CCP
The New York Times (Sort Of) Recognizes the Benefits of Super PACs
By Luke WachobMost Americans know April 15th as Tax Day, but campaign finance observers also know it as the date when presidential candidates file their campaign’s first-quarter fundraising report. Traditionally, these filings have had a significant impact on media coverage and public perception of candidates. Those who demonstrated fundraising prowess early on were presumed to be front-runners with the support of their party’s leaders. Candidates who struggled were considered longshots for the White House.However, April 15th isn’t quite what it used to be, according to The New York Times’ Nate Cohn in an interesting post at “The Upshot.” Cohn writes, “In 2007, [April 15th] was when we learned that Barack Obama could match the supposedly inevitable Hillary Rodham Clinton in fund-raising, and that John McCain wasn’t a real front-runner for the Republican nomination (although he managed to claw back to win it), despite his second-place G.O.P. showing in 2000. But this year, April 15 has come and gone without much news at all.”The reason why is simple: recent Supreme Court decisions freeing independent spending changed the game by wresting control of the primary process away from the political parties. Now that groups and individuals are free to fundraise and speak independently about candidates through Super PACs, which aren’t subject to the burdensome contribution caps that candidates must abide by, winning the favor of a select few party elites has become less important. Per Cohn, “Along with Internet fund-raising, super PACs are helping to form an alternative campaign finance model that is eroding party control over the primary process.”Thank goodness. If elections are about voters, then the support of party elites should not be a prerequisite for candidacy. Anyone whose ideas are good enough to win the support of their fellow citizens should have the opportunity to run a competitive campaign. Political parties are certainly important institutions in our democracy, but they shouldn’t have a monopoly on who gets to speak.
Significant Constitutional and Practical Issues with Connecticut Senate Bill 1126 (as Substituted)
By Eric WangThis legislation would treat an expansive universe of activities having absolutely nothing to do with elections as potentially being coordinated spending with a candidate, thereby converting such activities into prohibited or excessive in-kind contributions. To the extent some may believe candidates already give too much face time to donors and not enough time to voters, this bill would worsen this problem exponentially by revoking the existing statutory exception under which groups may sponsor “meet the candidate”-type events without having them be regulated as in-kind contributions to candidates. Additionally, the bill would cripple the state’s political party committees by significantly impeding their candidates’ ability to raise money for them. Lastly, the bill would unconstitutionally prevent candidates’ immediate relatives from supporting them, while lobbyists, corporations, and other unrelated interests would be free to spend as much as they want.
Independent Groups
Wall Street Journal: Ambushing Employers’ Speech Rights
By Thomas M. Johnson Jr.A popular narrative since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 posits that corporations have displaced political and religious minorities as the principal beneficiaries of First Amendment rights. There supposedly has been a “corporate takeover” of the First Amendment, as Harvard Law School’s John C. Coates IV put it in a February paper.This theory is flawed for many reasons, but one deserves special mention. For many companies, the most important place to exercise speech rights is in the workplace, where management and employees communicate about the terms and conditions of employment. And in this area, organized labor has succeeded for decades in restricting a company’s ability to speak freely to address employee concerns.The current administration in particular has sacrificed the speech rights of employers and employees to advance a pro-union agenda. Last month, for example, the president vetoed an effort by Congress to overturn the National Labor Relations Board’s controversial “ambush election” rule. This rule, which took effect on Tuesday, reduces the time that employers have to present information to employees in advance of a union election, thus making it easier for unions to campaign without meaningful opposition. Court challenges to the rule are currently pending.
AP: Super PAC formed to help Wisconsin’s Walker in ‘16 campaign
By Scott BauerMADISON, Wis. — Scott Walker’s expected campaign for the White House got a boost Thursday as his former campaign managers formed a political group able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money.Two former campaign managers for the Republican governor of Wisconsin said Thursday they have formed a super PAC to support Walker. It’s called Unintimidated PAC, a reference to the book Walker wrote in 2013 called “Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge.”
More Soft Money Hard Law: Mr. Noble in His Gyrocopter
By Bob BauerLong in the field of campaign finance, well versed in its triumphs and tribulations, Larry Noble of the Campaign Legal Center objects strongly to the suggestions for disclosure reform I co-authored with Professor Samuel Issacharoff. It’s all a magic trick, he argues, that accomplishes the reverse of its stated intention: it moves contributions into the dark, raises the risk corruption and disregards the lessons of Watergate. The public is not “gullible”: it won’t buy it.It is difficult not to imagine that Mr. Noble is engaged in theater of his own, something like the aerial feat performed yesterday by the mailman in a gyrocopter who touched down on the Capitol grounds with a similarly passionate appeal for campaign finance reform. This gentleman, undoubtedly sincere but less clearly prudent, entitled his project “Kitty Hawk”, after the Wright Brothers’ fabled flight in North Carolina in 1903. Larry, if he were maneuvering a craft, might have named it “Watergate,” and he would have refreshed the message by 70 years, with only another four decades to go to cross over into the current century and to the present time.
Amending the First Amendment
Slate: She’s right that money in politics is a problem. But suggesting a constitutional amendment is foolish.
