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Potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich quietly lined up $150,000 to help defeat Iowa justices who threw out a ban on same-sex marriage, routing the money to conservative groups through an aide's political committee. Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker who has aggressively courted the conservatives who dominate Iowa's lead-off presidential caucuses, raised the money for the political arm of Renewing American Leadership, also known as ReAL.
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That political group, Renewing American Leadership Action, then passed $125,000 to American Family Association Action and an additional $25,000 to the Iowa Christian Alliance — two of the groups that spent millions before last November's elections that removed three of the state's seven state Supreme Court justices.
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the political group backed away from running the anti-judges campaign itself; lawyers cautioned the spending could violate the group's nonprofit status, which requires that it remain somewhat aloof from electoral politics. The group was founded under a tax provision that allows it to keep donors anonymous but bars it from making politics its primary purpose.
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[T]he money went to the two conservative organizations without specific instructions on how to use it, Tyler said. Some are skeptical. "It is not customary in the political world for large sums of money to shift hands without a clear objective," said Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney who for a decade led the Internal Revenue Service tax-exempt division. "To give money unfettered to organizations that have announced they are going to be undertaking a recall effort is not going to protect you."
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If the Christianists embrace Gingrich, it will be a strong testament to their idiocy and hypocrisy. The man is a sleaze bag and anyone with a shred of intelligence ought to realize they are being conned.
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