Among the provisions in the House GOP's tax bill that passed last week and might well make it into the Senate version is a repeal of the 1954 Johnson Amendment, named after then-senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, which prohibits churches and other nonprofit groups from engaging in political activity.
Rolling back the ban has long been championed by religious leaders who say it unfairly infringes on their First Amendment rights. Certainly, the idea that pastors and other clergy aren't allowed to weigh in on elections or political issues from the pulpit would have struck the Founding Fathers as not only strange but inimical to the idea of a constitutional republic (especially since one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, John Witherspoon, was a Presbyterian minster).
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