It was another bad day for ACORN, the community organizing group. The House voted Thursday to yank the group's federal funding, following a similar Senate vote earlier this week.

The legislation passed 345 to 75 as a rider on completely unrelated legislation that would have the federal government displace private lenders from the student-loan industry.

The bill which passed Thursday was a reaction to the latest ACORN scandal. Undercover videos of ACORN employees advising a conservative filmmaker and his friend who posed as a pimp and prostitute on ways to break the law have placed the group on the defensive.

When the latest controversy happened the group, whose stated mission is the empowerment of poor and lower income people particularly in areas of housing and jobs, had hardly emerged from the defensive crouch it found itself in last year. That's when accusations of voter-registration fraud swirled around it before the 2008 general election.

The House legislation was authored by House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). Boehner said:

"Today's overwhelming bipartisan vote to stop all federal funding of ACORN is a victory for American taxpayers. Of course, it is only the beginning. We need to keep up the fight to end taxpayer funding for this troubled organization.

 

"House Republicans have worked tirelessly to sever ACORN's ties to the federal government. Those efforts began to bear fruit late last week when the Census Bureau ended its relationship with ACORN under steady pressure from Republican lawmakers. Though today's vote indicates that the writing's on the wall for ACORN, President Obama must indicate whether he will join the Congress in taking decisive action to break all government ties with this corrupt organization.

Conservative hostility towards ACORN has raised the group's profile but certainly not in a way it would have liked. Conservative broadcasters like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have attempted to make ACORN an albatross around President Barack Obama's neck, using the president's past as a community organizer and his presidential campaign's partnering with an affiliate of the group last year as cause for kind of guilt by association.

The White House is trying to avoid that by talking tough on ACORN. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a response to a question by ABC News' Jake Tapper:

You know, Jake, as it relates to ACORN, obviously the conduct that you see on those tapes is completely unacceptable. I think everyone would agree with that. The administration takes accountability extremely seriously. I think the Census Bureau evaluated and determined that this group could not meet the bureau's goal of achieving a fair and accurate count in 2010. And I assume others are evaluating to ensure, as we always are, that any grantee, whether that grant was let in this administration or in previous administrations — there's housing counseling grants that were let in previous administrations; FEMA grants that were let in previous administrations — that we constantly evaluate to ensure that any grantee is living up to what has to happen in order to fulfill that grant application.