Congress
Committee on House Administration: Full Committee Markup: H.R. 1, The For the People Act of 2019
On Tuesday, February 26, 2019 the Committee on House Administration will hold a markup to consider:
H.R. 1, a bill to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and for other purposes, or a related measure, and for other purposes.
The Committee will meet at 1:00 PM in Room 1310 of the Longworth House Office Building.
New York Times: G.O.P. Ready to ‘Nuke’ Senate Democrats Again Over Nominee Delays
By Carl Hulse
Angry over Democratic delaying tactics that have slowed the conveyor belt of Trump administration nominees plodding toward confirmation, the Senate majority is preparing to strong-arm a rules change that would reduce required debate time on judicial and executive branch appointees to two hours from as many as 30.
It would be the third time in six years that one party has used a procedural tactic, called the “nuclear option,” to rewrite the Senate rule book rather than do it the old-fashioned way by assembling a bipartisan consensus. The change might not be as drastic as the 2013 Democratic decision to abolish the 60-vote filibuster on most nominees or the 2017 decision by Republicans to extend that 51-vote confirmation threshold to the Supreme Court.
But Democrats say the consequences will still be significant, accelerating the nominating process for 80 percent of administration appointees, limiting the vetting of nominees and keeping the confirmation conveyor belt humming.
“They want to ram more nominees through,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, said about the proposal to cut debate time…
Mr. McConnell acknowledged that he has placed a priority on judges. Another 40 are in the pipeline right now, 34 of whom would be covered under the new rules.
Independent Groups
Bloomberg Government: Democratic Super PAC Effort Launched as Party Decries Big Money
By Kenneth P. Doyle
Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC funded by billionaires and labor unions, Thursday unveiled a $100 million initial effort in battleground states to help the eventual Democratic nominee beat President Donald Trump in 2020.
The effort comes as virtually all of nearly a dozen announced Democratic presidential candidates have said they intend to finance their campaigns with money from smaller donations and don’t want support from super PACs and other groups funded by big money.
Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, said the group will focus on expanding the universe of Democratic voters and connecting Trump with problems they face, including stagnant wages and rising costs of health care and prescription drugs.
Democrats have justified reliance on big donor money “by arguing that it would be otherwise suicidal for them to practice `unilateral disarmament,'” said Walter Shapiro, a fellow with the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, which supports strict campaign finance rules.
“For a party publicly committed to repealing Citizens United, this long-standing Democratic flexibility on Super PACs carries with it a whiff of hypocrisy,” Shapiro said in a posting on the center’s website. He was referring to the 2010 Supreme Court decision which allowed corporate spending in federal campaigns…
The effort will be financed through a super PAC, called Priorities USA action, which reports donors to the Federal Election Commission, as well as a related nonprofit group that doesn’t report donors.
Fundraising
CNN: How Bernie Sanders used the ‘Netflix’ model of political donations to raise millions
By Fredreka Schouten
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders raised an eye-popping $6 million during the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign, far surpassing the totals announced by his rivals for the Democratic nomination
But another number he revealed Wednesday could prove crucial to his candidacy and a model for others: the $600,000 he said he’s received from people who have signed up to automatically donate to his campaign each month.
In a year’s time — just as Democrats in Nevada and South Carolina weigh in on the presidential nomination — this initial round of donors already will have contributed $7.2 million to Sanders’ presidential ambitions — with little effort or expense from his campaign.
This “subscription” approach to politics is an increasingly popular way for candidates to build a sustaining fundraising base.
About 20% of the money that flowed to Democratic candidates and organizations through ActBlue in the 2018 cycle came from recurring contributions, Caleb Cade, an ActBlue spokesman, told CNN. ActBlue does not disclose the fundraising details of the individual candidates who use its online platform…
“It’s like Netflix but for unbought members of Congress,” [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] tweeted recently of the recurring contributions. She called it one of the “most important things people can do to get big money out of politics.”
FEC
Politico: FEC May Smack Down Election Security Group
By Tim Starks
Defending Digital Campaigns wants the FEC to declare that it can offer free services – including a cyber hotline, campaign boot camps, on-site training, and incident response assistance – to campaigns and political parties without violating campaign finance law. In its initial draft opinion, the FEC appeared poised to grant the request, citing its recent approval of Microsoft’s similar request. But in a revised opinion presented at a subsequent meeting, FEC staffers changed their minds and recommended denying the request.
DDC’s offerings would be illegal in-kind contributions, the latest draft opinion says, because they “would be provided for free or at less than the usual or normal charge and in connection with a federal election.” And while campaign finance law allows nonprofits to “engage in certain nonpartisan activities” like hosting debates, it says, “neither the [Federal Election Campaign] Act nor Commission regulations carve out a similar exception” for DDC’s proposed activities.
