CCP
Federal Appeals Court Rules Colorado Disclosure Law Unconstitutional
A federal appeals court unanimously affirmed a lower court decision declaring that Colorado’s ballot issue disclosure law violates the First Amendment for groups raising or spending less than $3,500. The decision was handed down late Wednesday by three judges nominated by President Barack Obama to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case, Coalition for Secular Government (CSG) v. Williams.
“Requiring a small, two-person group to register with the government, report every detail of its operations down to the purchase of postage stamps, and disclose nearly all of its financial supporters to the government, is inherently and obviously burdensome,” said Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) Legal Director Allen Dickerson, who represented CSG in the litigation. “We are pleased the court found this complex law violated the First Amendment. Perhaps multi-million dollar political organizations can afford those burdens, but small citizen groups cannot. The result is a campaign finance system that harms small, grassroots organizations that form the backbone of our society. The Court of Appeals was right to protect these groups.”
Independent Groups
NPR: SuperPACs Support Anti-Trump Effort With $16 Millions In Attacks
Peter Overby
Conservative donors and consultants are racing to fix what might be the worst strategic error so far in the presidential campaign — the nearly total failure of other candidates and their allies to attack frontrunner Donald Trump.
Opposing superPACs spent just $1.3 million attacking Trump in the seven months from June 2015, when he announced, to December, when he led the polls. In July, there was no anti-Trump spending at all. Only when the Iowa caucuses loomed did the spending accelerate, to $4.4 million in January and $9.4 million in February.
Eventually, the attacks concentrated on Trump. The nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute analyzed independent expenditures by superPACs and other outside groups, and reported that in the final week of February Trump was the target in 92 percent of all attack ads.
New Yorker: Is This the End of Big-Money Politics?
Jane Mayer
Has the power of big money in politics suddenly shrunk? There are many reasons to think so. Despite having spent surprisingly little on his Presidential campaign, and running in opposition to the Republican élite, Donald Trump is now the undisputed G.O.P. front-runner, after picking up seven more states on Super Tuesday. Jeb Bush, the Republican candidate with the best-funded Super PAC, was forced to drop out last month. By the time Bush suspended his campaign, the Super PAC Right to Rise had spent almost ninety million dollars on his behalf, with almost nothing to show for it. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who both have their own roster of ultra-wealthy backers, appear to be in a struggle for the G.O.P. élite’s last leaky lifeboat.
This wasn’t the storyline that most political observers predicted. Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialist brothers whose names have become shorthand for influence-buying, had signaled their intention to spend an astounding eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars of their own and their allied donors’ cash during the 2016 election cycle. But they appear completely unable to stop Trump, whom they are said to regard as unworthy and unreliable.
The Media
National Review: Les Moonves Exposes the Trump Media Game
Stephen Miller
The Sunday-morning news shows allow Trump to call in for interviews, something practically unheard of for presidential candidates. Yet Chuck Todd, George Stephanopoulos, and Chris Wallace all allow Trump to do so. And last year, CNN even shelved its long-planned tenth-anniversary Hurricane Katrina special hosted by Anderson Cooper. In its place, they aired a post-Trump-rally special with Don Lemon.
TMZ, both online and on their television show, routinely run segments on Trump, as does ET! Greta Van Susteren has frequently invited Trump’s sons on as guests, either in the studio, via satellite, or on the phone. CNN and MSNBC carry Trump’s campaign rallies in full — and Fox, too…
New York magazine columnist Frank Rich declared on CNN that Trump wasn’t stealing oxygen from other candidates, because he “was the oxygen.” Trump was the one making the race interesting, according to Rich. But interesting to whom? Persuasive evidence suggests that there is a direct correlation between Trump’s poll numbers and his media coverage compared with the media and polls for the rest of the field.
FEC
American Prospect: Reform Advocates’ Elusive Goal: Fix the FEC
Justin Miller
Campaign-finance reform advocates hold out zero hope that the current Congress will overhaul the rules, but they have nevertheless unveiled a plan that sketches out their ideal vision for tightening up federal election law enforcement…
The new proposed agency would instead consist of five commissioners—appointed by the president—including one chairperson who steers the agency for a 10-year term while the other four officials, theoretically two Democrats and two Republicans, serve staggered, six-year appointments. This design sets out to addresses what critics say is the major pitfall of the FEC: that an even number of Democratic and Republican commissioners is prone to deadlock along party lines.
