Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a thrice-married former casino magnate, is making an unusual promise to bridge the gap with evangelical voters.
He is calling for the repeal of a decades-old section of the federal tax code known as the Johnson Amendment, named after former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who as a U.S. senator spearheaded the ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt organizations such as churches.
Mr. Trump is the first GOP nominee to make the law a major campaign issue, religious leaders say, and he’s expected to raise the issue when he addresses hundreds of “values voters” at a convention Friday in Washington, D.C., organized by the Family Research Council.
“You’ve been totally silenced, silenced like a child,” Mr. Trump told a gathering of pastors in Orlando last month.
Yet many pastors already flout the tax law or walk right up to the line, all-but-endorsing both Republican and Democratic candidates from their pulpits by inviting them to their churches and singing their praises. They do so largely with impunity.
The IRS did not open a single audit of a church during President Barack Obama’s first term and only three audits in 2013 and 2014 combined. It’s unclear if those audits involved political activity.
“It’s a straw man,” Mat Staver, an attorney and founder of the Liberty Counsel, a Christian nonprofit, said of Mr. Trump’s call to repeal the Johnson Amendment. “It’s not going to empower Christians because it’s not holding the community back.”
help! they closed my church and the big boss man cannot be allowed to bar the faithful from praying at nassau otb, a public benefit corporation, on roman catholic easter sunday when tracks are running across the united states that we want to bet. nassau otb is open on orthodox easter sunday because not all christians are the same. fonsld trump, hillary clinton sndrew cuomo et al subscribe to the roman view of ny const art 1 sec 3, lawyers are nothing but high priced errand boys? ny pml sec 109 is unconstitutional and or does not apply to nassau otb.
help the faithful attend church whenever they wish.
Claude Solnik
(631) 913-4244
Long Island Business News
2150 Smithtown Ave.
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
A group called the Alliance Defending Freedom urges clergy to protest the law by openly endorsing or opposing candidates from their pulpits and sending their sermons to the IRS.
“There’s a chilling effect,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., an early Trump backer and the president of Liberty University, a Christian school. “It’s a club to get conservative churches and universities to shut up.”
Without the law, its proponents say, churches and other charities could become conduits for a flood of secret, tax-deductible money for political activities.
“It would be one more giant loophole in an already troubled campaign finance system,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It’s also a perversion of the very idea of what churches and charities are supposed to be about. They’re not supposed to be political-action committees where you can smell the cigar smoke in the basement.”
Since 1998, Mr. Lynn’s group has been sending out tens of thousands of warnings to churches, synagogues and mosques to stay out of the political fray during election years. In one of the few recent cases, a Binghamton, N.Y., church lost its tax-exempt status after running full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic candidate Bill Clinton.
But in an election-year tradition as strong as candidate swings through Iowa and New Hampshire, Republicans court conservative Christian leaders to mobilize that core GOP constituency, while Democrats appear at black churches to galvanize one of their party’s most loyal voting blocs.
Mr. Trump visited a couple of churches in Iowa before the state’s GOP caucus and recently attended services at a black church in Detroit as part of his outreach to minority voters.
Some pastors have been overt about their support for Mrs. Clinton during her numerous visits to African-American churches across the country.
“I’m not supposed to publicly endorse a candidate,” said the Rev. James Hall in April at Triumph Baptist Church in Philadelphia. “I’m just going to prophesize that Hillary is going to win. If there’s a newspaper person here please tell them that I was prophesizing, not endorsing. And my members usually follow my prophecy.”
Mr. Hall said Thursday that his remarks did not constitute an endorsement that would violate the law.
The tax law dates to 1954, when then-Sen. Johnson faced attacks from two McCarthy-era, anti-communist groups backing his re-election challenger.
Mr. Johnson’s plan passed a GOP-controlled Congress without debate and was signed by a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The law affects charities and churches organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, which can receive tax-deductible contributions.
Mr. Trump’s proposal for repealing the tax law has gained little traction in Congress. A House bill has three co-sponsors.
Charities face two potential penalties—an excise tax on any money used for political activity and the threat that their tax exemption could get revoked.
Unlike other charities, churches don’t have to apply for tax-exempt status. So a church that loses its tax break could simply reopen itself the next day and allow donors to claim tax deductions, as long as it refrains from future candidate endorsements.
The scarcity of church audits in recent years stems from a 2009 federal court case in which a Minnesota church successfully argued that the IRS wasn’t following mandated procedures for such inquiries, which require a signoff from a high-ranking Treasury official. Officials have installed a new process but it hasn’t been thoroughly tested.
“The IRS doesn’t do anything about it. That really is a bad situation,” said Beth Kingsley, a nonprofit tax lawyer at Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg LLP in Washington. “The organizations that try to follow the law are therefore disadvantaged.”
Policing political activity is toxic for the IRS, still reeling from the backlash that erupted in 2013 when the agency said some Tea Party groups seeking nonprofit status received additional scrutiny. Mark Everson, who served as IRS commissioner under President George W. Bush, described the examination of nonprofits as a “hairball” for the tax agency but said it could be done fairly.
“There’s an absolute right to religious liberty and freedom of speech,” he said. “But there is no such absolute right to a tax exemption, and that’s what’s at issue here.”
The newly minted Republican Party platform, however, frames the issue in constitutional terms: “Republicans believe the federal government, specifically the IRS, is constitutionally prohibited from policing or censoring speech based on religious convictions or beliefs, and therefore we urge the repeal of the Johnson Amendment.”
The issue particularly resonates with religious conservatives at a time when many feel under siege by a Democratic administration that has pushed for insurer-paid birth control, same-sex marriage and other rights for gay and transgender people.
