The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, popularly known as ACORN, has not violated the terms under which it has received federal funding in the last five years, according to a government report released on Tuesday by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.).

The report, which was requested by Conyers and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), was prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). The 82-page report details the research organization’s survey of 46 federal, state, and local investigations concerning ACORN  — 11 of which are still pending — and of several congressional probes.

Conyers pointed out that CRS found “no instances of individuals who were allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN or its employees and who were reported “attempting to vote at the polls. And, the report says that  ACORN has received federal funds, mostly from the departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development, 48 times in the last five years. In none of those cases did  Acorn violate the terms of the funding.

The CRS report does not include findings from a just-announced Government Accountability Office investigation of ACORN’s use of federal funds. House GOP Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said they were informed of the investigation in a Dec. 7 letter from GAO. Smith and Issa were not immediately available for comment on the CRS report.

ACORN, a controversial community organizing group that focuses largely on voter registration and housing,  received unfavorable publicity when documentary filmmakers earlier this year released undercover videos that they described as showing ACORN workers giving them advice on how to buy property to use as a brothel.  ACORN was already under attack from conservatives and many Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The videos spurred Congress to action. The House passed legislation in September known as the Defund ACORN Act of 2009, and several appropriations bills contained a prohibition on any funds in the bill going to ACORN.

Those actions, in turn, prompted some members of Congress to question whether the legislation respresented unconstitutional bills of attainder. The CRS report raises those questions as well, noting that “courts ‘may have a sufficient basis’ to conclude that the legislation ‘violates the prohibition against bills of attainder.’” However, according to the report, the limited term of the defunding mandated in the appropriations bills “could arguably be justified as an expedience necessary to address an issue of immediate congressional concern, while allowing Congress sufficient time to consider a longer term solution.”

The House and Senate could be on the road towards a fierce fight over whether photos depicting prisoner abuse should be released, Politico’s Glenn Thrush wrote on his blog today.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement today that they will use “all the legislative means available” to ensure that the pictures are not made public for three years. The senators added the Obama-backed ban on the photos to the wartime spending bill which passed the Senate late last month.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, House Democrats led by Reps. Barney Frank (Mass.) and Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) have voiced their concerns over the Senate’s move, Thrush said. The Politico blogger added that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she supported the amendment last week and has since wavered on her original position.

The House and Senate must reconcile the differences in their versions of the wartime spending bill before the final bill can be sent to the President Obama’s desk. They are expected to finish hammering out the details this week.

“We will employ all the legislative means available to us including opposing the supplemental war spending bill and attaching this amendment, which was unanimously adopted by the Senate, to every piece of legislation the Senate considers, to be sure the president has the authority he needs not to release these photos and any others that would jeopardize the safety and security of our troops,” the senators said in the statement.

Lieberman said at a news conference last month that the release of the photos would just give into “voyeurism,� and they would be a recruiting tool for terrorists.

We previously reported that the collection includes official photos and informal pictures taken by soldiers. The pictures were obtained during Defense Department investigations of military prisons.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Reps. Diane Watson (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), John Lewis (D-Ga.), Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) urged Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether a handful of American Indian tribes require the segregation of “freedmen,” the descendants of former tribal slaves, The Associated Press reported this afternoon.

The Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw tribes have reportedly stripped freedmen of their tribal membership or made them second-class members with few rights including the right to vote, the members of Congress said in a letter to Holder last week obtained by The Associated Press.

“Over 40 years after enactment of the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, there is a place in the United States that African Americans cannot vote or receive federal benefits as a matter of law,” the letter states. “They are called freedmen, but they are anything but free.”

Tribal leaders have said tribal ancestry is the basis for their decisions, and they do not discriminate, The Associated Press reported.

This issue of freedman discrimination is not new on Capitol Hill, according to The Associated Press. Watson spearheaded an attempt to take away some of the Cherokee’s federal funding when the nation took 2,800 freedmen and other non-Indians off its membership roster, The Associated Press said.