In case you missed it, CCP released a report, “Legislative Review: 2013 State Legislative Trends – Campaign Contribution Limits Increase in Nine States,” featured in this Wall Street Journal editorial.
In the News
Washington Times: Amend the First Amendment to curb political speech?
By Luke Wachob
Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico and dozens of other senators apparently find the elegant simplicity of the First Amendment offensive. It’s hardly surprising that politicians don’t like the sound of “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech” when they want to silence critics.
Not satisfied with the most popular amendment in the Bill of Rights, Mr. Udall and at least 36 of his Democratic colleagues (including independent Sen. Angus S. King Jr. of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats) have been promised a vote on their constitutional amendment to the First Amendment, which would more than quadruple its length. It seems it’s time to close that pesky “freedom of speech” loophole that lets citizens go unpunished for criticizing their government or elected officials.
The announcement there would be a vote on the amendment came during a Senate hearing titled “Dollars and Sense: How Undisclosed Money and Post-McCutcheon Campaign Finance Will Affect the 2014 Election and Beyond.” During the hearing, Mr. Udall, and fellow Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota took a hard line against both dollars and sense.
Buffalo News: Public financing of elections only provides more avenues for corruption
By Luke Wachob
This experiment has been played out in New York City, where public financing for City Council candidates has resulted in an astounding $19 million being handed to candidates who were later investigated on corruption charges since 2001.
Three other states already have tax-financed campaign programs for all legislative races, and the results should serve as a cautionary tale. A 2010 Government Accountability Office analysis concluded that Arizona and Maine had failed to achieve their goals. In Connecticut, my organization analyzed voting records and found that participation in the state’s tax-financing program had no effect on legislators’ likelihood of voting with organized interest groups.
Unfortunately, when a government is corrupt to begin with, adding a tax-financing program only opens new avenues for even greater corruption.
CCP
New Report: 13 States Raise Contribution Limits Since Citizens United Ruling
Alexandria, Va. — Thirteen states have raised contribution limits since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2010Citizens United campaign finance ruling and the subsequent D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in SpeechNow.org v FEC that created Super PACs, according to a new report from the Center for Competitive Politics (CCP).
According to the report, “While there are many strong First Amendment and pro-competitiveness reasons for increasing or eliminating contribution limits, lawmakers appear to be most concerned with giving candidates and political parties a stronger voice in election campaigns by allowing candidates and parties to raise more funds.”
“A key goal of our litigation strategy is to leverage more First Amendment freedoms through legislative action,” said CCP President David Keating. “That’s exactly what happened here. Litigation triggered a legislative response that gave more freedoms to candidates and parties.
“Of the nine states that acted last year, over half doubled contribution limits,” Keating noted.
IRS
Wall Street Journal: Lois Lerner in Contempt
Attorney Cleta Mitchell on the continuing investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups.
Wall Street Journal: Starr Turn?
By James Taranto
By this February he had changed his tune utterly, telling Fox News’s Bill O’Reillythat while the agency might have made “some boneheaded decisions,” there was “not even a smidgen of corruption.” He cited “multiple hearings on this” but didn’t mention that congressional investigations were stymied by ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s refusal to testify and by the IRS’s failure to turn over documents.
The House also voted last week, 231-187, to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress (only six Democrats were with the Republicans on that one). The next day, the IRS told Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, that “it will hand over all the Lerner e-mails related to the scandal,” a New York Post editorial notes. In March, the IRS had said “it ‘would take years to produce’ all the data Congress demanded.”
Independent Groups
Washington Post: ‘Fixing’ campaign finance is only making it worse
By SETH MASKET
There are plenty of reasons one might want to limit the amount of money spent on political campaigns. Some are concerned that too much money in elections runs the risk of corrupting elected officials; perhaps you can really buy their votes with enough money. Others worry that spending by parties and their allies can make candidates too dependent upon partisan money, undermining their independent judgment and enhancing polarization. Still others simply worry that the amount of money being spent is unsavory, even obscene, and would be better spent on almost any other activity.
Regardless of what motivates it, campaign finance reform, coming in various incarnations and across various levels of government over the years, has been almost uniformly a failure. To be sure, the advent of financial disclosure has been a help to political watchdogs and election observers. But the overall attempt to limit the role of money in elections has simply not worked. Ever more money is spent with each election cycle. Indeed, spending in federal elections has increased at roughly 10 times the rate of inflation since the late 1990s.
SCOTUS/Judiciary
Wisconsin State Journal: ‘John Doe’ ruling may land in U.S. Supreme Court
By Dee J. Hall
The federal court decision halting the John Doe investigation into coordination between Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign and conservative political groups raises unique questions that could very well end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, experts say.
But that same decision also conflicts in some respects with recent Supreme Court decisions, raising questions about whether in the end, the decision by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa would stand.
Randa ruled last week that the type of issue advocacy done by Wisconsin Club for Growth is not subject to government control, even if it is done in coordination with a candidate’s campaign.
More Soft Money Hard Law: Polarization on the Court and Campaign Finance
By Bob Bauer
In the growing press about polarization on the Supreme Court, campaign finance cases are cited as leading indicators and McCutcheon as a clinching bit of proof. The argument comes in two different versions. In the standard form, the Court is simply charged with dividing, routinely and reflexively, along partisan lines. A pointed variantis that the Court majority has exhibited something like fierce ideological bias, demonstrating through its campaign finance and voting rights cases that it will favor the rich donor but won’t protect the average, poor or minority voter.
In both arguments, the analysis begins from a standpoint outside the cases themselves and the circumstances in which campaign finance jurisprudence began to shift. So in the first argument, campaign finance is lined up with all other cases and sorted into opposing categories of “liberal” or “conservative.” In the second, the field of comparison is narrowed to voting rights and campaign finance, but the analyst must abstract a principle that can be used to make the comparison meaningful even if, as some have observed, “the voting rights at issue in voting rights cases are very different than the First Amendment interests Court was discussing” in campaign finance cases. Thomas Edsall, Supreme Injustice, N.Y. Times, May 6, 2014 (quoting Professor Jeffrey Rosen).
