In the News
The Insider: How Donor Disclosure Laws Invade Privacy, Stifle Dissent, and Threaten Free Speech
Matt Nese
There is a growing movement in the United States to make participating in politics an illegal activity—illegal unless you fill out the right forms to get the right permit from government. This movement flies under the flag of transparency, but it’s actually something else: It’s an assault on free speech. One of the primary ways this movement seeks to limit political speech is mandatory non-profit donor disclosure requirements.
As U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer said when introducing such a disclosure bill, “the deterrent effect [on speech] should not be underestimated.”
This thirst for more disclosure is what drove nine U.S. Senators to hound the Internal Revenue Service to audit conservative groups and deny right-of-center 501(c)(4) groups their applications for tax-exempt status—political pressure that many believe led to the IRS scandal.
Lansing State Journal: Pivate giving encourages participation
Bradley Smith
Americans have — and should have — the right to call for changes in public policy without interference from the government. On Election Day, we vote in private booths to ensure that no one is harassed for their political views and everyone feels safe participating. But these days, our ability to participate in political life without publicizing our activity is under attack, maligned as “dark money” by activist organizations that wish to harass supporters of groups they oppose.
From an historical perspective, the idea that you should have to report your political activity to the government, which then makes public your political affiliations, your home address, and your employment information — where it could be used to discriminate against you in job applications, or against your children in selecting school athletic teams, or to harass your employer — would have been considered a gross violation of rights. Great American political tracts, such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the Federalist Papers, were published while maintaining the privacy of both the authors and their financial supporters.
Michigan Live: Full disclosure or donor privacy? Michigan debate takes on money in politics
Jonathan Oosting
Anonymous contributions are playing a growing role in U.S. politics, but private donations are not always a bad thing, according to Bradley A. Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
“People have a lot of reasons to want to be private,” said Smith, chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics and a professor at Capital University Law School. “There are fears of harassment, both government harassment and unofficial harassment from private individuals.”
Smith, who acknowledges that supporting more privacy in political giving is not an immediately popular position, is set to debate Michigan Campaign Finance Network executive director Rich Robinson on Thursday in downtown Lansing.
New York Times: Companies and Campaign Disclosure (LTE)
Paul Atkins
According to Bradley A. Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman, corporations face “more campaign-finance disclosure than ever before. ”But special-interest groups demand additional disclosures, like corporate expenditures to trade associations, whose political participation is already disclosed.
As Mr. Porter aptly states, objections stemming from such disclosures “could limit political spending altogether.” While browbeating management over trade association memberships appeases vocal minorities, it comes at the expense of shareholders’ economic interest.
More Soft Money Hard Law: The FEC’s Problems
Bob Bauer
Now Brad Smith rightly counsels that we not overstate the significance of this. It may go too far to say that the FEC is the most dysfunctional agency or, as one Commissioner has suggested, “worse than dysfunctional.” We are seeing mainly a case of frayed nerves and personality conflicts among administrators who are under constant attack for being unable to agree on difficult issues. The Supreme Court disagrees on those same issues, and the Justices can get testy, but they are saved from the charge of “dysfunction” because there are nine, not eight, Justices, and they can get to 5-4 and issue decisions.
But the open, increasingly personal squabbling, while uncomfortable to watch, is not all there is to the story. It has led a form of “acting out” by Commissioners in the forms of procedural shenanigans, furtive and open uses of the press to score rhetorical points, and questionable characterizations of the issues before them (such as the absurd debate yesterday over whether some Commissioners were denying that others were people). The personal and ideological conflicts have come to be expressed in administrative behaviors that some may find difficult to reconcile with a core understanding of the Commissioners’ official responsibilities.
Center for Individual Freedom: Overreach at the IRS (podcast)
Scott Blackburn, Research Fellow at the Center for Competitive Politics, discusses the continuing saga involving the IRS as speech police, why tax collectors shouldn’t decide if an organization is a political committee or a social-welfare group, and recent developments in the campaign finance arena.
Supreme Court
Arizona Republic: Gilbert church wins: Supreme Court strikes down sign ordinance
Parker Leavitt
The court ruling makes it more difficult for governments to treat signs differently based on their content, like Gilbert did when providing more leeway for political and ideological signs but less for church signs directing the public to Sunday services.
