This article first appeared at ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Three churches in West Texas have made financial contributions to a pastor running for a hotly contested seat on the Abilene City Council, a clear violation of federal rules prohibiting nonprofits and churches from endorsing candidates, financial disclosure records show.

Fountaingate Merkel Church, Remnant Church and Hope Chapel Foursquare Church donated a combined $800 to the campaign of Scott Beard, senior pastor at Fountaingate Fellowship church, who is running for a seat on the seven-member City Council in Saturday’s election.

The donations represent a new level of brazenness as some churches across Texas and the United States become more active in political campaigns, a prominent expert said. Rules posted on the IRS’ website say campaign contributions from churches and other nonprofits “clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.”

“This is absolutely something every church should know — and probably does know — that they’re not allowed to do,” said Sam Brunson, a law professor specializing in religion and tax exemption at Loyola University Chicago.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported last year that church leaders in Texas and across the country endorsed candidates from the pulpit at least 20 times in apparent violation of the Johnson Amendment, a law passed by Congress in 1954. Three experts on nonprofit law, including Brunson, reviewed the sermons and said they crossed a line.

The IRS can strip violators of their tax-exempt status, but there’s only one publicly known example of it doing so, nearly 30 years ago. Brunson said this lack of enforcement has emboldened bad actors, and he called on Congress to explicitly tell the IRS it can also fine violators.

Beard told ProPublica and the Tribune in a phone interview on Thursday that the churches did not know they weren’t allowed to donate to him and that he has sent the checks back.

“Look, we’ve made mistakes,” he said. “Every campaign makes them. I’m just kind of under the microscope because of me being a pastor, honestly.”

Dewey Hall, the pastor of Fountaingate Merkel Church, which is nearly 18 miles west of Abilene and not affiliated with Beard’s church, said Beard told him on Wednesday that his church’s $200 donation was illegal, but he thought Beard would “be a good councilman, and we need to have Christians in politics nowadays.”

A representative of Remnant Church, which Beard reported gave him $400, responded to a question via Facebook Messenger to say that its donation was intended for Fountaingate Fellowship Church, not Beard’s campaign.

“They must have a mistake,” wrote the representative, who did not identify themselves when asked. “We will look into it.”

Beard told ProPublica and the Tribune on Friday that he thought Remnant Church’s check was written to his campaign, but that he would review his records and talk to the pastor of Remnant Church.

Hope Chapel Foursquare Church, which gave $200, did not respond to a voicemail and email seeking comment.

The IRS declined to confirm whether it had received any complaints or was investigating.

Though the donations made by the churches are small, local races are typically lower-dollar affairs than legislative elections or statewide offices. The donations may also violate Texas election law, which prohibits both nonprofit and for-profit corporations from making political contributions to candidates or political committees. Violations are considered third-degree felonies.

The Texas Ethics Commission is charged with investigating such violations and can assess a civil penalty of up to $5,000 or triple the amount at issue, whichever is greater, said J.R. Johnson, the commission’s executive director. Agency commissioners also have the authority to refer violations to local district attorneys for criminal prosecution, he said.

In February, the commission issued a $12,400 civil penalty against a for-profit corporation that it found had made two prohibited donations worth a combined $3,700 to the campaign of a county clerk candidate in South Texas. The company didn’t respond to the commission, which issued a default judgment. A message left for the company was not returned; the president’s voicemail inbox was full.

According to the Texas secretary of state, Fountaingate Merkel Church formed as a nonprofit corporation in 2017 and Remnant did so in 2021. Hope Chapel is part of the California-based International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which is formed as a nonprofit corporation. (The IRS automatically considers churches to be tax-exempt even if they don’t apply for that status directly.)

The Abilene City Council race has been marked by allegations of Johnson Amendment violations for months. At least five churches have displayed campaign signs for three conservative Christian candidates who have all vowed to protect children by removing what they deemed to be obscene books from the public library and banning family-friendly drag shows from the city.

Two of the candidates are pastors: Beard and Ryan Goodwin, a mayoral candidate, who is both a real estate agent and an associate pastor at Mosaic Church. The third candidate, James Sargent, who is running for a City Council seat, is an Air Force veteran and an auto mechanic who has made his identity as a Christian central to his campaign. Sargent’s campaign motto is “biblically founded | constitutionally grounded.”

All three organized to outlaw abortion in Abilene before the Supreme Court ruling that said it was not a constitutional right and prior to Texas enacting a near-total ban on the procedure.

In interviews with ProPublica and the Tribune, Sargent said the churches he asked to display his campaign signs said yes because they were willing to display all candidates’ campaign signs if asked, which Brunson said was not a defense to a potential Johnson Amendment violation. Goodwin said some churches asked him for his campaign sign, and he’s not concerned they’ll face IRS enforcement.

“What I think we’re seeing is a fiction of the law,” Goodwin said. If the issue were to ever reach the U.S. Supreme Court, he said, “churches would have a voice and wouldn’t have to worry about anything like this.”

Beard said the Texas Ethics Commission has so far notified him of three complaints about his campaign this election.

One complaint stemmed from Beard telling his congregation at the end of a service to pick up his campaign signs in the church foyer.

Michael Bob Starr, the former commander of Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, filed the most recent ethics complaint about Beard’s campaign, alleging that Beard had not reported the in-kind donations his church had made to his campaign, specifically his church allowing him to use its property for his campaign activities. Starr told ProPublica and the Tribune on Thursday that he will submit another complaint to the commission about Beard accepting donations from the three churches even though Beard sent the checks back.

