In the News
Tax Analysts: Should Political Nonprofits Disclose More Frequently?
Paul C. Barton
In an ideal world, say advocates of campaign finance reform, there would be more frequent and thorough disclosure of nonprofits’ political spending…
But the idea of quarterly reporting ought to be a non-starter, said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics. “This mania for more reporting is getting completely out of hand,” he said.
Before groups file reports with the IRS, they have to get auditors to verify them, Keating said. “This would send their administrative costs through the roof,” he said. “I can’t understand anybody wanting to do this quarterly.”
CCP
Is Uber “Disrupting Democracy”?
Luke Wachob
Public Citizen has published a new report detailing how Uber Technologies, the company behind the popular ride-sharing app Uber, advocates for regulatory policies that allow it to operate in cities alongside traditional taxi companies. When faced with regulations that threaten Uber, the company organizes petition drives, pays for television advertising, and employs lobbyists to make its case directly to city officials. In other words, like every other business, Uber seeks to persuade public officials and the public that its service is valuable and that the law should accommodate it…
“This giant and powerful corporation portrays itself as the scrappy rival to entrenched interests, but it is in fact able to deploy far greater political power than its public interest and commercial rivals,” writes Rick Claypool, author of the report and Research Director for Public Citizen’s President’s office. Anyone who has watched Public Citizen and its scores of well-funded allies push for more stringent donor disclosure laws in recent years – with few groups organized against them – can get a chuckle out of that statement.
Claypool criticizes Uber for gathering signatures from its customers as a show of support for the company, arguing that these petitions to “Save Uber” are merely an attempt to “legitimize” the company’s use of “high-powered lobbyists.” I guess it takes one to know one: Public Citizen circulates as many petitions as anyone to show public support for the bills and regulations their paid lobbyist (gasp!) works on. Go to www.citizen.org, click on the “Get Involved” tab, and you’ll see no fewer than 22 calls for petition signatures (as of right now, at least).
“Oligarchy”
Vox: Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it’s wrong.
Dylan Matthews
Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant. And there are some funny examples in the list of middle-class victories. For instance, the middle class got what they wanted on public financing of elections: in all three 1990s surveys included in the Gilens data, they opposed it, while the rich favor it. That matches up with more recent research showing that wealthy people are more supportive of public election funding.
So it’s hard to say definitively, based on this data, that the rich are getting what they want more than the middle class. And it’s hard to claim, as Gilens and Page do, that “ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots.” Even when they disagree with elites, ordinary citizens get what they want about half the time.
Independent Groups
CNN: Flint mayor diverted water-crisis money to political PAC, suit says
Sara Ganim and Dominique Debucquoy-Dodley
The former city administrator of Flint, Michigan, filed a federal lawsuit against the current mayor’s office, claiming she was fired after raising concerns about donors being directed away from a charity for victims of the city’s water crisis and toward a fund sharing a name with the mayor’s campaign fund.
In the suit filed Monday, fired administrator Natasha Henderson claims that in February 2016, Flint’s current mayor, Karen Weaver, directed a former city employee and a city volunteer to stop directing potential donors to a charity called Safe Water/Safe Homes. That charity was run by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint and had been approved by the city for water-crisis donations.
Instead, the lawsuit claims city employee Maxine Murray was directed by Weaver to begin directing donations to “Karenabout Flint.”
Washington Post: Super PAC coffers swell with more than $700 million
Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy
A burst of giving by liberal donors and a last-ditch effort to fend off GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump helped super PACs pick up nearly $100 million in new donations by the end of March, pushing the total raised by such groups this cycle to more than $700 million, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission reports.
Campaign Finance Enforcement
Los Angeles Times: ‘I have, in fact, done the crime’: Rep. Ami Bera’s father admits illegal campaign contributions
John Myers
The father of a Sacramento-area congressman pleaded guilty Tuesday to illegally funneling more than a quarter of a million dollars to his son’s campaigns in 2010 and 2012.
Babual Bera, father of Rep. Ami Bera (D-Elk Grove), entered the plea during a brief appearance in federal court in Sacramento. He will be sentenced in August, and federal prosecutors are recommending up to 30 months in prison.
In court documents, prosecutors said the 83-year-old retired engineer and his wife asked “relatives, friends and acquaintances to make the maximum allowable federal campaign contributions” in 2009 and again in 2011.
Conventions
New York Times: After Conventions, a Debt to Donors
Editorial Board
The demise of public convention financing is a result of the 2014 Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, named for a Virginia girl who died of brain cancer. The law ended government funding for nominating conventions, which in 2012 amounted to about $18 million, or one-quarter, of each political party’s convention costs, and redirected $126 million over 10 years to pediatric disease research.
The law shifted ever-escalating convention costs onto rich donors and corporations like Google, Facebook, Duke Energy, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Bank of America, General Motors and AT&T, which were all past contributors. Corporations can give unlimited cash, services and swag to Democratic and Republican host committees for conventions that basically are four-day-long parties. Shareholders in these companies pick up the tab since the money comes directly from corporate coffers.
