In the News
Huffington Post: Larry Lessig’s Half-Serious Plan to Hold the Country Hostage
Allen Dickerson
This is a remarkable bit of egoism. Several other landmarks in our history — the Emancipation Proclamation, the Voting Rights Act, or the Constitution itself — are certainly more consequential steps toward self-government than the inchoate Act. Writing the Act will prove even more difficult with such grandiose expectations.
This delusional sense of history is only a symptom of the larger problem that animates Lessig’s entire project. Consider for a moment what it would mean for a president to insist upon making the Act his sole act of government before resigning.
What if Congress fails to cooperate? How, precisely, will President Lessig force its hand given our constitutional structure? In the meantime, will he govern at all, or leave the trifles of his office — national security and appointments to the judiciary, for instance — to others? What if, heaven forbid, there is a significant attack on America or its interests? Does he honestly expect to serve as president, even for a time, while essentially conceding that he has no expertise or interest in these topics?
Independent Groups
Washington Post: Democratic group accuses GOP candidates of illegally coordinating with Koch political network
Matea Gold
In a complaint sent to the commission last week, the American Democracy Legal Fund seized on a new deal between Data Trust, which has an exclusive list-exchange agreement with the RNC, and i360, a company that manages its own database for groups in the Koch network and other political clients.
The partnership — similar to one that the two entities had in 2014 — means that the eventual GOP presidential nominee will have a voter file enriched with data gathered by other Republican contenders, as well as Koch-backed groups such as Americans for Prosperity.
ADLF said the arrangement allows the 11 presidential candidates who have list-exchange agreements with the RNC to effectively coordinate with outside groups gathering their own voter data. FEC rules require a vendor working for both a candidate and independent group to wall off information about a candidate’s activities, plans or needs from its other clients.
Free Speech
New York Times: How the Social Mission of Ben & Jerry’s Survived Being Gobbled Up
David Gelles
But today, 15 years after the deal, Mr. Michalak said Ben & Jerry’s remained as mission-driven as ever, and was having a bigger impact than before because of its increased size. (Since the acquisition, Unilever has nearly tripled Ben & Jerry’s revenue and added hundreds of jobs.) And instead of watching Ben & Jerry’s simply disappear into Unilever, Mr. Michalak and his colleagues have pushed their new parent company to become a more progressive multinational.
The recipe for this amicable partnership was written into the acquisition agreement. Unilever, not wanting to squander its purchase, chose to operate Ben & Jerry’s with more autonomy than any of its other subsidiaries. To ensure middle managers did not contaminate the unique culture, Unilever established an “external board” charged with overseeing Ben & Jerry’s culture and social mission.
Washington Post: No airport concessions for opponents of same-sex marriage?
Jonathan H. Adler
This is not the first time we’ve seen political leaders seek to impose a political litmus test on business owners. Eugene Volokh blogged about politicians in Chicago and Boston threatening to deny Chick-fil-A permits for the same stated reasons. The problem, as he explained here, is that such actions constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment.
“[D]enying a private business permits because of such speech by its owner is a blatant First Amendment violation. Even when it comes to government contracting — where the government is choosing how to spend government money — the government generally may not discriminate based on the contractor’s speech, see Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr (1996). It is even clearer that the government may not make decisions about how people will be allowed to use their own property based on the speaker’s past speech.”
Lobbying
Politico: Would more lobbying improve America?
Kevin Hartnett
But could it be the real problem is that they actually don’t push those interests enough?
It’s a strange-sounding complaint, but political scientist Thomas Holyoke of Fresno State University has been studying the internal dynamics of lobbying for years and has come to believe that the US would be better off if lobbyists did more effective work for their clients.
The problem, he writes in a new book, isn’t that corporations don’t get enough representation: It’s that lobbyists are slippery, and don’t work for their clients as much as they claim. Instead, they tell their clients what they want to hear, while chiefly acting to stay tight with their contacts in Congress.
Lawrence Lessig
Time: Lawrence Lessig Thinks a Single Issue Might Make Him President
Tessa Berenson
But Lessig says such an audacious claim is necessary because people don’t believe chipping away at campaign finance reform in smaller ways—electing sympathetic congressmen, mobilizing grassroots efforts—will solve the problem. “I thought it was important to have a strategy that is big enough and different enough that people can imagine, they can see how this in fact would do something,” he told TIME. “And if they did see that it would do something, they’d have a reason to step up and support it that they otherwise wouldn’t have for the other smaller kinds of changes.”
Candidate and Campaigns
Washington Post: Trump open to taking big and small campaign contributions
Jose A DelReal
“I would even take big contributors as long as they don’t expect anything. Because the only people that can expect something from me is going to be the people that want to see our country be great again,” Trump said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” in an interview that aired Sunday.
He also said that his campaign has “a lot of money coming in” from small contributors. “A woman sent in $7.23 the other day. It was cute. She wrote this beautiful little letter. It’s what she had,” he said.
Salon: FEC Swamped With Wave of Joke Presidential Candidates
Jacob Brogan
The United States truly is the land of opportunity, a country where anyone, even a dumb joke, can run for president. First there was Deez Nuts, the independent candidate for president who made a surprisingly strong showing in polling data released last week. As the Daily Beast reported, Deez Nuts is fictional—the creation of a puckish 15-year-old Iowan named Brady Olson—but his campaign filing is real.
Now Nuts has company—or perhaps a host of potential running mates. Scanning FEC filings, Robert Maguire of the Center for Responsive Politics found several other ridiculous candidates, many of whom seem to have cropped up in Deez Nuts’ wake: Butt Stuff of Seattle, Dat Ass of Syosset, New York, Tyrone Longdick of Elmwood Park, Illinois.
The States
Allentown Morning Call: County exec proposes campaign spending limits
Tom Shortell
Under the proposal, candidates would not be able to accept each year more than $2,500 from a single person or $7,500 from an individual political action committee. Once the money is in hand, the candidate would face annual spending limits, ranging from $125,000 for county executive candidates to $7,500 for commissioner candidates running for specific districts.
Bangor Daily News: National same-sex marriage foe releases donor list after 5-year legal battle
Christopher Cousins
The National Organization for Marriage has filed details of its financial activities related to a 2009 effort to repeal Maine’s same-sex marriage law after a more than five-year legal battle over Maine’s campaign finance laws.
Brian Brown, president and co-founded of the National Organization for Marriage, said by phone Monday that being forced to disclose donors was a “gross injustice” to his organization.
“We did not do anything wrong or in violation of the law,” he said.
Jonathan Wayne, executive director of the Maine Ethics Commission, said in a written statement Monday morning the list had been filed on the commission’s website and the organization has indicated it will not fight the matter through the courts any further.
