In a brewing fight on the Federal Election Commission, the longest-serving commissioner warned that Catholic priests and other church officials who endorse candidates could face punishment if Joe Biden wins.
In rebuffing the panel’s Trump-appointed chairman, who called on church officials to endorse candidates, Commissioner Ellen Weintraub warned that churches could lose their nonprofit status.
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“Our elections are not spiritual wars,” she told the Religion News Service.
And quoting from a 1796 treaty, she said, “The United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
FEC Chairman James Trainor told Church Militant founder Michael Voris this week that Catholic bishops should be endorsing and are wrongly hiding behind concerns about losing their nonprofit status if they do.
“I don’t think a bishop has the right to tell a priest that they can’t come out and speak,” the FEC chairman said.
He said that President Trump, in an executive order, ruled that churches can ignore the so-called Johnson Amendment that bans endorsements by nonprofit organizations.
But Weintraub, an anti-Trump Democrat, told the news service that an executive order doesn’t change laws. That has to be done by Congress.
“My colleague is not correct,” Weintraub told the Religion News Service. “Though the president’s executive order directs law enforcement authorities to not enforce the Johnson Amendment, that statute remains the law of the land and cannot be undone with an executive order. Anyone tempted to violate the statute should keep in mind that a future administration could well decide to enforce the law as Congress wrote it,” she warned.
Technically, the Johnson Amendment is not within the FEC’s jurisdiction. The IRS enforces rules regulating tax exemptions for churches. But Weintraub has not been shy about venturing outside her lane in public remarks. Over the past year, she interjected herself in debates with the president over mail voting and election fraud, subjects likewise not within the jurisdiction of the FEC, which focuses on campaign finance.
In the past, Democrats have sought to chill conservative churches from participating in electoral politics on behalf of Republican candidates. “Commissioner Weintraub strays outside her lane quite often and almost always in a way oppositional to President Trump’s reelection prospects,” said a former FEC official. “Unfortunately, even when she’s in her lane at the FEC, her votes as a law enforcement official go one way: Hurt Trump.”
