Politics from the Pulpit - BY SUSANNAH JACOB

Found here. My comments in bold.
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As is typical for Leftists, you find the author neither understands the role of government, the Christian faith, nor the obvious implications of her position as it relates to the issue at hand.
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Tucked inside the enormous House tax proposal (Since when has the Left been troubled by the size of a bill?)

is a provision that would roll back a 63-year-old ban on tax-exempt organizations — including churches — from making explicit political endorsements. In 1954, then-Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson proposed the amendment to section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code after a brutal campaign during which a tax-exempt group ran advertisements labeling him a communist. With its passage, Johnson hoped to quiet his opponents. (Hmm. Did the author just admit that the law was specifically designed by a liberal democrat to silence dissent?)

But in decades since, the ban has drawn a bright line between pulpits and political podiums, validating one of this country’s founding principles: the separation of church and state. (Was this really a founding principle? And is the author representing the principle correctly? We shall find out.)

Donald Trump promised religious leaders at the National Prayer breakfast in February that he would “get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”But though House Republicans are threatening to use their tax plan to upend the rule, the Senate version does not contain the change — so its final passage is far from guaranteed.

Last spring, Trump signed an executive order directing the Treasury Department not to penalize individuals or congregations who advocate politically from a religious perspective. But since it stopped short of overturning the part of the amendment that prohibits tax-exempt religious organizations from endorsing specific political candidates, it failed to truly eliminate the rule. Doing so requires Congress to change the tax code.

If the tax plan passes, it would allow churches and charities to raise money for political candidates, and create a workaround for campaign disclosure rules. ("Allow." The author's language betrays her. She admits that the law is a prohibition, that is, an entanglement of government in the activities of churches. 

Does she even remember her glowing characterization of the "separation of church and state?")

According to a 2017 Pew Research Center report on religious liberty issues:

• More than 7 in 10 (71 percent) Americans oppose allowing churches and places of worship to endorse political candidates while retaining their tax-exempt status, compared to only 22 percent who favor such a policy.Motivation to change the rule appears to be political. 
• Republicans are more than twice as likely as Democrats to favor allowing churches to endorse candidates (34 percent versus 16 percent, respectively).
• Strong majorities of Republicans (62 percent) and Democrats (78 percent) reject this idea.

All major religious groups in the country oppose allowing churches to endorse candidates while retaining their tax-exempt status:

• Only about one-third (36 percent) of white evangelical Protestants favor allowing churches to endorse candidates, compared to a majority (56 percent) who oppose it.
• Even fewer white mainline Protestants (23 percent), Catholics (25 percent), black Protestants (19 percent) and religiously unaffiliated Americans (12 percent) support churches endorsing political candidates.

(None of this matters. It doesn't matter how many people favor unconstitutional laws. The 18th Amendment popularly passed, after all.)

Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, an organization which works to maintain separation between church and state, said:

This tax bill will deform, not reform, the tax law that protects our houses of worship … Gutting the law that protects 501(c)(3) (tax-exempt not-for-profit) organizations from candidates pressing for endorsements threatens to destroy our congregations from within over disagreements on partisan campaigns … Pastors and people of faith know that there’s nothing free about a pulpit that is bought and paid for by political campaign donations or beholden to partisan interests. ("Protects our houses of worship?" Government intervention into the affairs of churches is protecting them? Protecting them from what, criticizing Democrats like LBJ?)

For all the fiery rhetoric, since the Johnson law took effect in 1954 only one case is known to have been brought against a church: During the 1992 campaign, when the the Branch Ministries Church in New York bought newspaper advertisements urging Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton. (So what then is the reason for the law if it's never used? How is it a danger to the protection of churches if in 60 years only one case has been brought? What is the author really afraid of?)