Starr, who ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for Congress in 2016, can’t vote in the City Council election because he doesn’t live within city limits, and he’s upfront about his friendship with Beard’s opponent, Brian Yates. During their time in the Air Force, Starr said, he and Yates traveled to countries run by those who believed they had a mandate from God and those who tried to impose their religion on others. He said that’s why he’s speaking up.

Beard told ProPublica and Tribune on Thursday that he is cooperating with the Texas Ethics Commission regarding Starr’s first complaint.

Beard stands by his belief that the nation was founded as a Christian nation and if it doesn’t turn back to God, it will fall like the Roman Empire and other great civilizations have throughout history.

This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow paid tuition for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ grandnephew for two years at two private boarding schools, according to a statement released Thursday by a longtime friend of Thomas’.

The statement came in response to a ProPublica story that disclosed Crow had paid the fees at two schools for Mark Martin, a relative who Thomas had legal guardianship of and said he was raising “as a son.” Thomas did not include the payments in the financial disclosures he is required to file each year.

Mark Paoletta, the friend, acknowledged that Crow paid Martin’s tuition at both Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia and Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia, saying Crow paid for one year at each school. Paoletta did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to roughly $100,000. Martin attended Randolph-Macon for multiple years, and the statement did not say who had paid for the remainder of his high school education.

Paoletta, Crow and Thomas did not respond to further requests for comment.

The revelation of the tuition payments deepens the financial ties between Crow, a Republican megadonor, and Thomas, who earns $285,000 a year as a Supreme Court justice. Last month, ProPublica reported that Crow had paid for decades of luxury vacations and travel for Thomas and his wife and had bought the home of Thomas’ mother, making tens of thousands of dollars of improvements to it.

“This story is another attempt to manufacture a scandal about Justice Thomas,” Paoletta wrote. “But let’s be clear about what is supposedly scandalous now: Justice Thomas and his wife devoted twelve years of their lives to taking in and caring for a beloved child — who was not their own — just as Justice Thomas’s grandparents had done for him.”

“They made many personal and financial sacrifices to do this. And along the way, their friends joined them in doing everything possible to give this child a future.”

Paoletta asserted that Thomas was not required to report the tuition payments “made directly to these schools” because Martin was not his “dependent child” as defined by federal disclosure law. Thomas has said he was advised he didn’t need to disclose the luxury travel because it was hospitality from a friend.

Legal ethics experts said the justice should have disclosed the payments as a gift because they defray tuition costs that he would otherwise be responsible for paying. Several years earlier, Thomas did disclose a $5,000 gift to help with Martin’s education from another friend. Minor children are seldom responsible for their own tuition. Martin told ProPublica in an interview he had not been aware Crow had paid his fees.

In Washington, prominent Democratic lawmakers renewed calls for ethics reform. One called for a Justice Department investigation.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that ProPublica’s latest report “continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question.”

“I think that all Justices should be held to the same ethical standards as every other federal judge,” he said. “The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee who previously sent a letter to Crow requesting a full accounting of the gifts he’s given Thomas, said: “Harlan Crow has been subsidizing an extravagant lifestyle that Justice Thomas and his family could not otherwise afford. This is a foul breach of ethics standards.”

If Crow doesn’t comply, Wyden added, the lawmaker intends to “explore using other tools at the committee’s disposal to obtain this critical information.”

In an interview with CNN, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., reiterated a call for a Justice Department probe and subpoenas to force Thomas to testify before Congress. Chief Justice John Roberts has previously rebuffed invitations to testify before Congress. He cited the “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

Blumenthal told CNN that “the drip, drip, drip of these destructive disclosures is going to destroy the United States Supreme Court unless there is an effective proper investigation.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who has sought Supreme Court ethics reform for years and has co-authored bills to shore up the ethics rules for justices on the high court, wrote on Twitter: “When does the stench get bad enough that SCOTUS stops the cover-up and ends the mischief? This is on the Chief Justice to solve, plain and simple. Mom’s rent, family tuition, vacations and gifts — and secret? Any other government employee would be fired.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, an array of experts — including a retired federal judge and a former attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush — debated the constitutionality of Congress regulating the Supreme Court, as well as the balancing act between two pillars of American government: checks and balances versus the separation of powers.

Former federal circuit judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative, sent a letter to the committee ahead of Tuesday’s hearing and argued that Supreme Court justices need to act and appear “beyond reproach.” He said Congress can pass laws to codify ethical standards for Supreme Court justices. But, Luttig added, lawmakers shouldn’t have to.

“The ‘judicial power,’ the power of the Supreme Court, is ultimately dependent on the respect that its judgments command, or not, from the American People,” he wrote. “Whether the Supreme Court is subject to ethical standards of conduct or not is emphatically not a partisan political issue and must not become one.”

During the hearing, Democrats, led by Durbin and Whitehouse, said there is a long tradition of Congress passing laws to regulate the Supreme Court’s administration — which, they said, is decidedly separate from the justices’ decision-making remit. Republicans said lawmakers across the aisle only care about enforcing ethics rules because they dislike the majority-conservative Supreme Court.

“There’s a very selective outrage here,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, ranking member of the committee’s minority side. Some Republicans on the committee cited examples of liberal justices accepting trips in the past but did not distinguish those from Thomas’ unreported trips. “This is not about making the court better,” Graham said, “this is about destroying a conservative court. It will not work.”

Last month, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, publicly criticized Thomas’ relationship with Crow. “If the reports are accurate, it stinks,” he told reporters.

Thursday morning, the Twitter account for the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee invited followers to retweet a tweet featuring a goat emoji, shorthand for the greatest of all time. “RT if you think Justice Thomas is the 🐐”