Candidates and Campaigns
Fox News: PAC aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez paid boyfriend $6G for marketing work
By Lukas Mikelionis
The Brand New Congress PAC (BNC), a political arm of Brand New Congress LLC, a company that was hired by Ocasio-Cortez to run and support her campaign, paid Riley Roberts for marketing services he provided to the PAC…
In a statement to Fox News, BNC’s Communications Director Zeynab Day said that Roberts “is a professional digital marketing and growth consultant who specializes in social media presence and subscriber engagement” and his hiring was based “on his experience managing successful advertising and social media campaigns.”
“He was hired through a 2 month trial period, beginning on August 3, 2017 and worked through the end of September, 2017,” she added. “Services to the Brand New Congress PAC consisted of advertising strategies for potential growth, developing metrics, and aiding in execution of strategy to increase brand awareness for the PAC as a whole.”
The revelation that a PAC aligned with Ocasio-Cortez paid Roberts was first noticed by political consultant Luke Thompson who detailed his findings in a Medium post.
The post drew the attention of Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti because it also included unverified speculation of legal impropriety and an incorrect claim that the Democrat’s campaign raised only about $3,000 while spending nearly $28,000 by October 2017 – ignoring that the campaign also raised more than $33,000 from small donors.
“The conspiracy machine is in full effect & it’s been disappointing to watch professionals get duped + amplify unvetted Medium posts as truth, treating journalism like it’s a high school Livejournal rumor mill or something,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “No, I don’t shadily pay my boyfriend. Come on & VET.”
VT Digger: Ben & Jerry’s co-founder among four chairs of Bernie’s 2020 campaign
By Colin Meyn
Hours after the announcement, the Daily Beast reported that Faiz Shakir, a progressive activist and political director for the American Civil Liberties Union, would manage Sanders’ 2020 campaign.
Today the campaign names its four co-chairs: Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s and a prominent Vermont progressive activist; U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who has co-sponsored a number of bills with Sanders in the past year; Nina Turner, the president of Our Revolution and a former Ohio state senator; and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz…
The ice cream mogul [Cohen] has been a leading advocate for campaign finance reform in Vermont and on the national level, an issue that Sanders has both championed while showing that campaign war chests need not rely on corporations. Sanders raised $6 million in the first day after announcing his 2020 campaign.
Cohen and his company are also politically active on social issues. He said his political activity is distinct from the sort of funding he is fighting against.
“I am not a rich guy that’s buying politicians. I’m not a corporation that’s contributing billions of dollars to politicians, PACS, Super PACs, parties, in what is clearly bribery,” he said.
“Corporations are political creatures by nature, what is different about Ben & Jerry’s is that most corporations are active politically in a covert manner and in their own narrow self interest, and Ben & Jerry’s has been active politically in an overt manner in the interest of people who are oppressed,” he said.
Donors
Center for Responsive Politics: State of Money in Politics: Female donors gaining influence as 2020 kicks off
By Grace Haley and Karl Evers-Hillstrom
If money is speech, women spoke loudly in 2018.
As 2018 was the most expensive midterm by a large margin, female donors gave more than $1.1 billion towards the ‘Year of the Woman’ election.
For the first time ever, women gave more to female Democratic candidates ($184 million) than to male Republican candidates ($106 million) among itemized contributions exceeding $200. From 2010 until the 2018 cycle, female donors gave the most to Republican men. While Democratic men outraised all others among female donors in 2018, just four percent of the contributions from women went to Republican women this cycle.
Although women are increasingly inching toward gender parity in Congress, the gender gap among donors is still strong. Women made up 37 percent of all individuals that made itemized contributions above $200 in 2018. All told, women contributed 29 percent of all the itemized congressional contributions given in 2018.
Though not a meteoric rise, women are steadily gaining influence among political donors. Even in the most expensive midterm cycle ever, women made up 37 percent of contributions above $200, a substantial leap from 28 percent in 2014…
Giving more money than ever, female donors will likely have a huge impact on the 2020 presidential election – and specifically in the Democratic primary that features several prominent female candidates.
Online Speech Platforms
Reason: Did Twitter Punish Criticism of Government Propaganda About Smokeless Tobacco?
By Jacob Sullum
As you probably did not know, this is Threw With Chew Week, an annual outburst of propaganda aimed at scaring people away from smokeless tobacco with warnings that are exaggerated, misleading, and in some cases simply false. Last week the Department of Defense anticipated the occasion by tweeting that “smokeless tobacco users are 50x more likely to get cheek, gum & mouth cancer vs. nonusers.” That 50-times factoid, which dates back to a frequently misrepresented subanalysis in a 38-year-old study, lives on the border between highly misleading and flatly untrue. In this formulation it crosses that border.
Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville and a longtime advocate of smokeless tobacco as a harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes, has repeatedly tried to set the record straight on this talking point, and last Friday he tried again. “Your 50 claim is a complete fabrication by a staffer @theNCI,” he tweeted back to the Defense Department’s @ucanquit2 account. “Here is the explanation: https://tinyurl.com/yxjsnugd. Furthermore, a large federally-funded study documented that men who dip/chew had ZERO excess risk for mouth cancer. ZERO. http://tinyurl.com/hd8nd49.”
