Political Parties
Atlantic: How American Politics Went Insane
Jonathan Rauch
I don’t have a quick solution to the current mess, but I do think it would be easy, in principle, to start moving in a better direction. Although returning parties and middlemen to anything like their 19th-century glory is not conceivable—or, in today’s America, even desirable—strengthening parties and middlemen is very doable. Restrictions inhibiting the parties from coordinating with their own candidates serve to encourage political wildcatting, so repeal them. Limits on donations to the parties drive money to unaccountable outsiders, so lift them. Restoring the earmarks that help grease legislative success requires nothing more than a change in congressional rules. And there are all kinds of ways the parties could move insiders back to the center of the nomination process. If they wanted to, they could require would-be candidates to get petition signatures from elected officials and county party chairs, or they could send unbound delegates to their conventions (as several state parties are doing this year), or they could enhance the role of middlemen in a host of other ways.
Independent Groups
Wall Street Journal: Pro-Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA Action Raised $12 Million in May
Rebecca Ballhaus
At the end of May, Priorities had $51.9 million on hand – far more than the collection of super PACs backing Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton’s general-election rival, whose fundraising operation has gotten to a late start after the billionaire largely self-financed his primary campaign. Priorities has reserved about $147 million in TV, radio and digital ad air time so far, a spokesman said.
Priorities’s fundraising comes on top of $240 million Mrs. Clinton raised for her campaign through May. Her campaign had $42 million on hand at the end of last month.
IRS
The Hill: House Republicans offer amendments to restrict IRS powers
Naomi Jagoda
The amendments were offered to the financial services and general government appropriations bill, which provides funding for the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies. Amendments were due to the House Rules Committee by noon on Monday…
The chairman of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), filed several IRS oversight amendments after the deadline. One of these amendments, to ban IRS funds from being used to require tax-exempt organizations to disclose donor information on annual returns, is similar to a bill the House passed last week.
FEC
Slate: This Comment Was Sponsored By …
Alex Richardson
From a policy perspective, it is confusing that a super PAC is allowed to make political communications to voters without the accompanying disclosure that the Federal Election Commission usually requires—that familiar “This communication has been paid for by Correct the Record” that you hear during campaign commercials. But several years ago, the FEC made a decision to regulate the internet differently than other forms of communication. At the time, the regulator was concerned that “individuals might simply cease their Internet activities rather than attempt to comply with regulations they found overly burdensome and costly,” and so it chose to err on the side of free speech.
Event
Cato Institute: Digital Speech under Attack: How Regulators Are Trying to Shut Down Dissent Online
June 29, 2016
In recent years political speech on digital media has again come under increasing scrutiny from regulators in Washington. This is particularly true of the FEC — which has tried to expand disclosure laws and apply campaign finance laws to unpaid political accounts on Twitter — and the FCC — which ruled last year that Internet service providers do not have a right to free speech.
But, this move toward tighter regulation has not been without its dissenters. In February of last year, FEC commissioner Lee Goodman and FCC commissioner Ajit Pai co-authored a Politico op-ed arguing that “without government regulation, political speech and civic engagement have flourished on the Internet, and ordinary citizens have had the same freedom and ability to disseminate their political opinions to a wide public audience as large media corporations.”
Is our digital speech under serious attack? What is the current status of free speech online, and what is it likely to look like under the next administration? How might new regulations impact political organizing online?
Candidates and Campaigns
BuzzFeed: Trump Fans Aren’t Upset He’s Raising From Big Donors Now
Tarini Parti and Rosie Gray
“He had no choice, now that he’s in the general election,” said Sue Gillis, 73, of Millen, Georgia, who came to see Trump in Atlanta on Wednesday.
“He has to,” said Michael Stainbrook, 64, of Stone Mountain Ga., who also attended Trump’s Atlanta rally. “You’re talking the difference between maybe — what was it? — he spent maybe $100 million on his campaign of his own money. Now they’re talking about a billion dollars. That’s an awful lot to spend.”