That decision has far-reaching implications for most cities and local governments across the nation, where similar sign regulations will come under renewed scrutiny, experts say.
“It’s almost universal,” said Lisa Soronen, executive director of the State Local Legal Center in Washington, D.C. “A majority of cities will now have to make some sort of change.”
“Money in Politics”
Wall Street Journal: Influence of Money in Politics a Top Concern for Voters
Patrick O’Connor
Democrats were most likely to cite the influence of corporations and wealthy individuals as the top concern, with roughly half of self-described liberals and Democratic primary voters ranking it as their primary anxiety as the 2016 White House race gears up. Only 21% of core Republican voters said it was their top concern.
Republicans, meanwhile, are more worried about the tone of the campaign, with a plurality of 37% saying they worry most about the emphasis on negative advertising at the expense of more substantive policy debates. The influence of wealthy donors was the primary concern for independents, according to the survey.
Disclosure
The Guardian: Secretive donors gave US climate denial groups $125m over three years
Suzanne Goldenberg and Helena Bengtsson
The amount is close to half of the anonymous funding disbursed to rightwing groups, underlining the importance of the climate issue to US conservatives.
The anonymous cash flow came from two secretive organisations – the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – that have been called the “Dark Money ATM” of the conservative movement.
FEC
Associated Press: FEC sues Utah businessman over donations to 2 US senators
The FEC’s lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, says Jeremy Johnson gave tens of thousands of dollars to friends, family members and employees to make “straw donations” to the three in violation of campaign finance laws. Federal law limited campaign contributions to $2,400 per person each election at the time.
Johnson is accused of donating some $100,000 to Shurtleff, $50,000 to Lee and $20,000 to Reid to protect his business interests from federal prosecution.
Candidates and Campaign
Bloomberg: A New ‘Pro-Rand Paul’ Super-PAC is Making Paul’s Official Super-PAC Nervous
David Weigel
The phone calls were confounding, until they multiplied. People at the top of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s network were being asked about a new group that wanted to turn donations into campaign wins. What, they asked, was the Concerned American Voters super-PAC?
The short answer: A headache. The new iteration of the CAV super-PAC is the child of a movement that mostly helps but sometimes bedevils Rand Paul. It was relaunched this week, with much fanfare, when long-time FreedomWorks CEO Matt Kibbe announced that he’d left the Tea Party group to become a senior PAC advisor. The new PAC would try to organize Iowa for Paul, starting with 40-full time organizers. Kibbe’s goal, he told reporter Byron Tau, was to prevent 2016 from being another “train wreck for the GOP” by out-organizing the Republican establishment.
Denver Post: Sanders delivers blistering condemnation of business, billionaires
John Frank
Sanders said he is “creating a political movement of millions of people who stand up and loudly and proudly proclaim that this nation and our government belongs to of all of us and not just a handful of billionaires.”
But his stance on particular issues is likely to alienate some Democrats. Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, vowed to break up large banks, offer government-paid health care and overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United campaign finance case, replacing it with public funding of elections.
The States
USA Today: Ex-governor scandal prompts Ore. ethics overhaul effort
Tracy Loew
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is proposing a major overhaul of the state’s policies on public records, public officials and ethics.
Not yet three weeks into office, Brown has developed a package of legislation she hopes to introduce soon.
“Oregon’s government belongs to its people,” Brown told the (Salem, Ore.) Statesman Journal editorial board Tuesday.
Arizona Republic: Michele Reagan’s disappointing trip to the dark side
Laurie Roberts
As secretary of state, Reagan is no longer fighting the forces of darkness. It seems she’s had a “dose of reality” and no longer believes the state can require dark-money groups to disclose who’s bankrolling an increasing number of big-money campaigns to get us to vote a certain way.
“The worst thing you can do is tell people something that they want to hear, knowing it can’t be done,” she said last week, during a meeting with the Arizona Republic editorial board. “Yes, I tried. I ran a bill and in running the bill, I learned what can happen on the state level and the state Legislature regarding disclosure of these groups and what can’t happen.”
