In the News
Scranton Times-Tribune: Delaware sheds light
Editorial Board
Delaware passed a strong disclosure law, however, requiring any advocacy group that spends more than $500 in any campaign to identify anyone who contributes more than $100.
Delaware Strong Families, a conservative group that publishes voter guides prior to elections, sued and won in the U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware.
A three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously Monday, however, that the state has a clear interest in compelling disclosure to inform voters.
That’s the correct standard. Now that Delaware has taken the lead in establishing it, Pennsylvania lawmakers should adopt the same level of transparency and responsibility.
Wisconsin John Doe
Patriot Post: Speech Crimes in Wisconsin: How a Campaign Finance Investigation Became a War on Conservative Activists
Jacob Sullum
Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court shut down a secret criminal investigation that featured early-morning raids on the homes of innocent people and indiscriminate seizures of email, documents and personal property. You may be surprised to hear that the Brennan Center for Justice, which usually defends Fourth Amendment rights, denounced the court’s decision.
Because this unconstitutional inquisition was prompted by the targets’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, the Brennan Center’s position is especially puzzling. It shows how the attempt to control corruption by controlling speech has corrupted the principles of civil libertarians.
New Yorker: Scott Walker’s Wisconsin And The End Of Campaign Finance Law
Lincoln Caplan
By 4–2, with the four conservatives in the majority, a liberal and a moderate in dissent, and one justice recused, the court halted the John Doe criminal investigation into whether Walker’s successful campaign to retain his post in a 2012 recall election violated Wisconsin law, by coördinating fund-raising and spending with so-called “independent” dark-money groups, and avoiding disclosure of donors’ names. The court did so by rewriting the state law in question, so that the kind of coördination the campaign was being investigated for is now unrestricted in Wisconsin.
IRS
Breitbart News: Obama: ‘Real’ IRS Scandal is that it’s ‘Poorly Funded’
Charles Spiering
Obama explained that accusations that they were specifically targeting conservative organizations was false and that IRS employees were simply implementing laws passed by Congress “poorly and stupidly.”
“Boy, you really do have only a year left,” Stewart cracked as Obama continued. The taped interview is Obama’s last for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and was covered by the White House press pool, but will air later tonight.
Obama went on to say that the “real scandal around the IRS is that they have been so poorly funded that they cannot go after these folks who are deliberately avoiding tax payments.”
The Hill: Senate Finance to discuss IRS in secret
Bernie Becker
“Throughout this process, we have been committed to ensuring a complete and thorough investigation, and this closed session will give members an opportunity to review our findings and vote to submit the report to the full Senate if they choose,” Wyden and Hatch said in a statement.
Hatch and former Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) kicked off the committee’s investigation into the IRS in May 2013, shortly after former agency official Lois Lerner apologized for the IRS’s actions.
But the release of the committee’s final report has been repeatedly delayed – including by the IRS’s announcement last year that it couldn’t find an untold number of Lerner’s emails.
Independent Groups
National Journal: Gary Hart’s Advice to Candidates: Shun the PACs
Zach Cohen
Hart, a former Colorado senator and two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Monday that candidates seeking the White House should get as far away from political action committees as possible during their bids in order to limit corruption in government.
“I’d urge candidates not to take political-action-committee money, to resist the efforts of outside interests—the so-called ‘super PACs’—to campaign on his or her behalf,” Hart said at the bookstore Politics and Prose in northwest Washington. “I guess now, under Citizens United, you can’t demand that somebody doesn’t take out an ad on your behalf, but I’d sure make it clear you didn’t appreciate it.”
Washington Post: Why political ads are going to reach a record in 2016
Cecilia Kang
Report author Elizabeth Wilner, who heads Kantar Media’s Campaign Media and Advertising Group, attributed the rise in political ad dollars in part to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. That decision made it easier for outside groups to collect and spend unlimited amounts of money for candidates.
“Spotting the impact of Citizens United on congressional election spending is like spotting the Great Wall of China from space,” Wilner said. The boon in political advertising won’t spread evenly across the nation as only primary and battleground states will get the most solicitations for ads, she added.
Campaign Finance
New York Times: The Only Realistic Way to Fix Campaign Finance
Lawrence Lessig
But even if we could pass amendment to reverse Citizens United soon (and not since the Civil War has an amendment been adopted with support from just one party), it would not solve the problem of money’s influence in American politics.
If the core problem is politicians beholden to their funders, then giving Congress the power to limit the amount spent or the amount contributed would not resolve it. Regardless of how much was spent, the private funding of public campaigns, even with limits, would inevitably reproduce the world we have now.
Real reform will require changing the way campaigns are funded — moving from large-dollar private funding to small-dollar public funding.
Bloomberg: Where Candidates Stash Their Cash
Phil Mattingly
“The largest issue that we would always have with people is that they’d be like, ‘Why would we use this Podunk little bank in McLean, Virginia?’ ” says Bradley Crate, Romney’s 2012 chief financial officer. He routinely refers clients of his consulting firm Red Curve Solutions to the bank, including both Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Trump. Chain Bridge offers services tailored to the idiosyncrasies of campaigns, which deposit and then spend enormous sums quickly, with no credit history to lean on. “I know I can call my contacts at Chain Bridge Bank and have an account open in like 15 minutes,” Crate says. “If you go to a much larger bank, you have a bureaucracy you have to deal with.”
The States
Salt Lake Tribune: Utah lawmaker seeks to close county campaign finance loophole
Robert Gehrke
Rep. Patrice Arent will sponsor a bill in the upcoming legislative session to close a loophole that lets candidates for county office use their campaign funds any way they see fit — including, in the past, buying a personal vehicle.
“This is an important issue to ensure the public trust, so that money donated is spent exactly how you would expect it to be used,” Arent, D-Millcreek, said. “The state regulates the majority of campaign-finance laws, all the way down to municipal elections. Somehow this personal-use exemption for county officials was overlooked.”
Santa Fe Reporter: Show Me at Least Some of the Money
Elizabeth Miller
“There were a lot of concerns last year because the mayor had PACs spending money for him, and there was a complaint that was taken before ECRB saying that there was coordination,” says Viki Harrison, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico, which assisted in drafting the proposed revisions. “The ECRB…[said], ‘We didn’t find that evidence.’ So this was a way for them to expand the coordination definition, to put in some examples and be able to put in some firewalls to make sure campaigns and PACs and political parties aren’t all just sharing the same paid staff, make sure that there are some firewalls in place.”
Revisions also clarify what constitutes a “campaign-related activity” and therefore is subject to the reporting requirements triggered if any entity spends more than $250 for mailers, phone banks, email campaigns and the like within 60 days of an election.
