CCP
Heritage Foundation: Compulsory Donor Disclosure: When Government Monitors Its Citizens
Brad Smith, Scott Blackburn, and Luke Wachob
The right of every American to support causes in which he or she believes is under attack through compulsory disclosure laws. These excessive disclosure laws do more harm than good and violate Americans’ fundamental rights to free political speech, association, and privacy. Anti–First Amendment activists and many misled Americans see these laws as a positive effort to “shine a light” on groups and individuals who are speaking out during campaigns. The reality is starkly different: Disclosure, particularly the compulsory disclosure of donors to causes and candidates, has failed. Vocal calls for more disclosure are not calls for transparency and good governance—despite their proponents’ arguments to the contrary. Rather, such attempts seek to increase the size and power of government while enabling activists to harass those with whom they disagree.
In the News
Al Jazeera America: Twitter enters campaign funding game, promising transparency
Dave Levinthal
But Twitter’s nascent PAC, which is poised to make its first-ever federal campaign contributions, plans to disclose such donations within 48 hours — tweet-like speed, relatively speaking, company officials tell the Center for Public Integrity…
Twitter’s PAC has raised about $95,000 — and spent less than $800 — since its creation in August 2013 and the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission records. The money came from employee contributions. Its next campaign finance filing is not required to be submitted until January 2016…
Will Twitter’s voluntary actions start a disclosure trend? “Probably not,” said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which supports limited campaign finance regulations. “It’s a free country. People can say what they want,” Keating added.
Twitter’s new policies come at a time when the company is expanding its presence in Washington, where most members of Congress and practically every government agency has a Twitter account.
Independent Groups
MSNBC: Team Cruz tries coordinating in plain sight
Steve Benen
It’s an amazing thing to watch. The Cruz campaign can’t contact the super PACs to say, “It’s important that you start buying airtime right away,” so the campaign instead talked to Politico, effectively saying on the record, “You know, we’d be really happy if our super PACs started buying airtime right away.”
None of this constitutes secret coordination, because there’s obviously nothing secret about it. It’s also not technically coordination, since the campaign never got in touch with the super PACs directly – Cruz aides just have to hope their allies see the article.
SCOTUS
Richmond Times-Dispatch: Bob McDonnell’s conviction should concern all Americans
Anthony Troy and William Hurd
In Governor McDonnell’s case, the jury was allowed to convict based on routine acts that every governor and other elected official performs for constituents — making inquiries, attending meetings or luncheons, granting access to cocktail parties, and asking subordinates to meet and gather information about the proposal a citizen is making.
All of these actions stop short of the “official actions” that were previously thought necessary to implicate federal bribery laws. This is why six former Virginia attorneys general — four Democrats and two Republicans — filed an amicus brief in the Fourth Circuit in support of Governor McDonnell. It is also why 44 former attorneys general from states outside Virginia joined together — a majority of them Democrats — to file an amicus brief on his behalf.
Off-Year Election News
Center for Public Integrity: Ohioans reject marijuana legalization measure
Liz Essley Whyte
Voters in Ohio rejected a ballot initiative that would have legalized marijuana Tuesday despite millions of dollars spent by investors hoping to profit from the measure’s passage.
Ohio’s Issue 3 would have made the state the first in the Midwest to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.
But with most of the state’s precincts reporting, 65 percent of voters rejected the measure, even though the pro-pot advocates paid an estimated $7.1 million to air TV ads supporting it, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from Kantar Media/CMAG, a media tracking firm.
WDRB: Matt Bevin email to all JCPS teachers raises questions about election law
Antoinette Kons
Republican gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin sent an e-mail to all 6,000 Jefferson County Public School teachers at their official school accounts early Monday morning promising to “give current and future teachers a new source of income when they retire” if they elect him governor on Tuesday.
The move raises questions about the use of the teachers’ public email accounts for political purposes.
The Kentucky Democratic Party called Bevin’s action “apparently illegal” while a law professor at the University of Kentucky said it’s “close to the line.”
Bevin’s campaign told WDRB News on Monday that the “democrats know that the law wasn’t broken, and the Kentucky Democratic party should stop lying. Matt Bevin will continue to ask all Kentuckians for their vote ahead of tomorrow’s election and we will continue to correct Jack Conway’s lies.”
