In the News
CPI: The next ‘Citizens United’ is coming
Carrie Levine
When asked by the Center for Public Integrity, campaign finance lawyers were more tentative when naming other cases that could bring sweeping change, and forecasting which cases have the potential to reach the U.S. Supreme Court…
One, Delaware Strong Families v. Denn, involves a Delaware law that requires groups to reveal their donors’ identities if they spend $500 or more in a single election cycle on advertising that refers to specific candidates. The disclosure requirements apply even if the ads don’t explicitly urge people to vote for or against a specific candidate.
“The Delaware law is pretty radical, and I think if the court accepted it, I think we’d win. I think we’d see a lot of support across the ideological spectrum for limiting the reach or striking down the Delaware law,” predicted David Keating, the president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which favors less regulation of campaign finance. “Good grief, they’re regulating nonpartisan voter guides.”
Independent Groups
Bloomberg: New Super-PAC Launches for Donors Who Won’t Back Trump But Loathe Clinton
Joshua Green and Zachary Mider
Robert Mercer, the GOP mega-donor and co-founder of Renaissance Technologies hedge fund who once backed Texas Senator Ted Cruz, is launching a super-PAC with a novel twist to get establishment-minded donors off the sidelines. The new project will informally be dubbed the “Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC” and, despite its Trumpian name, will focus solely on attacking Clinton, not boosting Trump. The idea is that conservative donors reluctant to support Trump can still donate in good conscience to a super-PAC that only attacks Clinton. “It’s a way to participate without [directly] supporting Trump,” says a source involved in the super-PAC’s creation.
Mercer’s new anti-Hillary vehicle is actually a refurbished version of Keep the Promise PAC, a pro-Cruz super-PAC that Mercer and his daughter Rebekah poured $13.5 million into during the primaries.
CNN: Why do dozens of GOP super PACs have the same official address?
Chris Moody
So why would several groups all have the same address? The answer is not nearly as titillating: Marston’s business, Election CFO, contracts with dozens of campaigns and political action committees to provide services that including filling out their financial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission and handle accounting. It’s a common practice for political groups to contract out such work to experts trained in navigating the complicated campaign finance regulations.
“People just hire me to be their treasurer,” Marston told CNN in an interview at his home office in Alexandria. “I do accounting. Honest to goodness I really just write the checks and make the deposits.”
Donor Privacy
The Hill: Donor privacy is dark money? Nonsense!
Roger Craver and Mark Fitzgibbons
Opponents of the bill, however, have decried its backing by Koch-funded organizations, claiming it is intended to protect “dark money” in politics. We reply: Nonsense!
The bill protects donors to homeless shelters, food banks, battered spouse refuges, veterans assistance programs, animal rescues, organizations educating about and litigating to protect civil liberties, and any other tax-exempt cause or charity with a 501(c)(3) designation. While doing private good to aid those in need in our society, some of these organizations are also essential educators and advocates about public policy, and sometimes they say or do things our current political leaders don’t like.
By lumping in donors to these causes protected under the donor privacy bill with what they claim to be a bad influence in politics, opponents disparage true and worthy beneficence done for purposes of conscience. And what is America without protecting rights of conscience?
IRS
Washington Post: The IRS probes represented much more than simple incompetence (LTE)
Walter Olson
As the Associated Press reported in 2012, the IRS demanded of local conservative civic groups “voluminous details about the groups’ postings on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, information on donors and key members’ relatives and copies of all literature they have distributed to their members” — demands going far beyond what had ordinarily been asked of 501(c)(4) groups.
Groups that might have a dozen or fewer active members were asked for transcripts of leaders’ speeches and radio appearances, printouts of all Facebook output, disclosure of every donor name matched to what their donations had been used for, and on and on. Even when groups tried to comply, they would find their applications stalled without a denial or explanation, making it difficult to challenge the agency in court.
Selecting certain political groups as targets for review was bad enough. The extraordinarily burdensome and intrusive demands placed on those groups are hard to explain within the editorial board’s preferred theory of mere inadvertence and bad luck.
Political Parties
More Soft Money Hard Law: Reform and the “Chaos Syndrome”
Bob Bauer
In an article just published in Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch argues that modern political reform has contributed to a disastrously weakened capacity for responsible, functional self-governance. The damage has been done to critically needed intermediary institutions, such as parties, whose effectiveness depend on allowances and practices now associated with old-style politics: less transparency in the conduct of government business, more resources for parties and their leadership, more of a role for party leaders and elites in screening candidates, and more flexibility for congressional leaders to utilize tools like “pork” to induce cohesion in the legislative ranks. The result of the change has been what he calls “chaos syndrome.”
