Suit Says Christian Coalition Improperly Assisted GOP

In a lawsuit with potentially significant implications for the 1996 campaign, the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday accused the Christian Coalition of improperly aiding Republican candidates over the last six years.

The FEC has been investigating the group’s activities for four years, starting in 1992 with a complaint to the commission from the Virginia Democratic Party. After negotiations failed to reach a settlement, the FEC voted in May to pursue the suit. At the time only four commissioners--two Republicans and two Democrats--were serving; all voted to file the litigation.

In the lawsuit, the FEC accused the Christian Coalition, a leading social conservative group, of making illegal corporate contributions to “influence the election of candidates for federal office” through the distribution of millions of voter guides and the organization of get-out-the-vote drives and other campaign activities in the 1990, 1992 and 1994 campaigns.

The suits seeks a fine against the 1.7-million-member coalition of perhaps as much as several hundred thousand dollars and also seeks to require the group to disclose its assistance to candidates and to enjoin them from making similar contributions in the future.

Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition’s executive director, denounced the suit and said the group would “commit every resource available” to fight it. “Christian Coalition has abided by both the letter and the spirit of the law,” Reed said in a statement.

In an interview, Reed said the suit would have no effect on the group’s plan to distribute 45 million voter guides through more than 70,000 churches this fall. “We will not allow anything to slow down or impede that process,” he said.

Critics, however, predicted that the FEC litigation could complicate that effort.

“If the assumption is correct--and I think it clearly is--that these voter guides and congressional scorecards are in fact partisan documents, then churches risk their tax exemption as an individual church by distributing partisan material,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Jim Bopp, an attorney for the Christian Coalition, said Lynn’s contention was “absurd” because the FEC filing does not claim “that the voter guides themselves have political advocacy in them.”

Indeed, the FEC never directly alleges that the group’s voting guides were improperly partisan. Instead the agency accuses the Christian Coalition of illegally coordinating the distribution of the guides, and the organizing of its other election-related activity, with the 1992 Bush presidential campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign and four other GOP congressional candidates from 1990 to 1994, including Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Oliver L. North, the GOP’s 1994 Senate nominee in Virginia.

Reed denied the charge that the group had worked with Republican campaigns to coordinate the distribution of its voter guides and said the organization “has never had any conversation with anyone” at presumptive GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole’s campaign about the planned distribution of this fall’s guides.

Recently, the FEC has suffered several legal reversals in its efforts to limit election-related activities by nonpartisan groups. With courts resisting restrictions seen as limitations on free speech, some analysts believe the agency could again face an uphill climb.

Founded by television evangelist Pat Robertson in 1989, the Christian Coalition has rapidly emerged as one of the most powerful elements in the grass-roots conservative coalition. The group’s local activists have become increasingly influential in GOP politics.

Under Internal Revenue Service regulations, the Christian Coalition is organized as a tax-exempt organization that is restricted, but not barred, from participating in partisan politics.