During his first term as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his Treasury Department to ease enforcement of the Johnson Amendment, which threatened the tax exemption of nonprofit organizations, such as churches, if they engaged in political activity or endorsed a political candidate. We now know, thanks to an investigation by Trump’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, that Joe Biden’s IRS strictly enforced the Johnson Amendment against conservative Christian churches, while turning a blind eye to liberal mainline churches, whose pulpits were used by Democrat candidates to deliver stump speeches and whose church houses, for all practical purposes, served as campaign headquarters for progressive political candidates. Of course, this double-standard weaponization of government against political opponents was nothing unusual for the Biden Administration, but common practice.
In a lawsuit last year, Donald Trump’s IRS consented to the complaint of the complainants—Sand Springs Church, First Baptist Church Waskom, and the National Religious Broadcasters Association—that the Johnson Amendment was not only unconstitutional, but an infringement on the complainants’ right to free speech. Since then, the Johnson Amendment has been shelved and the way paved for churches to endorse political candidates without jeopardizing their tax exemption.
While it remains to be seen if a future Democrat president will pull the Johnson Amendment back off the shelve, blow the dust off of it, and weaponize it once again against his or her political opponents, at least for the time being, it’s been assigned to the dust bend of unconstitutionalities, where it has always truly belonged. To prove this point, permit me to present to you the sorted story of the Johnson Amendment’s odious origin.
In 1948, Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected to the United States Senate. Although he defeated his Republican opponent, Jack Porter, in the general election, he won that year’s runoff election for the Democratic nomination, against Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, by dubious means, as well as by a mere margin of 87 votes.
The tallied ballots that gave Johnson his slim triumph over Stevenson came from a mysterious ballot box discovered in Alice, Texas. This box, discovered after all the other votes had been counted and Stevenson declared the winner, contained 202 ballots, all but two of which were for Johnson. The suspiciously found ballots were not only found in alphabetical order, but were all written in the same handwriting. In addition, many of them were signed by voters who had either moved away or passed away. The presiding election judge in Alice, Texas, who certified the ballots as legitimate, admitted years later on his deathbed that the votes were fraudulent and that the election was stolen.
Upon his election to the United States Senate, and in light of the infamous “Box 13 scandal,” Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) was nicknamed “Landslide Lyndon.” When Johnson successfully ran for reelection 6 years later, in 1954, he was opposed by some powerful Texas nonprofit organizations. In order to exact revenge against them, Johnson proposed an amendment on the Senate Floor that would prohibit all nonprofits from political involvement, under the threat of revoking their tax exemption. The Johnson Amendment, as it is known today, was agreed to and passed into law without discussion, debate, or descent. Consequently, all nonprofits, including churches, were not only gagged by their tax exemption from endorsing political candidates, but also prohibited from participation in political campaigns.
Although most Americans believe that the prohibition against a pastor endorsing a political candidate from the pulpit was chiseled into our Constitution in stone by our Founding Fathers, it was actually the product of a fraudulently elected United States senator who villainously and vengefully proposed an acrimonious amendment to mute his political nemeses. For decades, churches and nonprofits in these United States were unconstitutionally muffled from speaking out on political matters, under the threat of having their tax exemption revoked for doing so.
Last July’s announcement by Trump’s IRS that it would no longer enforce the Johnson Amendment, which unconstitutionally banned churches from speaking out on political matters and endorsing political candidates, should be celebrated by all freedom-loving Americans. Still, it is a sad testimony to our country that it took us seventy years to remove "Landslide Lyndon's" gag order from the mouths of pastors and their parishioners.
BIDEN'S IRS WEAPONIZED JOHNSON AMENDMENT TO TARGET CONSERVATIVE PASTORS WHILE IGNORING LIBERALS
