Independent Groups
Salon: Jeb’s multi-million dollar sinkhole: Months of pro-Bush ads haven’t accomplished much
Simon Maloy
NBC News broke down the numbers and found that the campaigns and allied groups of three establishment candidates in the GOP race – Jeb, Rubio, and John Kasich – have thus far spent a combined $47.5 million in TV advertising. Jeb’s super PAC, Right to Rise, is single-handedly responsible for over $28 million of that spending. The group has been carpet-bombing the early primary states for months with pro-Jeb ads highlighting all the positive aspects of his life and career in government. And for all that money spent, they don’t really have much to show for it. Jeb’s numbers have not improved at all, while other candidates who have spent the barest fraction of Right to Rise’s TV budget have surpassed him in the polls.
San Francisco Chronicle: Super PACs dole out cash, whether candidates like it or not
Julie Bykowicz and Lisa Lerer
But the barrage of insults hasn’t stopped the political groups known as super PACs and their donors from showing the two presidential candidates some love — no matter how loudly they may rail against their very existence.
“I’m not going to be deterred just by that alone,” said Joshua Grossman, president of Progressive Kick, of Sanders’ anti-super PAC message. His liberal super PAC, funded by donors who have written checks as large as $250,000, has endorsed Sanders and is planning to spend money helping to elect him.
New York Magazine: GOP Presidential TV Ad Money Is Pouring Down Ratholes
Ed Kilgore
But Bush isn’t the only Republican candidate whose ad spending doesn’t seem to be working. Two outside groups have spent $8 million on ads — nearly as much as the team backing Hillary Clinton — supporting John Kasich, who is tied for eighth at 2.5 percent in the RCP national average of polls. The rival with whom Kasich is tied, Chris Christie, has totaled $6.4 million in ad spending, mostly from a super-pac. Meanwhile, the candidate currently trouncing all these worthies in every poll in nearly every state, Donald Trump, has benefited from a grand total of $217,000 in TV ads. In presidential-campaign terms, that’s enough to buy a fast-food meal deal, but not enough to supersize it.
Political Parties
USA Today: Liberals, conservatives battle McConnell on plan to boost political parties
Fredreka Schouten
Conservative members of Congress and liberal campaign-finance watchdogs alike are fighting an effort by Republican leaders to relax limits on how much political parties can spend to help individual candidates.
The push by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to boost parties comes as a raft of deep-pocketed super PACs dominate spending in the 2016 campaign and as a brash political novice, billionaire developer Donald Trump, tops most polls for the GOP’s presidential nomination.
McConnell’s measure could become law as part of a spending bill Congress must pass soon. The bill currently funding the government expires Dec. 11.
The McConnell plan would allow party committees, such as the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, to spend unlimited amounts in coordination with federal candidates.
National Journal: Freedom Caucus to Battle McConnell on Campaign Finance
Daniel Newhauser and Sarah Mimms
Rep. John Fleming, another Freedom Caucus founder, who is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. David Vitter, said that allowing unlimited coordinated spending by party committees would make it more difficult for a candidate like he was in his first race in upstart who was not the pick of the National Republican Congressional Committee. He said he would prefer the limits to stay where they are, but that if leaders feel they must do away with them, they should also allow political action committees to spend unlimited sums in coordination with candidates.
“Either uncap everything or uncap nothing,” Fleming said. “What they’re really saying is, ‘We get to choose our candidate, and we run our candidate, and we’re going to make sure they have unlimited money.’ … If they are given no limits or more limits or more coordination, so should the other organizations.”
The Hill: McConnell’s campaign finance riders
Daniel I. Weiner and Ivan Vandewalker
In an era of super PACs, which can raise unlimited funds from a small coterie of mega-donors, there is certainly a case to be made for relaxing some of the restrictions on official party committees. Traditional party organizations are built on longstanding grassroots networks. For all their faults, they remain more participatory, transparent and accountable than their shadow party analogues. That is why we support a variety of measures to make the party committees more competitive, including small donor public financing and targeted efforts to lighten their regulatory burden.
So why aren’t we on board with the McConnell rider? …
First, under current conditions, the benefits of lifting limits on party coordinated spending would not outweigh the risks. It is true that unlimited coordination with candidates would help the official parties. However, if the soft money excesses of the 1990s (to say nothing of Watergate and Teapot Dome) show us anything, it is that the parties left unchecked do have the capacity to facilitate corruption thanks to their symbiotic relationship with officeholders.