By Richard HasenAside from the fact that it is hard to write a constitutional amendment neither draconian nor ineffective, the amendment proposal is a political nonstarter. Even if Democrats retake control of the Senate in 2016, there is no supermajority in the Senate (and very unlikely to be even a vote in a Republican House) to overturn Citizens United. An amendment requires not only a vote of two-thirds of each House of Congress, but also approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures. Many Republicans are quite happy with the Citizens United era, and there is no way a campaign finance amendment will pass these days.Clinton’s call for a constitutional amendment is really just one thing: red meat for Democratic activists. It is a game President Obama has played for years. On the one hand, he has railed against Citizens United and the conservative Supreme Court. On the other hand, he has taken a number of steps to push campaign finance boundaries even further, such as being the first sitting president to set up a 501(c)(4) organization to support his agenda. The president has offered lip service and little else in his time in office. And those same Senate Democrats who favored a constitutional amendmentrecently pushed a bill to dramatically raise the amount of money individuals can give as contributions to political parties.
IRS
Wall Street Journal: House Passes Package of Bills Aimed at Curbing IRS Abuses
By John D. McKinnon
WASHINGTON—The House on Wednesday passed a package of bills aimed at preventing future abuses at the Internal Revenue Service, in the wake of a series of controversies at the agency.The bills, which were largely noncontroversial, passed the House on voice votes, with support from some Democrats.Despite the bipartisan agreement on Wednesday, the bills’ future in the Senate remains somewhat unclear, as there is ongoing partisan rancor over the IRS.
Ultra-Light “Reform”
Sacramento Bee: Pilot has gumption, Clinton has chutzpah – neither has a campaign finance reform plan
By Ben Boychuk
Plan for a plan or not, this much is certain: Clinton is so enthusiastic about tamping down the influence of big money in politics that she’s willing to raise $2.5 billion to ensure she’s elected to do something about it.Demands for reform are meaningless without details. As it happens, we have a fair idea of what campaign finance “reform” would look like.To back a “constitutional amendment if necessary” requires repealing and replacing the First Amendment. The U.S. Senate last year debated a constitutional amendment proposed by Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, that would give Congress and states the unfettered power to “regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents” in elections.
Tampa Bay Tribune: Gyrocopter flight raises profile on campaign finance reform, but for how long?
By Steve Contorno“The positive spin that I could put on it with a straight face is that as the objective conditions of campaign finance get worse and worse we ought to expect more and more weird stunts because people see a problem and no way to effectively leverage a solution,” said David Karpf, a professor focused on strategic political advocacy and communications for George Washington University.“Random stunts that get you a news cycle,” he said, “won’t get us close to a constitutional convention, which is what is needed to get this issue changed.”
Candidates, Politicians, Campaigns, and Parties
Wall Street Journal: Contenders Fill Coffers by Delaying Declarations
Jason Bellini and Aaron Zitner discuss the 2016 presidential race and campaign finance, and Sara Germano looks at why running shoes are for running.
Politico: Hillary Clinton campaign to accept lobbyist donations
By Annie KarniBreaking with a standard set by President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton’s campaign will accept political donations from lobbyists and political action committees, the campaign confirmed Thursday.The move is consistent with how Clinton ran her 2008 campaign, but it was a policy difference that Obama used as an effective attack at the time. His campaign did not accept donations from federally registered lobbyists and also prohibited lobbyists from serving as bundlers.“Hillary Clinton has a long history of taking on tough fights against special interests, whether or not they’re donors to her campaigns,” spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a statement. “She strongly supports campaign finance reform and has voted for tough lobbying reform, but as long as Republican groups and candidates are going to spend millions attacking Hillary, we need the resources to fight back.” As a U.S. senator, Clinton voted for lobbying reform.
Senator Menendez
AP: Menendez raises more than $400K for legal defense
NEWARK, N.J. — Sen. Bob Menendez has reported that his legal defense fund raised $430,000 and spent about $100,000 this year up until the day before his indictment on bribery and corruption charges.The Democratic senator is fighting federal charges stemming from an April 1 indictment that alleges he helped his long-time friend and co-defendant Salomon Melgen with his business dealings in exchange for trips to a lavish villa in the Dominican Republic as well as campaign donations.
Lobbying and Ethics
Washington Post: What we get wrong about lobbying and corruption
By Lee DrutmanFirst, it is increasingly difficult to challenge any existing policy that benefits politically active corporations. Though corporate lobbying has become more ambitious and more aggressive over the years, the top priority for most corporate lobbyists is still preserving the status quo. When I surveyed corporate lobbyists on the reasons why their companies maintained a Washington presence, the top reason was “to protect the company against changes in government policy.” On a 1-7 scale, lobbyists ranked this reason at 6.2 (on average)Second, the sheer amount of lobbying has created a policymaking environment that now requires significant resources to get anything done. Which means that, with increasingly rare exceptions, the only possible policy changes on economic policy issues are those changes that at least some large corporations support.This state of affairs is not inevitable. But the key point is that we need to move past the overly simplistic questions about whether or not money “buys” votes or whether or not our politics are “corrupt.” These either/or questions are not only unanswerable; they also shift our focus away from seeing the system as a whole – a necessary first step toward making it work better.
FEC
Wall Street Journal: Party Politics: FEC at Loggerheads on How to Celebrate Anniversary
By Rebecca Ballhaus and Brody MullinsPlanning a party at any government agency can be a challenging task. Even ordering pastries for the event required a consultation with government attorneys, to make sure the plans complied with ethics standards.The decision about whether to serve bagels or doughnuts revolved around which one was healthier, Ms. Ravel recalled, although she expressed some doubt as to whether there was much difference between them. In the end, the question of the snacks became one shining moment of compromise: Instead of choosing between bagels and doughnuts, they served both.“Perhaps the Great Bagel Compromise will usher in an era of bipartisanship at the FEC,” mused Brett Kappel, an election lawyer who has practiced at the FEC for 25 years. “Of course, sometimes a bagel is just a bagel,” he said.