Campaign Finance Abroad
Vox: John Oliver’s anti-Brexit rant won’t air in the UK until after polls close
Katherine Hicks
Last Week Tonight typically airs on the British television network Sky Atlantic on Monday nights. The latest episode, which includes Oliver’s 15-minute rant on the Brexit referendum, has been pushed back to air Thursday night at 10:10 pm, after polls have closed. This means UK voters might not see Oliver’s argument until it is no longer relevant.
In a statement, a Sky Atlantic spokesperson said the move comes in response to broadcast neutrality rules:
“Sky have complied with the Ofcom broadcasting restrictions at times of elections and referendums that prohibit us showing this section of [Last Week Tonight] at this moment in time. We will be able to show it once the polls close have closed on Thursday”
Influence
Politico: Apple’s Cook to host Paul Ryan fundraiser amid Trump woes
Tony Romm
Cook is hosting the fundraiser on his own accord, as Apple does not have a corporate political action committee like Facebook, Google and other tech giants in Silicon Valley. Still, the move reflects Apple’s desire to court Republican and Democratic officeholders alike, even at a time when it has serious reservations about Trump, the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee.
Trump’s incendiary remarks about women, immigrants and minorities led Apple to decide against donating cash and technology to the GOP’s convention in Cleveland next month, according to two sources, who revealed the company’s thinking to POLITICO on Saturday. Apple had provided such aid to Democratic and Republican nominating events in previous years.
Candidates and Campaigns
CPI: Hillary Clinton crushing Donald Trump in White House cash dash
Michael Beckel, Dave Levinthal, Carrie Levine, and Cady Zuvich
$173,597,679: The amount by which Clinton’s campaign has outraised that of Trump during the 2016 election. Entering June, Clinton’s fundraising machine had pulled in more than three-and-a-half times as much money as Trump’s. She had raised about $238 million for her campaign (not counting supportive super PACs), while Trump had collected about $65 million — largely from his own money. Most recent polls give Clinton a modest lead in the presidential race, although Trump has praised his campaign’s thriftiness. “I spend much less money than her and the results so far [are] the same. I should be credited for that,” Trump told FOX News host Bill O’Reilly Monday night.
Business Insider: Donald Trump defends dismal campaign finance report: ‘I understand money better than anybody’
Pamela Engel
“I understand money better than anybody,” Trump told “Today” on Tuesday. “I understand it far better than Hillary, and I’m way up on the economy when it comes to questions on the economy. But we have a party that, I mean, I’m having more difficulty, frankly, with some of the people in the party than I am with the Democrats because they’re just, they don’t want to come on.”
Huffington Post: The Story Behind The Weird ‘Mad Men’ Firm That Donald Trump Is Using
Sam Stein
Documents show the Trump campaign made four payments totaling $35,000 to a firm called Draper Sterling.
The name alone was enough to turn heads. Any self-respecting “Mad Men” fan would recognize it as a cheap rip-off of the acclaimed show. But the firm Trump is using for web advertising purposes isn’t located on Madison Avenue. It’s based in Londonderry, New Hampshire, on a pleasant residential street. It isn’t even an office. Rather, it’s a recently purchased four-room home occupied by a man who owns a cafe in a nearby town.
How did this place become a small hub for Trump for President activity?
That’s not entirely clear but there are some intriguing political connections to the firm and equally intriguing theories to explain its existence.
The States
New York Times: The Old Albany Hustle
Editorial Board
After a lackluster legislative season, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared on Sunday that he and state lawmakers had managed to finish “probably the most successful session in modern history.” That is not only wrong, but ridiculous.
The most urgent and important item on the Legislature’s to-do list this year should have been reforming a debased political culture that most recently resulted in the convictions of New York’s top two legislative leaders — the former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the former Senate leader Dean Skelos. Mr. Silver was sentenced to 12 years in prison for receiving kickbacks, honest services fraud and extortion. Mr. Skelos earned five years in prison for bribery, extortion and conspiracy.
Instead of seizing the moment to enact reforms, New York’s politicians left intact one of the state’s great campaign financing scams — the so-called L.L.C. loophole.
