CCP

Elizabeth Warren Attacks SEC Chair for Refusing to Help Her Silence Businesses

By Joe Albanese

To be clear, the SEC has never before required the disclosure of corporate contributions to 501(c) groups. Indeed, its website describes its mission as one to “protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” It is unclear how monitoring corporations’ support for nonprofit groups would fulfill these ends, which concern economic matters and the prevention of legal wrongdoing. Furthermore, Congress has explicitly forbidden the agency from creating any rules mandating the disclosure of contributions to tax-exempt organizations or trade associations – the SEC could not do so even if Chairman White wanted it to.

But Senator Warren has chosen to ignore all this, casting herself as a reasonable moderate grappling with an intransigent federal official…

Warren’s un-ironic accusation of Chairman White’s rigidity betrays the Senator’s own single-minded purpose: to empower political activists to silence speech that they dislike.

Free Speech

Charlotte Observer: Firebombing wasn’t an attack on Republicans only

By Editorial Board

Democracy was firebombed last weekend in North Carolina. The competition of ideas was burned, vigorous debate was charred, free speech was defaced.

The news that a North Carolina Republican headquarters had been torched was sickening and disheartening – not just for Republicans, but for all Americans who understand our country thrives in part because we choose our government leaders with free elections, not through intimidation or violence…

The tenor of this election is bordering on dangerous. The Arizona Republic, for instance, received death threats after endorsing a Democrat for president for the first time in its history. Publisher Mi-Ai Parrish wrote a moving piece last weekend in response. She talked about staffers who know free speech requires compassion, bravery and open debate.  

FEC

Washington Examiner: Hacked: Clinton team ripped star Obama appointee

By Rudy Takala

Hillary Clinton’s chief legal counsel excoriated one of President Obama’s most high profile appointees on the Federal Election Commission for what he said was an “endless desire to be portrayed in the press as a profile in courage.”

The exchange began with an email from Clinton sharing a May 2, 2015 article in the New York Times. The article centered on Democratic FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel’s contention that her agency was “dysfunctional” and unwilling to enforce campaign finance laws. Legal counsel Marc Elias advised Clinton to discount Ravel’s concerns. “I have no illusions about the FEC or its power. I do, however, think this article is significantly overstated. It is the product of Ann Ravel’s endless desire to be portrayed in the press as a profile in courage,” Elias wrote.  

Citizens United

Reason: Michael Moore Releasing Trump Film as ‘October Surprise’ Thanks to Citizens United

By Ed Krayewski

The film that sparked that landmark First Amendment ruling, Hillary: The Movie, was inspired by Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, released in the summer of 2004, and the influence that film had on the election season, as David Bossie, the president of Citizens United, wrote earlier this year. The Federal Elections Commission decided differently, that the two films were different because the latter was “electioneering.”

In its decision, the Supreme Court took away the power from government to make those kind of highly subjective distinctions, freeing Michael Moore to be honest about his intents and leaving fans of works like his or John Oliver’s anti-third party “electioneering” who nevertheless support a candidate who opposes Citizens United and is proud to be in favor of banning films that depict her in a negative light in an uncomfortable position if they ever thought about the consequences of their professed policy preferences on political speech.

Supreme Court

National Review: The Case for Shrinking the Supreme Court

By Michael Stokes Paulsen

Senator John McCain made minor headlines this week by stating that a Republican Senate might well be justified in refusing to confirm any nomination that a president Hillary Clinton might make to the Supreme Court. The only problem with such a statement is that it does not go far enough: The Senate should decline to confirm any nominee, regardless of who is elected. More than that, it is time to shrink the size of the Supreme Court.

Congress should pass a law reducing the Court’s membership to six Justices rather than nine – a return to its original size – and in so doing both take the question of Supreme Court appointments off the table for this election cycle and also thereby reduce the capability of the Court to engage in judicial activism harmful to the Constitution. 

Independent Groups

Bloomberg BNA: Emerging Pro-Trump Super PACs Backed by Big GOP Donors

By Kenneth P. Doyle

Two super political action committees that have emerged as major supporters of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign have collected more than $30 million in recent weeks, including multimillion-dollar contributions from wealthy Republican donors who once were reluctant to support him…

Overall, Clinton’s campaign and allied groups have raised more than two-and-a-half times the amount raised by Trump and his allies. The Clinton side led the Trump side in the money race by $517 million to $205 million raised through the end of August, according to an analysis on FEC reports by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

Most of the money being spent by outside groups on both sides is going for television attack ads.

Candidates and Campaigns

The Intercept: Hacked Emails Prove Coordination Between Clinton Campaign and Super PACs

By Lee Fang and Andrew Perez

The fact that political candidates are closely coordinating with friendly Super PACs – making a mockery of a central tenet of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision – is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington.

Super PACs are only allowed to accept unlimited contributions on the condition that the money is spent independently of specific campaigns. The Federal Election Commission hasn’t reacted for a variety of reasons, including a lack of hard evidence, vague rules, and a partisan divide among the commissioners so bitter they can’t even agree to investigate obvious crimes.

