In the News

Santa Fe New Mexican: Both sides in ‘dark money’ debate voice concerns at hearing

By Andrew Oxford

Opponents and some supporters of proposed rules to expand required disclosure of political spending agree on one thing: The regulations could reach beyond big-spending “dark money” groups.

The first of three public hearings on the rules proposed by Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver took place Thursday…

Tyler Martinez from the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit Virginia group that says its mission is to protect political speech, said he was concerned the proposed reporting requirements would be an added burden on nonprofits. Some nonprofits are permitted to engage in electioneering, as long as that isn’t their primary purpose.

The regulations “would mandate detailed record keeping and force groups to create multiple bank accounts and solicitations,” Martinez said in comments submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office.

The rules would “likely place a heavy burden … on any entity that speaks using the name of a candidate, including charities,” he said.

The rule could affect fundraising, he said, and force nonprofit groups to reject some anonymous donations.

CCP

The “NO PAC Caucus” is Another Misguided – and Revealing – Campaign to Squash Free Speech

By Joe Albanese

Representative Ro Khanna of California is forming a new caucus for lawmakers who pledge not to accept contributions from PACs or lobbyists. He has also introduced a bill (H.R. 1743) that would ban candidates for U.S. House or Senate from accepting any PAC contributions at all…

Nobody with any knowledge of campaign finance law or the First Amendment would ever argue that we could ban contributions from individuals to candidates. So why do PACs get singled out? Individuals have the right to express their opinions via political donations, and they do not forfeit that right by choosing to pool resources with other like-minded individuals. That’s all a PAC is – an organization that donors trust to pursue their common interests.

Of course, Congressman Khanna and his fellow caucus members are free to reject whatever contributions they want. Indeed, if they were to stop there and simply let voters decide whether accepting PAC money is a major issue that will determine who they vote for, it would allow the public to make their feelings clear without infringing on anybody’s First Amendment rights. Unfortunately, as is typical for lovers of regulation, it isn’t sufficient to keep individual decisions voluntary. Instead, Congressman Khanna wants to decide for everyone, through his legislation, who gets to participate in politics.

FEC

Bloomberg BNA: Little FEC Consensus on Moves to Combat Foreign Influence

By Kenneth P. Doyle

FEC commissioners found little consensus during a lengthy July 13 meeting on new measures to combat foreign influence in U.S. elections.

Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub pressed her colleagues to be more proactive in dealing with possible foreign intrusion in future elections, but other members said the Federal Election Commission should bide its time and pursue its traditional function of working through enforcement complaints regarding past alleged campaign finance violations…

Weintraub said her proposals to deal with foreign influence weren’t focused on past allegations but on efforts to prevent future problems.

She said the FEC should be holding more discussions with other agencies that are also dealing with the issue and should consider getting security clearances for commissioners and staff to help with that process…

Caroline Hunter, the FEC’s Republican vice chairwoman, said it wasn’t the proper role of the FEC to get involved in other agencies’ efforts.

“I have no intention of calling up Bob Mueller and asking if he needs my help or asking what he’s working on,” Hunter said. 

Daily Caller: Democrats At FEC Keep Accepting Foreign-Funded Trips

By Drew Johnson

Since 2002, the Federal Election Commission’s three Democratic members took at least 50 official trips during their combined time serving on the agency, according to documents obtained from public records and Freedom of Information Act requests. Expenses related to the trips were paid by a combination of foreign groups, governments, and by U.S. taxpayers through the agency’s own budget.

According to the records, which come from the Office of Governmental Ethics and FEC records published by The Hill’s Rudy Takala, none of the FEC’s three Republican commissioners have ever taken a single agency-related international trip while serving on the commission.

Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who has engaged in more sponsored trips than any of her colleagues, sought last month to stoke fears over the influence that she said foreign money could have had on the 2016 election, claiming that Russia might have bought ads on Facebook aimed at influencing the American electorate.

New York Times: Lawmakers Can Use Campaign Funds for Home Security, F.E.C. Says

By Nicholas Fandos

The Federal Election Commission, after some debate, said on Thursday that given the threats, it would approve that use, so long as the improvements were “nonstructural.”

The commission unanimously authorized the use of campaign funds to pay for only the installation or upgrade, and the monitoring costs, of cameras, sensors, distress devices and similar security devices in and around lawmakers’ residences. Lawmakers will be required to report those expenses to the commission, but it did not set a cap on how much a lawmaker could spend on the security systems…

The principal objections to the commission’s opinion initially came from Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democrat, who said she worried that the decision could open the door to a bevy of abuses and questioned why lawmakers did not simply allocate government funds for the cost of home security.

“I do have some concerns,” Ms. Weintraub said, “about the limiting principles. How far could this rationale be used? Could somebody, for example, say, I feel unsafe in my current home, so I need to move to a gated community, and I need to use campaign funds to pay the higher rent and mortgage?” 