“Trump is communicating a big message to social conservatives and evangelicals that he respects our freedom of speech,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
—Laura Meckler contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications:
A Binghamton, N.Y., church lost its tax-exempt status after running full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the church was located in Birmingham, N.Y.
A Binghamton, N.Y., church lost its tax-exempt status after running full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the church was located in Birmingham, N.Y.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a thrice-married former casino magnate, is making an unusual promise to bridge the gap with evangelical voters.
He is calling for the repeal of a decades-old section of the federal tax code known as the Johnson Amendment, named after former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who as a U.S. senator spearheaded the ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt organizations such as churches.
Mr. Trump is the first GOP nominee to make the law a major campaign issue, religious leaders say, and he’s expected to raise the issue when he addresses hundreds of “values voters” at a convention Friday in Washington, D.C., organized by the Family Research Council.
“You’ve been totally silenced, silenced like a child,” Mr. Trump told a gathering of pastors in Orlando last month.
Yet many pastors already flout the tax law or walk right up to the line, all-but-endorsing both Republican and Democratic candidates from their pulpits by inviting them to their churches and singing their praises. They do so largely with impunity.
The IRS did not open a single audit of a church during President Barack Obama’s first term and only three audits in 2013 and 2014 combined. It’s unclear if those audits involved political activity.
“It’s a straw man,” Mat Staver, an attorney and founder of the Liberty Counsel, a Christian nonprofit, said of Mr. Trump’s call to repeal the Johnson Amendment. “It’s not going to empower Christians because it’s not holding the community back.”
A group called the Alliance Defending Freedom urges clergy to protest the law by openly endorsing or opposing candidates from their pulpits and sending their sermons to the IRS.
“There’s a chilling effect,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., an early Trump backer and the president of Liberty University, a Christian school. “It’s a club to get conservative churches and universities to shut up.”
Without the law, its proponents say, churches and other charities could become conduits for a flood of secret, tax-deductible money for political activities.
“It would be one more giant loophole in an already troubled campaign finance system,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It’s also a perversion of the very idea of what churches and charities are supposed to be about. They’re not supposed to be political-action committees where you can smell the cigar smoke in the basement.”
Since 1998, Mr. Lynn’s group has been sending out tens of thousands of warnings to churches, synagogues and mosques to stay out of the political fray during election years. In one of the few recent cases, a Binghamton, N.Y., church lost its tax-exempt status after running full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic candidate Bill Clinton.
But in an election-year tradition as strong as candidate swings through Iowa and New Hampshire, Republicans court conservative Christian leaders to mobilize that core GOP constituency, while Democrats appear at black churches to galvanize one of their party’s most loyal voting blocs.
Mr. Trump visited a couple of churches in Iowa before the state’s GOP caucus and recently attended services at a black church in Detroit as part of his outreach to minority voters.
Some pastors have been overt about their support for Mrs. Clinton during her numerous visits to African-American churches across the country.
“I’m not supposed to publicly endorse a candidate,” said the Rev. James Hall in April at Triumph Baptist Church in Philadelphia. “I’m just going to prophesize that Hillary is going to win. If there’s a newspaper person here please tell them that I was prophesizing, not endorsing. And my members usually follow my prophecy.”
Mr. Hall said Thursday that his remarks did not constitute an endorsement that would violate the law.
The tax law dates to 1954, when then-Sen. Johnson faced attacks from two McCarthy-era, anti-communist groups backing his re-election challenger.
Mr. Johnson’s plan passed a GOP-controlled Congress without debate and was signed by a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The law affects charities and churches organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, which can receive tax-deductible contributions.
Mr. Trump’s proposal for repealing the tax law has gained little traction in Congress. A House bill has three co-sponsors.
Charities face two potential penalties—an excise tax on any money used for political activity and the threat that their tax exemption could get revoked.
Unlike other charities, churches don’t have to apply for tax-exempt status. So a church that loses its tax break could simply reopen itself the next day and allow donors to claim tax deductions, as long as it refrains from future candidate endorsements.
The scarcity of church audits in recent years stems from a 2009 federal court case in which a Minnesota church successfully argued that the IRS wasn’t following mandated procedures for such inquiries, which require a signoff from a high-ranking Treasury official. Officials have installed a new process but it hasn’t been thoroughly tested.
“The IRS doesn’t do anything about it. That really is a bad situation,” said Beth Kingsley, a nonprofit tax lawyer at Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg LLP in Washington. “The organizations that try to follow the law are therefore disadvantaged.”
Policing political activity is toxic for the IRS, still reeling from the backlash that erupted in 2013 when the agency said some Tea Party groups seeking nonprofit status received additional scrutiny. Mark Everson, who served as IRS commissioner under President George W. Bush, described the examination of nonprofits as a “hairball” for the tax agency but said it could be done fairly.
“There’s an absolute right to religious liberty and freedom of speech,” he said. “But there is no such absolute right to a tax exemption, and that’s what’s at issue here.”
The newly minted Republican Party platform, however, frames the issue in constitutional terms: “Republicans believe the federal government, specifically the IRS, is constitutionally prohibited from policing or censoring speech based on religious convictions or beliefs, and therefore we urge the repeal of the Johnson Amendment.”
The issue particularly resonates with religious conservatives at a time when many feel under siege by a Democratic administration that has pushed for insurer-paid birth control, same-sex marriage and other rights for gay and transgender people.
“Trump is communicating a big message to social conservatives and evangelicals that he respects our freedom of speech,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
—Laura Meckler contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications:
A Binghamton, N.Y., church lost its tax-exempt status after running full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the church was located in Birmingham, N.Y.
A Binghamton, N.Y., church lost its tax-exempt status after running full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the church was located in Birmingham, N.Y.
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