But newly disclosed hacked campaign documents published by WikiLeaks and a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 reveal in stark terms how Hillary Clinton’s staffers made Super PACs an integral part of her presidential campaign…

The emails show consistent, repeated efforts by the Clinton campaign to collaborate with Super PACs on strategy, research, attacks on political adversaries and fundraising.   

Los Angeles Times: The more they campaign, the more things stay the same…

By Christi Parsons

So many primary contests, so much debate, so many millions spent on defining Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

And now, three weeks before the election, it turns out voters may have known these two characters fairly well at the outset – or at least as well as they cared to.

New NBC/WSJ poll numbers show this shocking pattern:

Trump’s favorability rating in January 2016: 29% positive, 58% negative.

Trump’s favorability rating now: 29% positive, 62% negative.

Clinton’s favorability rating in January 2016: 40% positive, 49% negative.

Clinton’s favorability rating now: 40% positive, 50% negative.

Yes, that’s right. Almost zero change in how voters see the candidates. 

CNN: Questions for Clinton and Trump on the Supreme Court

By Ariane de Vogue

The future of the Supreme Court hangs on the next election, but will the issue come up during Wednesday’s debate?

Moderator Chris Wallace made it one of the six issues for the debate, so here’s our list of what kind of questions could be asked:

Clinton is no fan of the controversial campaign finance decision Citizens United. But would she demand a litmus test from potential nominees on the issue? Even retired Justice John Paul Stevens — who dissented in the case during his final term on the court — thinks litmus tests are a bad idea…
Trump has threatened to sue news organizations and mused about changing libel laws if he wins the White House. Is that a real threat? What about the First Amendment and a potential lawsuit against a media organization? 

The States

NPR: Missouri Voters To Decide Whether To Rein In Unlimited Political Cash

By Jason Rosenbaum

The most expensive race for governor in the country is going on in Missouri. In fact, it’s not even close: The more than $50 million spent in Missouri’s governor race is more than the combined spending in the Indiana and North Carolina gubernatorial contests, according to the National Institute of Money in State Politics…

But this historically expensive governor’s race may soon become a thing of the past in Missouri. The state’s voters will decide in November whether to put a $2,600 limit on donations to candidates for state office. It’s not the only campaign finance measure facing voters this year, ballot measures before voters in South Dakota and Washington State would create systems to publicly finance state elections.  

Albany Times Union: Claim: Stadium’s name is political donation

By Casey Seiler

Should the name of a sports stadium be categorized as a political contribution?

That’s the argument made in a notice of claim filed by a Democratic candidate against longtime Long Island Republican state Sen. Ken LaValle over the potential advantage presented to the incumbent by the naming of Stony Brook University’s Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium.

Also named in the claim: Stony Brook, the SUNY system, the state Department or Transportation, the state Board of Elections and others.

In energetically written court papers filed earlier this month in state Supreme Court in Suffolk County, Democrat Greg Fischer contends that the stadium’s name – plus the adjacent signage and the media mentions that come with it – constitutes “an obscene transfer of ‘soft money’ political contribution from one group of government actors to another. It is such a gross and excessive amount of wealth transfer and unjust enrichment … that it shocks the senses.”

Newsweek: Amid Billion-Dollar Campaign, Two States Weigh Untested Alternative

By Emily Cadei

Suppose you were handed $150 worth of taxpayer-funded “coupons” to donate to a state candidate of your choosing-what would you do with it? Would you even use it? And how would politicians respond if voters had this option? Given that less than 10 percent of Americans say they’ve ever donated to a political campaign, these are fair questions. They’re also relevant amid the renewed focus this election season on the role of money in politics. If reformers get their way in November, we could soon have some answers to these questions-the result of what would amount to a grand, democratic experiment…

The idea of campaign donation vouchers has been kicking around among scholars and campaign finance experts for decades, but it’s never actually been implemented (the city of Seattle did pass an initiative last year to create a voucher system that goes into force in 2017). That hasn’t stopped Represent.Us and a coalition of like-minded groups from selling the program as an antidote to democratic dysfunction in two states on either side of the red-blue divide-Democrat-dominated Washington and the conservative prairie land of South Dakota.   

Boston Herald: Lawmakers weigh call for special panel to review ethics laws

By Associated Press

State lawmakers are weighing a proposal by House Speaker Robert DeLeo to create a special panel to review ethical guidelines for public officials in Massachusetts.

A legislative committee held a public hearing Tuesday at the Statehouse on the Winthrop Democrat’s resolution to create an 11-member Task Force on Integrity in State and Local Government.

If approved, the task force would review the state’s conflict-of-interest and ethics rules, campaign finance disclosure laws and laws related to lobbyists…

Common Cause Massachusetts Executive Director Pam Wilmot says her group supports the bill. In particular, she says the state must revamp the statements of financial interest that are filled out by public officials. Wilmot said portions of the statements are outdated.