PBS NewsHour: Watchdog groups file complaint with FEC accusing Donald Trump Jr. of breaking campaign finance law

By Daniel Bush

The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by PBS NewsHour, argues that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign committee broke campaign finance law by soliciting contributions from a foreign national or foreign government when Trump Jr., former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner agreed to the meeting.

Trump Jr. “violated the ban on knowingly soliciting a contribution from a foreign national by arranging and attending a meeting to request and accept what he understood to be a valuable in-kind contribution to his father’s presidential campaign in the form of opposition research on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government,” the complaint said.

The complaint was filed by the advocacy groups Common Cause, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21. Paul S. Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, and Catherine Hinckley Kelley, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, also signed onto the complaint.

Privacy

Goldwater Institute: An Informed Citizenry: Broadening The “Media Exemption” to Include Nonprofit Communications

By Jon Riches

When nonprofits discuss matters of public concern, they are increasingly required to disclose the names, addresses, and other private information about their donors, ostensibly to ensure corporations and other organizations are not anonymously influencing public policy. The media, on the other hand, enjoys broad exemptions from these sorts of disclosure requirements and other campaign finance laws, despite the fact that some of the asserted government interests in mandating donor disclosure apply with even greater force to media activities than to those of the nonprofit world. This difference in treatment is unprincipled and unworkable. It also raises important and unresolved areas of First Amendment law that must eventually come to a head at the U.S. Supreme Court. Litigants should seek ways to broaden protections that currently apply to media organizations but not to nonprofits, and legislators should work to ensure that both the media and nonprofit sectors can work freely to inform the public about the salient issues of our time.

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The Courts

Fortune: Why I’m Suing President Trump for Blocking Me on Twitter

By Eugene Gu

While many may feel that it is a badge of honor to be blocked by the president, it certainly does not feel like that to me. In fact, it feels isolating. Millions of Americans have access to a public forum from which I am now excluded.

Holly Figueroa O’Reilly, another Twitter user blocked by Trump, introduced me to Katie Fallow, lead attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. After discussing my situation with Fallow, I agreed to join a lawsuit against the president to unblock me and many others. We believe it is a violation of our First Amendment rights for the president to exclude us from viewing and responding to his tweets…

While America’s founding fathers may not have envisioned something like Twitter, they certainly knew the importance of free speech to a democracy. They would have been outraged if the president could ban an American citizen from reading his announcements in a newspaper or book.

New York Times: Sheldon Silver’s 2015 Corruption Conviction Is Overturned

By Benjamin Weiser

A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned the 2015 corruption conviction of Sheldon Silver, once the powerful speaker of the New York State Assembly, saying the judge’s jury instructions were in error in light of a United States Supreme Court decision that has since narrowed the legal definition of corruption.

Mr. Silver was convicted on charges that he had obtained nearly $4 million in illicit payments in return for taking a series of official actions that benefited others. But in the jury instructions, the judge’s explanation of an official action was too broad, the appeals court found, because it swept in some conduct that the Supreme Court’s decision would now exclude.

Federal prosecutors quickly vowed to retry the case, noting that the appeals court said that the evidence against Mr. Silver was legally sufficient to support a conviction.

Congress

JD Supra: U.S. House Considering Change to Enforcement of Trade Association PAC Rules

By Rebecca Gordon and Courtney Weisman

A bill currently being considered by the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations could significantly alter the way trade associations may solicit contributions for their political action committees (PACs) in fiscal year 2018.

Federal law currently requires a trade association to seek written permission from a member company before soliciting the member’s employees for contributions to the trade association’s PAC. While most companies are members of more than one trade association, each member company can only authorize one trade association per calendar year to solicit its employees. This often has the effect of eliminating a significant number of otherwise-eligible employees of member companies from a trade association PAC’s donor pool.

However, if the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations draft bill were to become law, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) could no longer enforce this restriction in fiscal year 2018…

Practically speaking, this would allow trade association PACs to solicit contributions from the restricted class employees, executives and stockholders of all of their member corporations and their families, and membership corporations would not be limited to selecting just one trade association per  year.

The States

Albuquerque Journal: Former FEC member pushes transparency

By Dan Boyd

A former member of the Federal Election Commission is in New Mexico for several days to meet with local groups and officials about an effort to enact election-related disclosure rules.

Ann Ravel, who resigned from the FEC in March, said Thursday that gridlock at the federal agency has hampered enforcement efforts. Largely for that reason, she said it will largely be up to states to take the lead in requiring more disclosure of political spending and donors.

“I really think disclosure and transparency are incredibly important to the people,” she told the Journal.

Ravel’s visit to New Mexico comes as Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver is proposing new campaign spending rules that would trigger more disclosure from groups that spend significant sums of money in state elections, among other things.

However, Ravel did not attend a Thursday hearing on the proposed rules and said the timing of her trip is coincidental. She’s working on a separate disclosure-related amendment to the state Constitution, she said, along with similar efforts in other states.