CCP
Center for Competitive Politics Comments on Proposed Changes to California’s Coordination Regulations
Today, the Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) released their comments on proposed changes to California’s coordination regulations. These changes, proposed by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, are riddled with many pitfalls and paradoxes, and CCP’s comments highlight some of the proposal’s most egregious issues:
The proposed changes would make such a broad universe of publicly available information about candidates’ campaign plans the basis of coordination that it would force independent speakers to choose between shutting their eyes and ears, on the one hand, or shutting their mouths on the other.
The proposal unjustifiably and irrationally prohibits family members from independently supporting their relatives’ campaigns.
The proposal disfavors certain forms of communications and unfairly inhibits independent speakers’ ability to illustrate their points.
Comments to California Fair Political Practices Commission on Proposed Changes to California’s Coordination Regulations
Eric Wang and David Keating
The proposal’s use of the adverb “indirectly,” without any accompanying qualifier, means that virtually any publicly available information that a candidate conveys “indirectly” to the sponsor of an independent expenditure would create a presumption that the expenditure is coordinated. Given the sheer breadth of the proposed rule, independent speakers would have to hermetically isolate themselves from the rest of the world lest their speech be considered “coordinated” with a candidate. They could not use the Internet, watch television, read a newspaper, listen to the radio, or talk to anyone.
That is because candidates’ “planned expenditures” are typically a matter of public knowledge, and the media routinely reports on this subject. For example, in August, Politico reported that Hillary Clinton was planning to spend $2 million on television advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire in the coming weeks…
Of course, none of these news sources is clairvoyant. Presumably, they were apprised of the candidates’ planned expenditures by the candidates or their campaigns. Thus, any independent speaker who is informed by these publicly available reports would – in the language of the proposal – have received “information about the candidate’s or committee’s campaign needs or plans that the candidate or committee provided to the expending person directly or indirectly.”
The Brennan Center Backs Off the Ledge
Luke Wachob
Vandewalker and Weiner deserve credit for urging the reform lobby to recognize the many positive aspects of parties and to consider whether easing restrictions on these entities could be beneficial for politics. Their sleight of hand absolving reformers of responsibility for our failed regulatory system is forgivable if it succeeds in persuading their traditional regulatory allies to finally adopt a nuanced view of how political spending functions in practice. After all, it’s not easy to switch overnight from hollering to the heavens that money must be kept out altogether to accepting that the democracy you want is only possible if groups can effectively fundraise and work with candidates.
FEC Commissioner Lee Goodman spoke most persuasively on this point, describing how BCRA forces state and local parties to abide by complicated federal regulations if they spend more than a small amount advocating for a candidate in a congressional race. Speaking from experience, Goodman told the room that local parties couldn’t comply with the onerous regulations and therefore couldn’t run ads for their candidate. If you want citizens to have more influence in politics, it doesn’t make sense to strangle the political institution closest to them.
Donor Disclosure
Wall Street Journal: Jeb Bush Disclosure on His Campaign ‘Bundlers’ Spurs Criticism
Christopher S. Stewart and Beth Reinhard
Mr. Bush is defining bundlers as donors who have raised at least $17,600, according to people familiar with the disclosure plan, a much lower threshold than used by past presidential campaigns and by Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who is identifying supporters who raise at least $100,000.
The $17,600 baseline chosen by Mr. Bush’s campaign comes from a 2007 law requiring federal candidates and party committees to disclose registered lobbyists who have bundled that amount. The law doesn’t apply to non-lobbyists, and campaigns aren’t required to release the names of bundlers.
Critics say the lower benchmark allows Mr. Bush to make it impossible to detect his biggest bundlers, given that they will be intermingled with potentially hundreds of other supporters who raised less. The list isn’t expected to detail what each bundler raised.
Independent Groups
Washington Examiner: Watchdog probes Clinton Foundation payments to Hillary’s campaign
Sarah Westwood
A watchdog group is asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate whether the Clinton Foundation broke federal law by making payments to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.
Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, pressed the IRS on whether the nearly $350,000 the Clinton Foundation paid to rent Clinton’s email list after she failed to secure the Democratic nomination was above “fair market value,” which is the benchmark used to determine whether such payments constitute veiled donations rather than typical transactions.