Congress
Orlando Sentinel: Jolly’s folly: Lawmakers still beholden to funders
Lawrence Lessig
But Jolly’s proposal is the most cynical example of fraudulent reform that I have ever seen. No doubt, the Stop Act would make Jolly’s job — and the job of other members of Congress — better. By law, none of them would have to spend their time engaged in the misery of direct fundraising. By law, they would all effectively collude to leave the fundraising to their staffs.
Yet this would change none of the causes of the corruption of Congress. For the piper would still be paid by the very same people. Members of Congress would still be dependent on the very same special interests to fund their campaigns. Indeed, Jolly’s staffers have spread the word across Capitol Hill that the power of the big funders wouldn’t really change with his so-called “reform.” All that would change is that congressmen wouldn’t have to do the dirty work.
Orlando Sentinel: Jolly defends plan to curb pitch for political big bucks
Rep. David Jolly
Lessig ably twists the conviction behind the Stop Act into cynicism, and, in so doing, he risks setting reform back years. That’s not a leader looking for solutions, it’s a professional commentator advancing his own career and financial interests by ensuring the problem of incessant congressional fundraising remains for him to opine on endlessly for years to come.
Lessig had his chance to get into the arena just last year — audaciously declaring he would run for president if the American people would give him $1 million. People believed in him, and he raised the million, only to then announce weeks later he was withdrawing. Clearly, that’s not a leader from whom the American people should take campaign-finance advice.
The Media
The Hill: Cruz slams media for ‘manipulating’ voters
Ben Kamisar
“This election will be studied for the role of the media, and in particular network executives,” Cruz said on Glenn Beck’s radio program, his first public interview since ending his presidential campaign last week.
“That has a dramatic impact on the polls, when every network becomes the super-PAC for the candidate that they want to win.”
Cruz attacked media execs for “manipulating and trying to deceive the voters” and said Trump’s rise was “heavily fueled by the media executives who have run him 24/7.”
Candidates and Campaigns
CNN: Trump needs cash, but GOP donors not opening their wallets
MJ Lee and Sara Murray
As the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump now faces a monumental obstacle: Hillary Clinton’s money machine.
There’s just one problem: Trump has spent the last year railing against his party’s powerful donors.
After Trump abruptly wrapped up the GOP nomination last week, many major GOP fundraisers are playing the wait-and-see game as they mull over whether to help the New York billionaire. Deep-pocketed financiers, who have collectively poured hundreds of millions of dollars into efforts to elect past GOP nominees, say they are monitoring Trump’s tone — and waiting for his phone call.
The Blaze: This Libertarian Presidential Candidate Refused to File With the FEC Because He Believes it Shouldn’t Exist
Kate Scanlon
Libertarian presidential candidate Darryl Perry has refused to file campaign paperwork with the Federal Election Commission because he believes there is no constitutional reason for the agency to exist.
“There shouldn’t be a federal agency that oversees campaign finance,” Perry told TheBlaze in an interview Tuesday.
Perry said that a federal agency with the power to control campaign finance through regulations has the power to hinder independent and third-party bids in favor of the current two-party system.
The States
New York Daily News: Mayor de Blasio brushes off ethics commission’s motion to bring his defunct Campaign for One New York to court
John Marzulli and Jennifer Fermino
The group’s lawyer, Laurence Laufer, Friday said it wouldn’t comply because the records request was a “blatantly political exercise by an agency whose very independence is deeply in question.”
Laufer has suggested that Gov. Cuomo – who does not get along with the mayor — is behind the probe, but has stopped short of naming him.
De Blasio also demurred when asked if Cuomo was pushing the investigations.
“JCOPE has started to go into areas that have nothing to do with its stated mission,” de Blasio said.
He added, “Look at the cast of characters, who hired them, and what they have come out of. It’s a very interesting story.”
New Hampshire Union Leader: Year-round sunlight: Sanborn bill is a great start
Editorial Board
Under current law, political committees raise and spend campaign cash in complete darkness for more than a year and a half out of every two-year election cycle. From November of one election year until June two years later, they don’t have to file a single public report on their activities.
Sen. Andy Sanborn has mustered a bipartisan coalition to bring some light into the darkness, and the House Election Law Committee is unanimously recommending passage of his bill.
SB 458 would require political committees, including both PACs and candidate who file as political committees in order to take unlimited PAC contributions, to file complete receipt and expenditure reports in June and December of odd years. This would give the public a peek at what they’re up to before the next election is underway.
NPR Buffalo: LLC loophole bill stalls in Senate
Karen DeWitt
The loophole in the state’s campaign finance laws also made it possible for several real estate developers and related companies, now part of a new federal probe, to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign of Governor Andrew Cuomo.
But a bill to close the loophole could be stalled in the state Senate.
Sponsor Dan Squadron, a Democrat who represents lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, made the case at the Senate Elections Committee meeting, saying the measure requires that LLC’s be more transparent, and that the founders of multiple LLC’s be subject to the same $5000 donation limit in place for corporations and not be used “as a way for individuals and other corporate interests to skirt campaign finance regulations”.