‘Civil Disobedience’
The Nation: Open Letter: Let’s Sit-In to Save Democracy From the Billionaire Class
Rhana Bazzini, Medea Benjamin, Ben Cohen, Jodie Evans, Joseph Huff-Hannon, Lawrence Lessig, Joan Mandle, Kai Newkirk, Carlos Saavedra, Umi Selah, Paul Song, Zephyr Teachout, Cenk Uygur, and Winnie Wong
From Selma to Occupy Wall Street, the Tar Sands Action to Black Lives Matter, everyday people have proven the power of mass, escalating nonviolent action to rapidly shift the political weather and open the door to reforms previously considered impossible.
Now it’s our turn. Here’s our plan.
Next spring, in the heart of the primary season, as the national election begins to take center stage, Americans of all ages, faiths, and walks of life will bring the popular cry for change to Washington in a way that’s impossible to ignore: with nonviolent civil disobedience on a historic scale…
Beneath the dome of the rotunda, on the steps outside the Capitol, and in the offices of our representatives, we will engage in peaceful civil disobedience for at least a week. Day after day, Congress will have a choice: to put hundreds of disciplined, dignified democracy defenders in handcuffs, or simply do its job to listen to the people and fix this broken system. A drama so unprecedented in the nation’s Capitol will rock the business-as-usual cycle of this election and catapult this critical issue onto center stage.
Political Speech Abroad
Washington Post: A Turkish court appointed five ‘Lord of the Rings’ experts to figure out whether this Gollum meme is offensive
Sarah Kaplan
According to the Turkish news agency DHA, Çiftçi was expelled from the Public Health Institution of Turkey in October after sharing a meme comparing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the creepy creature from “The Lord of the Rings.”
Insulting the head of state is a crime punishable with jail time in Turkey, and Çiftçi was promptly put on trial after the meme was spotted in his Facebook feed.
But when he appeared in court, Çiftçi insisted that he hadn’t insulted anyone at all. For all his slimy skin and questionable syntactic habits, many say Gollum is not a villain. He may even be a hero.
Wisconsin ‘John Doe’
Daily Cardinal: State Supreme Court rules to end Walker probe
Andrew Bahl
In a 4-1 ruling, the high court upheld a July decision ending the John Doe probe into whether Walker’s campaign violated campaign finance laws in working with conservative groups.
The court also ruled special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, who filed the petition, was improperly appointed, meaning he lacked legal basis to reopen the investigation.
Candidates and Campaigns
National Journal: Why It’s So Hard to Make a Campaign Donation With Bitcoin
Zach Montellaro
FEC commissioners have expressed their doubts about the currency in campaign finance in the past. Bitcoin “allows for anonymous and untraceable transactions, which would clearly undermine what is the most important, in my mind, purpose of campaign finance laws, and that is transparency and the disclosure of political spending. I am definitely unwilling to go that far,” FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel said.
Wall Street Journal: GOP Presidential Candidates to Assemble With Top Donors
Patrick O’Connor
Mr. Adelson isn’t the only top Republican donor still on the sidelines. The family of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts remains uncommitted, after contributing more than $5 million to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who left the race in September. Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma oil billionaire who gave nearly $1 million to a super PAC supporting 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, is similarly uncommitted. So are PayPal founder Peter Thiel and other top donors to Mr. Walker and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who also suspended his campaign in September.
Bill Millis, a North Carolina textile heir who was one of Ben Carson’s biggest financial backers and a member of his campaign’s three-man board of directors, on Wednesday quit the campaign because of a disagreement with its senior staff. Mr. Millis was one of just a handful of millionaire donors to the retired neurosurgeon, whose campaign is funded by small donors to a far larger extent than the rest of the GOP field.
The States
New York Times: Cuomo Tempers Hopes for Tougher Ethics Laws
Vivian Yee
But on Tuesday, in his first public comments about the guilty verdict, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declined to seize the moment. He had done what he could, he said, helping pass ethics laws this year that he characterized as “the strongest laws in the history of the state of New York.” It was Mr. Silver, he said of his fellow Democrat, who had failed.
“I don’t care how strong the law is,” Mr. Cuomo said. “If a person is going to break the law, the person is going to break the law.”
Daily Caller: DC Council Takes Shot At Mayor With New ‘Fair Elections’ Legislation
Josh Fatzick
The legislation came in response to a Super PAC organized by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s supporters that is raising unlimited amounts of money from businesses and individuals who do business in Washington.
“Public financing of campaigns would give greater voice to all voters and reduce the disproportionate influence of big donors in D.C. politics,” Grosso said in introducing the bill.