FEC
Pillar of Law Institute: Tables Turn on Vague Campaign Finance Regulation
Steve Klein
Reformers once enjoyed this arrangement, because if the law actually prohibited everything they want it to prohibit it would be subjected to a successful constitutional challenge; murkiness and fear of FEC enforcement amidst the hustle-and-bustle of campaign season used to be a worthy alternative to unequivocal regulation. But that’s no longer the case, because the current Republican commissioners (and certain other commissioners who are no longer serving) have resisted case-by-case rulemaking, or adding new elements to numerous nonexhaustive arbitrary checklists. FEC commissioners used to reliably interpret vague and overbroad regulations in favor of regulating activity; now three of them interpret it to broadly allow activity. The righteous indignation of Chair Ravel and one of her fellow commissioners Ellen Weintraub notwithstanding, the fact that such vague and overbroad regulations are being interpreted this way is but the other side of a creation they and other reformers have long supported.
Candidates and Campaigns
Politico: The GOP Is Throwing Away Millions of Dollars
Patrick Ruffini
Snuffing out Donald Trump’s candidacy may lower the rest of the Republican field’s chances of beating Hillary Clinton. To bring Trump down a peg, the field is likely to double down on strategies—like heavy spending on negative TV ads—that may win the primary but simply won’t work as well in November. Democrats, meanwhile, are busy building a vast organization to replicate President Obama’s data-and-field driven juggernaut and take it even further.
Washington Post: Voters are mad about mega-donors, and it’s helping Trump and Sanders
Matea Gold and Jenna Johnson
“I love the idea that he’s not accountable to anybody other than himself,” said Francis Wise, 64, a retired county plan examiner and building inspector who is volunteering for Trump’s campaign in Nevada.
A similar sentiment courses through the crowds that assemble to cheer on Sanders. The self-described democratic socialist warns in his stump speech that the United States is becoming “an oligarchy.”
“All of these people are turning out because he’s hearing our voices and not being bought,” said Danielle Jancarole, a 23-year-old supervisor at Kohl’s who was among an estimated 13,000 people who packed a rally for Sanders in Tucson on Friday night.
U.S. News and World Report: Hillary Takes Millions in Campaign Cash From ‘Enemies’
Kimberly Leonard
When asked during the Democratic presidential debate what enemies she was most proud to have made, Hillary Clinton named pharmaceutical and health insurance companies at the top of her list. But that hasn’t stopped the Democratic front-runner from accepting millions of dollars in campaign cash from both industries in the course of her political career, financial disclosure records show.
Since her first bid for Senate in 2000, Clinton has accepted nearly $1 million from drug and health companies and more than $2.7 million from the insurance field and its related sectors, according to an analysis of public records from the Center for Responsive Politics. While the analysis did not include campaign finance figures for the 2016 cycle, some of the same donors and patterns can be seen in Clinton’s lone financial disclosure filed in July.
The States
Bangor Daily News: How Maine could become a speech nanny
Jon Reisman and Matt Benner
Question 1, the “clean election reform” initiative, is a progressive assault on freedom hiding behind Orwellian language and hypocrisy. Advocates have trumpeted transparency and the dangers of money in politics, while so far raising at least $300,000 from out-of-state donors and pretending that they really do believe in free speech, just not for people and corporations on the right such as the Koch brothers.
“Clean Elections?” “Transparency?” Please. “Whitewashed Elections” would be the correct term.
Money in politics has the potential to counterbalance the political classes, promote ideological diversity and challenge the status quo. Money, speech and freedom intersect and reinforce one another. A “yes” vote will protect entrenched interests from critical speech and electoral rebuke and empower the government to decide what kind of political speech is allowed. No wonder the left thinks it’s a great idea.
Wisconsin Public Radio: Wisconsin Lawmakers Consider Campaign Finance Changes
Shawn Johnson
At a public hearing of the plan on Tuesday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said allowing the contributions would leave voters better informed because the money would be reported. He said it embraced the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
“We need to have more advocacy, more issues, more discussion. And sometimes that takes money to do it,” said Vos.
But, the bill would also let candidates coordinate with interest groups that keep their donors secret as long as the groups don’t use words like “vote for” or “vote against” in their ads.
State Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, called it a loophole that would let campaign ads “masquerade” as issue ads.
Billings Gazette: Court rejects appeal by group suing over Montana election laws
Associated Press
A federal appeals court has rejected a request by a tax-exempt organization to overrule a judge’s order that it must reveal certain information about itself in the group’s lawsuit challenging Montana’s election laws.
Montanans for Community Development had asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen’s ruling that it must answer questions or disclose documents about the group’s formation, operations, advertising and communications with candidates and other groups.
