Debate grows on voter registration ban

First sign today that the non-specialist press is noting civil-rights objections to the anti-voter-registration part of the reported HR 1461 housing fund compromise. The Minnesota Star Tribune calls the proposal a "Catch-22" and reports:

The same nonprofits that provide the bulk of very-low-income housing services could be cut out of the grants because they also provide voter registration services, as they are required to do under federal law.
Since passage of the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, nonprofits across the United States have been required to provide voter registration services to receive housing and other social service money from the states.
But they became much more active in 2002, becoming part of a voter registration drive that registered millions of new voters, many of them low-income.
A bloc of conservative House members known as the Republican Study Committee has expressed misgivings about what it sees as the liberal tilt of many low-income-housing groups. They have proposed inserting language in the new funding bill that would bar any nonprofit that engaged in voter registration in the last year from participating in the Affordable Housing Fund.

The provision would reportedly deny housing fund money to non-profit groups that do voter registration even in a non-partisan manner, with their own funds, and on their own time, though for-profit companies would be exempt from the ban.