In the News
Monticello Times: Reader questions Sen. Al Franken’s position on IRS, non-profit groups
By Bob Esse
And Sen. Franken wrote two times in two separate months pushing the IRS to stop the approvals of these organizations.
You do not need to be a partisan person to say it is wrong for someone from the Congress to write urging that a branch of the government select certain groups for harassing.
President Barack Obama most likely did not participate in this illegal act but others stepped forward and did it for the party.
CCP
The Corruption Sleight of Hand
By Scott Blackburn
Crooked politicians are often the poster boy for greater campaign finance regulation, used to justify every imaginable measure of government control over speech, from caps on donations to what words can appear in political advertising. In the eyes of many who wish to further regulate political speech, simply parading around corrupt officials is often enough to warrant more restrictions on what the average Joe can say when he wants to get involved in the political process.
But the dirty little secret of so-called campaign finance “reforms” is that they have nothing – NOTHING – to do with the kind of corruption that is splashed across the pages of the New York Times.
Take the trial of former New York State Senator, Malcolm Smith. Smith, a prominent Democratic State Senator from Queens, wanted to run for mayor of New York City as a Republican and, to further this end, is accused of bribing two Republican City Councilmen to help get his name on the ballot. The whole affair is full of the kind of underhanded dealings normally reserved for the movies, complete with brown paper bags filled with cash and wire-tapped meetings with FBI informants in empty parking lots. Smith and his co-conspirators have been charged with wire fraud, mail fraud, bribery, and extortion.
IRS
Wall Street Journal: The IRS Loses Lerner’s Emails
Editorial
The IRS—remember those jaunty folks?—announced Friday that it can’t find two years of emails from Lois Lerner to the Departments of Justice or Treasury. And none to the White House or Democrats on Capitol Hill. An agency spokesman blames a computer crash.
Never underestimate government incompetence, but how convenient. The former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations was at the center of the IRS targeting of conservative groups and still won’t testify before Congress. Now we’ll never know whose orders she was following, or what directions she was giving. If the Reagan White House had ever offered up this excuse, John Dingell would have held the entire government in contempt.
The suspicion that this is willful obstruction of Congress is all the more warranted because this week we also learned that the IRS, days before the 2010 election, shipped a 1.1 million page database about tax-exempt groups to the FBI. Why? New emails turned up by Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee show Department of Justice officials worked with Ms. Lerner to investigate groups critical of President Obama.
SCOTUS/Judiciary
Watchdog.org: Will taxpayers have to pay for frivolity of John Doe prosecutors?
Frivolous.
That’s the word that U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa has repeatedly applied to motions filed by John Doe prosecutors-turned-defendants in a civil rights lawsuit.
Most notably, last month Randa said that he was “absolutely convinced that the defendants’ attempt to appeal this issue is a frivolous effort to deprive the Court of its jurisdiction to enter an injunction,” the federal judge wrote in his ruling that reinstated his preliminary injunction shutting down a secret John Doe investigation into dozens of conservative groups.
Kochs Obsession
NY Times: The Koch Cycle of Endless Cash
Editorial
It’s not enough, apparently, that some of the wealthiest Americans spend millions to elect their candidates to Congress. Now they are using their fortunes to lobby Congress against any limits on their ability to buy elections.
Candidates, Politicians, Campaigns, and Parties
Washington Post: People move to places that fit their politics. And it’s helping Republicans.
By AARON BLAKE
Basically, the argument (which I have espoused) is that Republicans have an advantage when it comes to map-making because their voters are much more diffuse and spread out, while Democratic voters tend to be more concentrated in urban areas. So while Republicans have a bunch of districts that they generally win with 55 or 60 percent, Democrats have many more districts that are 70 percent-plus Democratic performing.
Thus, the half of Americans who tend to favor Democrats are concentrated in fewer districts, leaving Republicans with many more districts — and states — that lean their way.
NY Times: A Cantor Effect for Businesses and the G.O.P.
By JEREMY W. PETERS and SHAILA DEWAN
WASHINGTON — The day after Representative Eric Cantor became the first congressional leader in modern times to lose his seat in a primary, one of the biggest aftershocks occurred not on Capitol Hill or in the sprawling Richmond suburbs he has represented for more than a decade but on the New York Stock Exchange.
The share price of Boeing tumbled, wiping out all the gains it had made this year, a drop analysts attributed to the startling defeat.
While he was often an adversary to both the Tea Party and Democrats in Congress, Mr. Cantor, a Republican and the House majority leader, was also a powerful ally of business big and small, from giants like Boeing to the many independently owned manufacturers and wholesalers that rely on the federal government for financial support.
State and Local
New York –– Buzzfeed: Exclusive: Progressive Ticket Will Challenge Andrew Cuomo And His Running Mate In New York Primary
By Jacob Fischler
Zephyr Teachout, who failed in a surprisingly stiff challenge to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for the nomination of the progressive Working Families Party, will challenge Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for governor, she confirmed for the first time in an interview with BuzzFeed Friday.
Teachout, a Fordham law professor who also worked on Howard Dean’s failed presidential bid, will run alongside Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor known for his advocacy of net neutrality, as her lieutenant governor, they said in the joint interview.
New York –– ProPublica: Cuomo Has Raised Millions Through Loophole He Pledged to Close
By Theodoric Meyer
When he ran for office four years ago, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo pledged to close a loophole in the state’s campaign finance regulations allowing corporations and individuals to pour unlimited amounts of money into politics.
Instead, he’s become the loophole’s biggest beneficiary.
New York State forbids corporations from giving more than $5,000 a year to candidates and political committees. But limited liability companies—businesses that share attributes of corporations and partnerships—are allowed to give up to $60,800 to a statewide candidate per election cycle and up to $150,000 a year to candidates and committees overall. What’s more, corporations and individuals can set up an unlimited number of LLCs through which to donate, making the caps effectively meaningless.