“We’ve entered into a different entity,” said Joan Buchli, a homemaker from West Tampa. “We have to come to the realization that it takes $2 billion to run a presidential campaign…”
New York Times: Yes, Political Ads Are Still Important, Even for Donald Trump
Lynn Vavreck
The evidence suggests that campaign ads have small effects that decay rapidly — very rapidly — but just enough of the impact accumulates to make running more advertising than your opponent seem a necessity.
It sets off an arms race of ads as candidates try to neutralize or displace their opponents. But will the 2016 general election be different? Mr. Trump has used unconventional campaign tactics and has relied on free media to get his messages out. All of this may render advertising less relevant…
The takeaway from these studies is simple: Even though the effects from an ad imbalance are small and go away fast, candidates cannot allow them to pile up. Election Day may be far away, but candidates may still want to match their opponents’ daily advertising in the months before the vote because they care about publicly released news polls that convey information to voters — and donors — about their viability and the closeness of the race.
Huffington Post: Donald Trump’s Latest Campaign Finance Report Makes Dumpster Fires Look Good
Paul Blumenthal
Presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump entered June with just $1.3 million cash on hand in his campaign account, according to a campaign finance report filed on Monday. The tiny sum is the result of Trump’s poor first month of fundraising from donors that netted just $3.1 million…
Clinton, by comparison, raised $26.4 million for her campaign in the same time period as Trump’s $3.1 million. In May 2012, when Romney was the presumptive Republican nominee, he raised $23.4 million.
Weekly Standard: Donald’s Donor Problem
Sarah Isgur Flores
It’s possible Trump is now trying to right the ship. But if firing Corey Lewandowski was Trump’s attempt at offering an olive branch to these donors, the effect has been more like poison ivy. While Republican donors were looking for a change in the campaign or even minimal effort by the candidate to reach new voters, firing Lewandowski on a Monday morning simply guaranteed another news cycle about campaign dysfunction and chaos, minimal fundraising numbers, and polling that shows Hillary pulling away. It may be a compelling episode for his reality show campaign, but it won’t raise money. And, once again, it showed donors in bright flashing lights Trump’s inability to go on offense in a week when the administration was trying to redact a terrorists’ allegiance to ISIS and Hillary was continuing to play hide and seek with the FBI.
The States
Newsday: Gov. Cuomo, legislative leaders reach deal on ethics package
Michael Gormley and Yancey Roy
The deal comes six months after the corruption convictions of former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) and former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan). More than 30 officials have lost their jobs to corruption probes in the last decade.
The deal is “further limiting the influence of outside money in our elections and taking pensions away from corrupt public officials,” said Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx).
But Susan Lerner of Common Cause said: “Nothing in this bill touches either the legislators’ or executive’s behavior. It touches on someone else.
Wall Street Journal: The Corruption Probe at a Glance
Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Josh Dawsey
The NYPD investigation is connected to probes by the Manhattan district attorney and federal authorities into Mr. de Blasio’s campaign fundraising, including efforts by the mayor and his allies to raise money for Democratic state Senate candidates in 2014. Investigators are looking at whether the mayor and his team sought to evade contribution limits or tried to disguise the true name of contributors. More broadly, the authorities are examining whether any official government action was taken in exchange for contributions to a nonprofit run by the mayor’s allies.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: State bar: Select, not elect, court
Lisa Hammersly
The Arkansas Bar Association on Friday endorsed choosing state Supreme Court justices, elected to their jobs since the 1800s, through appointment.
The state’s largest organization of lawyers also backed passage of new laws requiring judicial “dark money” donor groups to identify their contributors.
The bar association also proposed changes to the state’s judicial ethics code that include barring most gifts to judges, except from relatives. The changes would require judges to learn about their campaign contributions and would create a system for removing a judge from a case if a party in it has made sizable campaign donations.
New Hampshire Union Leader: Fixing NH’s campaign finance system
Grant Bosse
Updating and streamlining the New Hampshire campaign finance system would provide a clear and level playing field for all candidates. And that would lower the incentive for candidates to avoid the labyrinth entirely by outsourcing their campaigns to Super PACs and other independent expenditures.
