In the News
Wall Street Journal: That’s Odd, ‘Big Money’ Isn’t Buying This Election
Bradley Smith
Apparently oblivious to the failure of “big money” to dictate the race, the goo-goos—the good-government crowd—have cranked up the same theme they use every election year. “We must,” they say, “have campaign finance reform.” We must “get money out of politics.” The Supreme Court must reverse its 2010 decision in Citizens United and allow “reasonable” regulation of campaign finance.
But what would “reasonable” regulation actually look like? Well, we have an idea, because once, not that long ago, Congress passed “reasonable” regulation.
Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most momentous Supreme Court decisions: Buckley v. Valeo. In Buckley, the Supreme Court struck down provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act that threatened core First Amendment freedoms. The 1976 decision is as important to democracy as 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education is to education and civil rights. Its anniversary is a time for reflection on what might lie ahead if “reformers” get their way.
Independent Groups
Washington Post: Donations, big and small, continue to pour into 2016 race
Matea Gold, Anu Narayanswamy and Tom Hamburger
New federal campaign finance reports filed Sunday show that the GOP contenders continue to largely lean more heavily on their outside allies than do the Democratic candidates, who have focused on bringing in small contributions directly for their campaign committees.
On one end of the spectrum is financial executive Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, who gave $10 million through his company to Right to Rise USA, a super PAC backing former Florida governor Jeb Bush. The group brought in $118 million for the year — but only $15.1 million of that came in the second half of the year, demonstrating the extent to which donations have fallen off as Bush has struggled to gain traction.
Center for Public Integrity: What’s hiding in presidential campaign finance disclosures
Dave Levinthal, Cady Zuvich and Carrie Levine
More than a few curiosities, oddities and abnormalities arose when presidential campaigns and super PACs filed their 2015 end-of-year campaign finance disclosures Sunday night.
Among the notable numbers the Center for Public Integrity flagged:
$4,769,923: Amount raked in by Eleventy Marketing, the top-paid vendor to Republican Ben Carson’s campaign during the fourth quarter of 2015, when Carson’s campaign spent nearly $5 million more than it raised. The Carson campaign raised about $54 million in 2015, mostly from small donors, but spent a big chunk of the money on fundraising expenses.
$500,000: Value of a bank loan Democrat Martin O’Malley took out in December to keep his campaign afloat. With less than $170,000 cash on hand, the O’Malley campaign fell behind on paying senior staffers. Some relief arrived in January when the campaign took receipt of more than $846,000 in public matching funds and paid the loan off, O’Malley spokeswoman Haley Morris noted.
New York Post: Super PAC fuels Bernie Sanders’ White House bid
Marisa Schultz
The National Nurses United for Patient Protection super PAC raised more than $2.3 million last year to help elect Sanders for president, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The PAC, which can raise unlimited amounts of money, is affiliated the National Nurses United union, an active Sanders’ supporter.
The behind-the-scenes financial effort to boost Sanders belies the candidate’s campaign rhetoric against Super PACs.
“Secretary Clinton yesterday just announced, I suppose with pride, that her super PAC brought in $45 million,” Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “I don’t have a super PAC. Our average contribution is 27 bucks.”
The Hill: George Soros gives $6 million to pro-Clinton super-PAC
Harper Neidig
Billionaire George Soros contributed $6 million to a super-PAC supporting Hillary Clinton last month, according to the committee’s latest financial statement.
The investor has now contributed a total of $7 million in this election cycle to Priorities USA Action, which raised $41 million on behalf of Clinton in 2015.
In the last 6 months, the super-PAC raised $25.3 million, meaning that Soros’s contribution accounted for almost a quarter of its fundraising haul.
Center for Public Integrity: Sarah Palin’s PAC burning through cash
Dave Levinthal
But the former Alaska governor’s own political action committee, once prodigious, is flaming out: Palin’s appetite for luxury travel and pricey consultants has depleted its cash reserves to historically low levels, a Center for Public Integrity review of new federal records indicate.
Sure, lots of political committees would love to have the $380,000 that remained in Sarah PAC’s coffers as of Dec. 31.
But not since mid-2009, just after Palin formed SarahPAC following her unsuccessful vice presidential bid, has the group’s cash stash dipped so low.
The Media
Politico: Clinton camp plans to roll out Washington Post’s anti-Sanders editorial
Annie Karni
One scathing newspaper editorial is worth a thousand of a candidate’s own words.
That’s the bet Hillary Clinton is making. While she has dropped direct attacks on Bernie Sanders from her stump speech, her campaign is planning to reprint a withering Washington Post editorial that accuses Sanders of running a “fiction-filled campaign” and distribute it to voters in New Hampshire ahead of the Feb. 9 primary.
The plan, an inside source said, is to have volunteers pass out reprints of the editorial and let the newspaper make the case against Sanders, with no commentary necessary from the campaign.
Buckley v. Valeo
Brooklyn Daily Eagle: Brooklyn Law School hosts Buckley v. Valeo discussion for case’s 40th anniversary
Rob Abruzzese
Brooklyn Law School (BLS) recently hosted a conversation on the landmark case Buckley v. Valeo in observance of its 40th anniversary with three of the major figures who helped bring forth its First Amendment challenge.
BLS Dean Nicholas W. Allard led the conversation, which was held at the Subotnick Center in Downtown Brooklyn on Tuesday. He was joined by Hon. James L. Buckley, former senator and U.S. Circuit Court judge who served as lead plaintiff; Ira Glasser, former executive director at the American Civil Liberties Union; and Prof. Joel M. Gora, who was one of the attorneys who argued for the case in the Supreme Court.
