Republicans in Congress has already<\/font> blasted<\/a> the decision as "shameful."<\/font><\/p>\n According<\/a> to The New York Times, soon after Congress voted in September, a lawyer for the Department of Housing and Urban Development asked the Justice Department how it should handle pre-existing contracts with ACORN. Much of the money which ACORN receives from the federal government is in the form of HUD grants involving the provision of affordable housing.<\/font><\/p>\n In an October 23<\/font> memorandum (pdf)<\/a>, which has just been released, Acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron replied that the language of the bill was ambiguous but his opinion was that those contracts could not be breached "where doing so would give rise to contractual liability."\u2026<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Inserted from <Raw Story<\/a>><\/p>\n The GOP Regime has their panties in such a tight bunch over this that they are almost sure to challenge the DOJ in court. Frankly, I\u2019ll be surprised of the DOJ argument stands, but that\u2019s OK. In the cross complaint ACORN will raise that the bill, whereby Congress cut off their funding, is a bill of attainder, forbidden by the Constitution, and therefore void. In the meantime, ACORN may continue many of their valued services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DOJ has repeatedly used the \u201cpreexisting contract\u201d argument to foil stripping taxpayer-funded bonuses from GOP crony executives to my great frustration. However, at least they are being consistent in the application of that argument. The saga of the embattled anti-poverty group ACORN has taken a new twist, with the disclosure of a Justice Department opinion […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Voter](\"http:\/\/s217.photobucket.com\/albums\/cc83\/TomCat1948or2\/Blog%202009\/GOPinaSnitOverACORNReprieve_21CC\/acorn_raid.jpg\" "\\"Voter")
<\/a> The saga of the embattled anti-poverty group ACORN has taken a new twist, with the disclosure of a Justice Department opinion that a vote by Congress to cut off all federal funding to the group should not affect contracts signed before it was passed.<\/font><\/p>\n