After Rodu’s reply, some weird things began to happen on Twitter. You can still see his tweet, but it does not show up in Twitter’s search engine, although other posts by Rodu are still searchable. More than two dozen people who retweeted Rodu’s correction of the Defense Department complained that their accounts were suddenly disfavored in several ways: Their handles did not show up as suggestions in searches for their accounts, their tweets were no longer searchable, and their reply tweets were hidden from other users.
The States
The Intercept: Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Budget Proposal Would Force Grassroots Activists To Register As Lobbyists
By Aída Chávez
When activists in New York get together to send letters to their elected officials, they pool together money to pay for postcards, stamps, and even pizza to chow on as they do their work. Printing out flyers to advertise their events can also cost a pretty penny.
These efforts are almost always volunteer-funded, but if Gov. Andrew Cuomo gets his way, activist organizations will have to register as lobbyists if they spend $500 a year on such activities.
A lobbying proposal tucked away in Cuomo’s executive budget would lower the annual spending threshold for what counts as lobbying from $5,000 to $500 – requiring grassroots organizations, run largely by volunteers, that engage in even a bit of issue-based advocacy to register as lobbyists…
Activist organizations say the spending threshold proposal is meant to attack and stifle grassroots movements, which backed Cuomo’s primary opponent, Cynthia Nixon, and helped vote IDC members out of office…
More than 100 grassroots groups across the state last week signed onto a legislative memo, saying they are “strongly opposed” to the measure…
Ricky Silver, a lead organizer for the progressive group Empire State Indivisible, told The Intercept that for a group like his, the cost of renting a charter bus for volunteers to make a trip or two to Albany is enough to reach the spending threshold… Having to collect receipts from volunteers and keeping track of the frequent expenses on top of filing spending reports will stifle engagement, he added…
“We are not set up with the legal resources or the accounting resources or the time to spend on what would be the requirements,” Silver said. He added that, beyond his individual group, “the lack of confidence in what the rules would be, would also be a big deterrent for individuals.”
Sundance Times: Legislature reforms campaign finance
Senate File 18, now Senate Enrolled Act 3, is just the second piece of legislation signed into law by Governor Mark Gordon, who took office in January.
“During the 2018 Election Season, several campaign finance issues presented themselves. The advent of social media, the creative use of political action committees and the advancement of technology, require a more dynamic approach to campaign finance. This bill is a good start to reforming Wyoming’s Election Code,” commented Secretary of State Edward Buchanan.
The new law is intended to enhance transparency by requiring that candidates report their expenditures and contributions simultaneously and up to two weeks before the election. It also raises the threshold for reporting from $25 to $100 to account for inflation.
Meanwhile, the new law clarifies campaign advertising provisions to now include online advertizing and defines “electioneering communications”, while requiring that campaign activity be subject to the disclosure of donors and expenditures whether or not that activity was done in coordination with a candidate. A disclosure must now explicitly state, “Paid for by…”
According to Buchanan, many of the comments received from voters expressed concern over the gray area of express advocacy in campaign advertisements. In other words, political advertising that explicitly recommends voting for or against a candidate.
“However distasteful and disappointing advertisements from ‘Wrong for Wyoming,’ ‘Switch for Wyoming,’ and ‘Protecting Our Constitution’ may have been, they were legal in 2018. The 2020 election cycle will be different with these reforms,” he said.
Edmonds Beacon: AG’s office penalizes SEIU Council 14
By Brian Soergel
The Attorney General’s Office announced Tuesday that the Service Employees International Union Leadership Council 14, also known as SEIU Washington State Council, will pay up to $250,000 to resolve a campaign finance lawsuit.
The judgment, filed in Thurston County Superior Court, requires SEIU to pay $233,205 in civil penalties, with $104,942.25 suspended for four years contingent on no violations in that period, as well as $18,300.85 in costs and fees.
Edmonds City Councilmember Mike Nelson, who is running for mayor this year, is executive director of SEIU 14, which represents more than 100,000 employees.
He referred comment to Dmitri Iglitzin, SEIU counsel.
“We try very hard to comply with Washington’s byzantine campaign laws,” Iglitzin said Wednesday. “We took it seriously, and reached out to AG office to find out what the claim was. We filed all of the reports and resolved the issue.”
It was in July 2017 that the state attorney general’s office filed charges against the union after it received a citizen action notice from the Freedom Foundation alleging multiple violations of the state’s public disclosure laws in April 2017.
The charge, which did not name Nelson, alleged that Council 14 failed to register and report as a political committee to the Washington Public Disclosure Commission.
In addition, the charge claimed SEIU failed to identify a treasurer for the political committee, and failed to identify a depository for funds collected by the political committee. All are required by law.
The suit continued that Council 14 operated as a political committee in 2014 and 2016 – both election years – and failed to report at least $4 million in receipts and nearly $4.7 million in expenditures.