Brooklyn Law: ‘A Landmark of Political Freedom’
Joel Gora
January 30 marks the 40 the anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo, dealing with the clash between First Amendment rights and campaign finance limits. As a young ACLU attorney, I was privileged to have been one of the lawyers who argued that case in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the First Amendment. In its opinion, the Court declared:
The First Amendment denies government the power to determine that spending to promote one’s political views is wasteful, excessive, or unwise. In the free society ordained by our Constitution it is not the government but the people –individually as citizens and candidates and collectively as associations and political committees –who must retain control over the quantity and range of debate on public issues in a political campaign.
U.S. News & World Report: End Court-Ordered Corruption
Derek Cressman
But the most damaging aspect of the Buckley ruling was to reject the common-sense notion that in order for all voices to be heard in a policy debate, we must limit the amount that each individual can speak. We apply limits on the amount of speech anyone has in public comment period at a city council meeting or on the floor of Congress. But while spending money is hardly the same thing as actually speaking with your own voice, the court has refused to allow limits on the amount that billionaires can spend on political advertisements.
FEC
Washington Free Beacon: FEC Commissioner: U.S. Political System Only Benefits White Men
Joe Schoffstall
Ann Ravel, former chair and current member of the Federal Election Commission, appeared at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Conference in Ottawa last October and said that the United States political system only benefits wealthy white men. The video, however, was just uploaded January 22…
“There’s no question that the difficulty of being a candidate–even at the primary stage because of the cost–has been an impediment to women and minorities,” Ravel said. “We have unusually low statistics about women and minority participation in public office.”
Candidates and Campaigns
Politico: Hillary Clinton confronts her 43 percent problem
Annie Karni
That her supporters see themselves more in line with a billionaire independent puts Clinton in a tight spot — those backers are important allies for Clinton, many of them longtime personal friends. But as textbook one-percenters, they are potentially political poison in Iowa, where Sanders’ most potent line of attack on Clinton has been highlighting her paid speeches in front of Goldman Sachs, and her personal connections to Wall Street.
Politico: Trump, king of free media, finally bankrolls campaign
Kenneth P. Vogel
Donald Trump finally put his money where his mouth is ― loaning his presidential campaign $10.8 million in the last three months of last year, accounting for 80 percent of all the cash he brought in, according to a report filed Sunday night with the Federal Election Commission.
In all, the billionaire real estate showman ― whose improbable front-running campaign for the GOP nomination is centered around the idea that his wealth makes him incorruptible ― has lent or donated $12.8 million to his campaign. That accounts for two-thirds of the $19 million that the campaign has brought in to date ― a sum that is dwarfed by those of other top-tier candidates.
New Yorker: Ted Cruz’s Iowa Mailers Are More Fraudulent Than Everyone Thinks
Ryan Lizza
Insights from the Yale study have since been adopted by several campaigns, including MoveOn, which also faced criticism when it used the tactic to turn out voters for Barack Obama’s reëlection, in 2012. Given its obsession with political science, it’s no surprise that the Cruz campaign decided to adopt the “social pressure” techniques to turn out voters in Iowa for Monday night’s caucuses. On Saturday, Twitter came alive with pictures from voters in the state who received mailers from the Cruz campaign. At the top of the mailers, in a bold red box, are the words “VOTING VIOLATION.” Below that warning is an explanation:
You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record. Their scores are published below, and many of them will see your score as well. CAUCUS ON MONDAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE and please encourage your neighbors to caucus as well. A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.
Below that, a chart appears with the names of the recipient of the mailing as well as his neighbors and their voting “grade” and “score.”
Washington Post: Bernie Sanders’s campaign brings in jaw-dropping $20 million in January
Matea Gold
Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign announced Sunday that it will bring in more than $20 million this month, an astonishing sum that underscores the power of its online fundraising operation.
Sanders has received more than 3.25 million contributions, including 770,000 in January, the campaign said. Because most were small sums, more than 99.9 percent of his donors have not yet reached the maximum $2,700 they can give to him in the primary.
New York Times: Sanders Campaign Introduces Text-to-Donate App
Nick Corasaniti
It’s a familiar way of donating, mastered by the Red Cross during global catastrophes: Simply text a five-digit number and a donation is made seamlessly through a phone bill.
And now the method is coming to the Sanders campaign. Through the campaign’s digital vendor, Revolution Messaging, supporters of Mr. Sanders can now text the word “Give” to a special number and automatically donate $10.
There are federal caps to the donations that users can send. Individual phone numbers are allowed to donate $50 a month, topping out at $200 a year..
Politico: Rubio’s campaign has best fundraising quarter yet
Marc Caputo and Anna Palmer
“We’re not the leading fundraiser in this race,” Rubio told reporters Friday while campaigning in Muscatine, Iowa. “I knew when I got in this race that the establishment money in Washington had chosen to go in a different direction. I didn’t feel we needed to have the most money. I just felt we needed to have enough money, enough resources to get our message out.”
Still, Rubio’s campaign reported ending 2015 with nearly $10.4 million cash on hand. It’s unclear how much of that money can be used in the primary.
The States
National Review: NY Ethics Commission Aims to Clean Up Albany by Abolishing First Amendment
Ian Tuttle
And just in case you were still worried, JCOPE chairman Daniel J. Horwitz added: “Nobody here is suggesting that a garden-variety telephone conversation between a reporter or editorial board and a consultant is necessarily considered to be lobbying.”
Oh, whew! It’s only the non-“garden-variety” calls that count! I mean, probably. Maybe a “garden-variety” counts once in a while — just not “necessarily.”
Glad that’s all cleared up!