Campaign Regulation
Cato Institute: Leading Campaign Finance “Reformer” Would Stop You from Spending Money on Your Own Campaign
Ilya Shapiro
This is remarkable. I mean, Hasen’s general approach of overturning Citizens United and restricting how much anyone can donate to any group that engages in election-related speech is par for the course on that side of the debate. As is, unfortunately, the exemption for “bona fide press entities” – whatever that means: I’m sure Hasen has balancing tests that distinguish Sheldon Adelson-owned Las Vegas Review Journal from the blog of Adelson’s Venetian/Palazzo casino – and government-financed campaigns (yes, the solution to the “money-in-politics problem” is to have the government control the money).
But to say that you can’t spend money on promoting yourself for public office… words fail. (This proposal likely wouldn’t even stop Donald Trump, by the way, depending on the specifics of the relevant legislation: most of his personal “contributions” have come in the form of loans that are supposed to be repaid out of the donations that he takes in.)
If the point of campaign-finance “reform” is to prevent corruption, how is it possibly corrupting to spend your own money on yourself?
Influence
USA Today: Caitlyn Jenner: ‘I like Ted Cruz’
Andrea Mandell
“I get it. The Democrats are better when it comes to these types of social issues. I understand that,” she said, but countered, “Number one, if we don’t have a country, we don’t have trans issues. We need jobs. We need a vibrant economy. I want every trans person to have a job. With $19 trillion in debt and it keeps going up, we’re spending money we don’t have. Eventually, it’s going to end. And I don’t want to see that. Socialism did not build this country. Capitalism did. Free enterprise. The people built it. And they need to be given the opportunity to build it back up.”
Should Cruz win, Jenner, who recently tweeted a photo of her updated country club locker with a new nameplate (adding the hashtag #acceptance) suggested she become “trans ambassador to the president of the United States, so we can say, ‘Ted, love what you’re doing but here’s what’s going on.’”
Candidates and Campaigns
Center for Public Integrity: Ben Carson’s small-dollar donors could keep yielding big money
Carrie Levine
Ben Carson’s presidential bid has failed.
But the retired neurosurgeon’s campaign succeeded wildly at one thing: collecting personal — and lucrative — information from more than 700,000 donors and millions of fans.
This database is a potential post-campaign money machine: The remnants of Carson’s campaign could wring riches from a legion of small-dollar supporters for years to come, as other campaigns have done before it.
How? By renting supporters’ information to other candidates, political committees — even for-profit data brokers — that may, in turn, use it to raise money.
Buzzfeed: DeRay McKesson To Hold Fundraiser At Banker’s Manhattan Home
Nicolas Medina Mora
DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist who is running in the Democratic primary for mayor of Baltimore City, will hold a fundraiser at the Manhattan home of a former Citibank executive next week.
The fundraiser is scheduled for March 9 and will take place at the Upper West Side home of Ted Dreyfus, according to an open Facebook page for the event. A former Citibank executive, Dreyfus has also worked for the Clinton Foundation and serves on the board of Teach for America, an organization that placed Mckesson at a New York City public school from 2007 to 2009…
Tickets for the event will run from $250 to $6,000. Guests who purchase the top tier of tickets will have access to a “private event,” the campaign website said.
The States
UALR Public Radio: Democrats Push For Legislature To Consider Finance And Ethics Measure
Associated Press
The proposals include a ban on state elected officials from forming or holding more than one political action committee and repealing a 30-day “cure period” allowed for certain campaign finance violations.
The package also includes legislation to require outside groups to disclose their donors and spending in campaigns. The proposal comes after Judicial Crisis Network, which isn’t required by law to disclose its donors, spent more than $600,000 on television ads in the Arkansas Supreme Court chief justice race.
Boston Globe: Mass. campaign finance regulators’ office gets hip to memes
Steve Annear
Can teenagers be the treasurers of political campaign committees in Massachusetts? As Alicia Silverstone, of “Clueless” fame, would say, “As if!”
The state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance this week used Silverstone’s classic one-liner — and a picture of the Hollywood star from the late-nineties film — to clear up any confusion about whether minors are permitted to hold such a position…
The aim of the tongue-in-cheek social media blitz, it seems, is to make the complex rules and regulations of running for political office more engaging. It’s a dramatic change of tactics from the usually staid office.
Los Angeles Times: California voters could finally weigh in on ‘Citizens United’ in November
John Myers
California voters will likely weigh in this November on the explosion of money in politics, through an advisory measure that the Legislature now has legal permission to place on the statewide ballot.
A quartet of state senators submitted language Thursday to ask voters, through a nonbinding Nov. 8 ballot measure, whether Congress should work to overturn the 2010 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United.
