You’ve heard of “too big to fail.” Well, this is a tale of “too big to punish.”

Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a hastily constructed bill called the Defund ACORN Act, after video exposed ACORN workers offering tax-dodging advice to actors posing as prostitutes and pimps. So far, so good. If the community organizing group is defrauding the government while accepting government assistance, then the bucks should stop.

However, the bill itself isn’t limited to ACORN, because doing so could’ve raised legal challenges. Legislators are not supposed to single out organizations for punishment or gain, so the bill casts a wider net, including:

“Any organization that has filed a fraudulent form with any federal or state regulatory agency; any organization that employs any applicable individual, in a permanent or temporary capacity; has under contract or retains any applicable individual.”

The Project on Government Oversight reports that this language could sweep in corporations such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, ExxonMobil, GlaxoSmithKline, AT&T and many more. POGO’s defense contractor database notes 87 instances of fraud involving 43 companies. These are companies that collect government money in the billions, not millions, and they’ve been convicted, not merely indicted.

But so what? These companies don’t deserve taxpayer money any more than a street-level outfit that gives voice to the voiceless, right? Try telling that to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposed a 2007 bill that would’ve defunded such contractors after two convictions. Eventually, Congress backed down and merely created a database of offenders and removed any punishment.

So Congress can treat ACORN the same or it can prostitute itself by rewriting the bill to shield high-end clients. My money is on the latter.

Boing! Boing! Just because legislators know that singling out a company is legally dubious, it doesn’t mean they’re dissuaded. It just takes some creative writing. For instance, when Washington state legislators wanted to give Boeing $3.2 billion in tax breaks to lure its 787 Dreamliner business, they wrote the law so that it could only apply to Boeing without, of course, mentioning it by name.

It wasn’t “any aerospace company that moved its headquarters to Chicago and employs more than 50,000 people in Washington state and whose name mimics the sound of those ACME foot springs worn by Wile E. Coyote in his ill-fated pursuit of the roadrunner,” but it might as well have been.

So it shouldn’t be difficult for Congress to zero in on ACORN:

“Any nonprofit organization whose acronym spells a type of nut that, God-willing, grows into an oak tree and whose workers were caught on camera helping real or fake pimps and prostitutes. Note that by ‘pimps’ and ‘prostitutes’ we mean the kind associated with selling sexual favors, not government favors.”

Sign of the times. You know the health care debate is muddled when you see placards stating: “No Socialized Medicine … Get Your Hands Off Medicare!”