Huffington Post: Maine Backs Post-Citizens United Campaign Finance Initiative
Paul Blumenthal
Maine voters backed a ballot initiative on Tuesday to update the state’s 19-year-old system of publicly financing campaigns. Fifty-five percent of voters supported the initiative, and 45 percent opposed it…
Candidates participating in the state’s public financing system will now be able to receive additional public funds when an independent group like a super PAC spends big in their election. The initiative will also increase transparency of independent spending by requiring groups to disclose their donors, including their top three donors on all advertising. Penalties for violations will also increase.
King 5 News: Seattle’s ‘Honest Elections’ initiative wins handily
In votes counted by Tuesday night, I-122 led with 60 percent of the votes — 53,157 to 34,956.
The initiative would tighten campaign finance restrictions in Seattle, and also create a first of its kind system in which registered voters can receive up to $100 of “democracy vouchers” to support the candidate of their choice.
“Participating candidates may continue to raise money from both traditional cash sources and the publicly-funded democracy vouchers as long as they comply with the cash contribution limit of $250 and the spending cap,” according to the initiative.
Influence
New York Times: Mayor de Blasio’s Hired Guns: Private Consultants Help Shape City Hall
Thomas Kaplan
The mayor’s reliance on private consultants seems to run contrary to the image he has cultivated. As mayor, he has criticized the role that the “consultant class” played in politics; in his previous elective office, as the city’s public advocate, he assailed the influence of political donors hiding behind “political committees that masquerade as tax-exempt nonprofits.”
Yet a review by The New York Times of hundreds of pages of the mayor’s daily schedules, as well as email correspondence and other records, shows the central role that private consultants have played in his administration. The correspondence highlights how some consultants have almost unfiltered access to City Hall.
Salon: The Kochs have already won: How their billions remade the GOP in their own image
Sean Illing
The real story here isn’t that the Koch brothers haven’t decided which candidate to support – though that’s what they wanted to emphasize. The truth is that it doesn’t matter who they endorse, just as it doesn’t matter if their preferred candidate wins. Political influence is about much more than election outcomes. The ability to shape discourse, to define the issues and craft the narratives is essential – this is what the Koch brothers have done with unprecedented success.
Privacy
Washington Post: I wanted to shame an accused con man. I didn’t realize how much power I had over him.
Jason Feifer
When is the past worth burying, and who should get to decide? Those questions have launched an international debate, pitting practices in Europe, which recognizes a “right to be forgotten,” against the United States, where the First Amendment dominates. And way down below all that, here I was, with more power than I welcomed over the reputation of a stranger…
“The question is: Is this information still relevant, does it have bearing on the individual, and is there still a public interest in this information?” said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor who studies Internet privacy at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information. The European Court of Justice ruled last year that privacy rights should trump the public’s right to know when information is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.”
FEC
Time: Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Asked If an Intern Could Get Paid by Her College
Eliana Dockterman
According to paperwork filed with the FEC on Oct. 29, the DePauw University student would receive college credit as well as a grant from a summer internship grant program at the school’s Hubbard Center which offers money to students who do unpaid internships.
Clinton campaign lawyers argue that the student should be permitted to accept the $3,000 stipend and the college credit without either being designated as in-kind contributions to the campaign
The States
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Don’t let legislators cut off your ability to know
Editorial Board
The legislation would: Make it much more difficult for the public to determine the background of who is financing candidates’ campaigns; allow unions and corporations to give money to political parties and campaign committees controlled by legislative leaders; allow wealthy donors to give as much as they wanted to those entities, which could then pass them on to candidates; and codify a recent state Supreme Court decision allowing candidates to work closely with issue groups that don’t have to disclose where they get their money.
The Assembly bill includes a provision championed by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) — one of the architects of the July open records gambit — that would end a requirement that donors disclose where they work, making it harder for the public to know when companies are investing heavily in certain politicians, the Journal Sentinel’s Patrick Marley reports.
Detroit Free Press: Michigan continues its dark money streak
Rich Robinson
Michigan’s state Supreme Court candidates raised and spent $5 million in 2014. Independent committees reported spending $750,000. The Michigan Republican Party and the Center for Individual Freedom spent $4.7 million for television ads about the Republican slate of candidates that weren’t reported anywhere but the public files of state broadcasters and cable systems. The donors who provided the money for those ads aren’t disclosed anywhere.
