In the News
Heritage (Event): Taxing the First Amendment: Using the IRS to Censor Speech?
The Internal Revenue Service is being investigated over claims that it denied tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code to Tea Party and other conservative organizations because of their political views and beliefs. Lawsuits are pending over the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive donor and tax information by the IRS. On Nov. 29, 2013, the IRS issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would broadly widen the definition of “candidate-related political activity” for 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations, restricting the ability of groups like the NRA and the Sierra Club to engage in political advocacy. Does this proposed regulation violate the First Amendment rights of nonprofits and their members? What is the status of the litigation and the investigations being conducted by Congress and the Justice Department? Are the IRS scandal and the current regulatory proposal a coordinated effort to stifle criticism of the government? Two campaign finance experts, including a lawyer representing conservative organizations and a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, along with two journalists who have extensively covered the IRS scandal, will discuss these issues. The panel will be moderated by a former FEC commissioner.
Independent Groups
National Review: Proposed IRS Rule Change Fractures the Left
By Eliana Johnson
The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, submitted a 26-page comment to IRS commissioner John Koskinen slamming the proposed regulations. “Social welfare organizations praise or criticize candidates for public office on the issues and they should be able to do so freely, without fear of losing or being denied tax-exempt status, even if doing so could influence a citizen’s vote,” the group wrote, calling such advocacy “the heart of our representative democracy.” The ACLU argued that, if the advocacy of social-welfare groups influences voting, it does so only by “promoting an informed citizenry.”
Then, late last week, the liberal magazine The Nation piled on with an op-edarguing that the rules would “do almost nothing to fix the things you think are broken and may, in fact, do some real damage to the ability of everyday Americans to have an impact on the political process” — that is, that groups funneling big money into the electoral process would find a way around the rules, perhaps by recategorizing themselves, while the little guy would effectively be silenced.
“There is pretty widespread agreement that this is not a good first draft of these rules,” says John Pomeranz, a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg and an expert on lobbying and election-related activity who represents left-leaning groups. The IRS, he says, erred by including “a lot of things that are and always have been non-political activities in their definition of political activities.” These “clearly shouldn’t be treated as political activity,” he says.
USA Today: New PACs try to elect state election officials
By Martha T. Moore
Thirty-nine states elect their secretary of State, and because the job includes overseeing the administration of elections, Republican and Democratic PACs have emerged to fight for control of the position. In addition to iVote, a second Democratic PAC called SOS for Democracy and a Republican group named SOS for SOS have also begun raising money for secretary of State races in November.
The election-year focus on secretaries of State results from the flood of outside political spending that began in earnest in 2012 and is now flowing to races further down the ballot. It also grows out of a wave of controversial GOP-led voter identification legislation, challenged in court by Democratic groups arguing that they are intended to disenfranchise poor and minority voters.
NY Times: Emails Released in Wisconsin Political Investigation
By MONICA DAVEY and STEVEN YACCINO
Thousands of email messages were released on Wednesday morning from a former top aide to Scott Walker, now the governor of Wisconsin, in connection with a secret criminal investigation that ended last year into whether campaigning had been conducted on government time in a county office Mr. Walker once led.
Mr. Walker, a Republican who faces re-election in November and who is widely viewed as a possible presidential candidate in 2016, was never charged in the investigation and it was uncertain what, if anything, the email messages may now reveal. Still, the release of the messages and revelations about a second, secret criminal investigation threatened to leave a cloud of uncertainty over Mr. Walker’s political future.
Bloomberg: Our Pointless, Futile Campaign Finance Regulation
By Jonathan Bernstein
One question I have for all those worried about coordination between candidates and super-PACs, or about any of the other campaign coordination that is semi-outlawed (but apparently unenforceable given current Supreme Court doctrine): What exactly is at stake here?
My answer: Nothing.
From the early days of modern campaign finance regulation, we’ve known (courtesy of the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v Valeo) that individual expenditures would be protected under the First Amendment as a form of political speech. Whether one thinks that was a correct interpretation or not — I think the Court got it right — that ruling was pretty much the whole ballgame on campaign finance.
Read more…
Bloomberg: Big-Money Politics Groups Get Clarity From IRS They Hate
By Richard Rubin
That would give some of the biggest players from the 2012 campaign, including Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, greater certainty to run ads in ways that don’t risk their tax-exempt status going forward. They could run issue-based ads that mention candidates’ names months before an election, and then switch to a direct pitch closer to the vote.
“If I were sitting in the chair of a conservative political operative, I would be rubbing my palms together hoping that these (c)(4) rules would be adopted,” said Greg Colvin, an attorney at Adler & Colvin in San Francisco who specializes in the political activity of nonprofit groups.
Corporate Governance
Acton: Religious Shareholders Want to Shut Down Political Debate
By Bruce Walker
Harvard students a century or so ago joked that Professor Irving Babbitt’s distaste for Jean-Jacques Rousseau was so fervent that he checked under his bed each evening to make sure the 18th century French philosopher wasn’t hiding there. In this humorous vein, one could apply the same fear held by progressive activists for the dreaded brothers Koch – Charles and David. Not only do activists check under their respective beds, but as well their closets, attics, basements, cookie jars and cupboards for signs the billionaire libertarians are funding candidates and causes with which liberals disagree.
SCOTUS/Judiciary
The Advocate: Super PAC challenges ethics stance
By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON
A Super PAC supporting Sen. David Vitter’s gubernatorial bid asked a federal judge late Tuesday to declare the state’s limits on campaign contributions unconstitutional.
The argument made by The Fund for Louisiana’s Future is that the state violates the First Amendment clause in the U.S. Constitution by capping individual contributions to political action committees at $100,000 per four-year election cycle.
Candidates, Politicians, Campaigns, and Parties
More Soft Money Hard Law: Of Fragmentation and Networks, and the State of Political Parties
By Bob Bauer
Are parties now weaker, or holding their own if we just see them in the right way? The question has engrossed political scientists, but more general interest is growing in direct proportion to the worry that healthy parties could play a constructive role in tempering polarized politics. Rick Pildes argues for the view that parties are struggling through a period of political fragmentation, defined as a “diffusion of political power” away from the political parties and their leadership, and he see them as in need of help if they are to contribute to the management of polarization. Seth Masket answers that parties still exert their power effectively, if in a new form, through a complex “network” composed of “candidates, officeholders, activists, major donors, media figures and others.”
Parties tend to be redefined as their changing roles and structure require. The mass party is behind us, most agree: gone are the torchlight parades of party members prepared to put deep, emotional and largely unquestioning loyalty first among their political commitments. Candidates run their own show. As John Aldrich has noted, the party of today is primarily, and at best, “in service” to their candidates—a source of funding, polling, training in campaign techniques and other support. John H. Aldrich, Why Parties: A Second Look 285-86 (2011). The party “in service” helps ambitious politicians achieve their goals, but the politicians set the terms of engagement, raise much of the money the parties distribute, and always feel free to go elsewhere if necessary for what they need.
Lobbying
CPI: Netflix stacking deck on Capitol Hill
By Dave Levinthal
Much of Netflix’s recent lobbying activity is focused on its support for “net neutrality,” the notion that Internet service providers can’t penalize certain content providers, such as those that use huge chunks of bandwidth, with slower connection speeds or extra fees.
The White House and Congress have both been targets of Netflix’s governmental influence efforts.
