In the News

Rio Grande Foundation: July 8, 2017 Edition of RGF Weekly Radio Show

Paul sits down with Scott Blackburn from the Center for Competitive Politics to discuss efforts by New Mexico’s secretary of State to force organizations like Rio Grande Foundation to disclose their donors. They talk about campaign finance issues and why average Americans might not want to be listed in government databases. 

The Courts

Washington Post: U.S. judge set to hear new challenge to Trump voter commission Tuesday

By Spencer S. Hsu

A federal judge will hear arguments Tuesday over whether a Watergate-era law prohibiting the government from collecting data on how Americans exercise their First Amendment rights bars President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission from American’s voting records.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District set the hearing Monday after Common Cause, a nonprofit government watchdog group, alleged that the Trump administration was violating the Privacy Act of 1974 by seeking the “quintessentially First Amendment-protected political party affiliation and voter history data” of every American…

In a statement, Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, said, “The commission cannot be trusted, it has already shifted its explanation on where, and how, this First Amendment protected data will be stored. This is an attempt to evade post-Watergate privacy laws and undermines our electoral system and the privacy rights of millions of Americans.”

Congress

BillMoyers.com: The Latest Sneaky Attempt to Increase Corporate Political Power

By John Light

The riders attached to the appropriations bill take aim at how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) enforce campaign finance law.

In the case of the two aimed at the IRS and the SEC, Republicans are seeking to keep the agency from increasing transparency. The politicians behind these measures want to make sure the IRS never cracks down on the wealthy interest that are anonymously passing money through tax exempt non profit groups…

The SEC-related rider would make sure that that agency – Washington’s top cop on the financial beat – never forces corporations to disclose to their shareholders when they are using their money to fund political candidates or causes.

Finally – in good congressional form – the rider aimed at the FEC is both the most complicated and, according to watchdog groups who have been sounding the alarm, the most insidious. At the moment, only one trade association at a time can ask the employees of a corporation for money. The rider would bar the FEC from enforcing this rule in 2018, allowing every trade association under the sun to receive money from a given corporation during that year.

Associated Press: Senators seek tougher law for lobbyists for foreign govts

A group of Democratic senators is introducing legislation to crack down on lobbyists who fail to disclose their work on behalf of foreign governments.

The legislation being introduced Monday would ensure the Justice Department has the authority to impose civil financial penalties on lobbyists who fail to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The bill is being introduced by Illinois senators Tammy Duckworth and Richard Durbin and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

The foreign agents statute has received attention this year because several associates of President Donald Trump have belatedly disclosed their lobbying work. That includes campaign chairman Paul Manafort and fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The Justice Department rarely prosecutes people for failing to register, with officials saying they prefer to seek voluntary compliance.

Free Speech

Washington Post: For Facebook, erasing hate speech proves a daunting challenge

By Tracy Jan and Elizabeth Dwoskin

The 13-year-old social network is wrestling with the hardest questions it has ever faced as the de facto arbiter of speech for the third of the world’s population that now logs on each month…

The company says it now ­deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month.

But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.

The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the ­social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues…   

“Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”

The company recently admitted, in a blog post, that “too often we get it wrong,” particularly in cases when people are using certain terms to describe hateful experiences that happened to them. The company has promised to hire 3,000 more content moderators before the year’s end, bringing the total to 7,500, and is looking to improve the software it uses to flag hate speech, a spokeswoman said.

The States

Washington Post: Getting more people engaged in D.C. elections

By Councilmember Kenyan R. McDuffie

The Fair Elections Act of 2017 would establish a voluntary, limited public matching-funds program for qualified candidates running for elected office in the District…

A matching-funds program would strengthen our democracy by empowering D.C. residents who now are underrepresented.

Currently, the people who largely fund D.C. elections do not reflect the beautiful diversity of our city. Donors tend to be whiter, wealthier, older and more male than the District’s population. A study by Demos of the 2014 election found that, while white people make up 37 percent of the District’s population, 62 percent of mayoral donors and 67 percent of D.C. Council donors are white.

Candidates who do not have a wealthy network of friends are at a disadvantage when facing candidates with a broad and well-financed network. The disparity is even more pronounced when considering citywide races, in which donor limits increase. We can address this with the Fair Elections Act so that the people who fund our elections reflect the people who live and vote in the District.

Michigan Capitol Confidential: State Drops Links To Left-Leaning Political Websites After Inquiry

By Tom Gantert

The Center for Public Integrity advertises itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C.

Its board of directors contains a who’s Who of liberal news organizations. The board includes Arianna Huffington, who launched the liberal Huffington Post; Jennifer Lee, a former New York Times reporter; Amit Paley, former Washington Post reporter; Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a senior editor of the far-left Mother Jones magazine; and Matt Thompson, former editorial manager at National Public Radio.

Yet, until recently, Michigan’s Secretary of State office had linked to websites of the Center for Public Integrity and two other advocacy organizations on the state’s webpage on campaign finance.

The Secretary of State also linked to the websites of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, both nonpartisan nonprofits.

Once the Secretary of State was notified of the questionable links, the office removed those groups from the page.

Kansas City Star: Greitens faces more ‘dark money’ questions over no-bid contract with Express Scripts

By Jason Hancock

To start the program, Greitens’ administration was giving a no-bid contract to Express Scripts, a St. Louis-based pharmacy benefits management company that donated an undisclosed amount of money to the governor’s inauguration.

“When you’ve got the governor taking money from Express Scripts and not disclosing how much, and then giving Express Scripts a contract, it seems to me to have the air of impropriety. It really raises red flags for me,” said Sen. Rob Schaaf, a St. Joseph Republican and frequent critic of the governor.

The governor, along with Express Scripts, is adamant there is nothing inappropriate about the contract.

But it’s become a familiar accusation, one that’s dogged Greitens throughout his nearly eight months in office: That secret campaign contributions could be influencing the governor’s actions.

His critics say this is the unavoidable byproduct of the governor’s reliance on so-called dark money – contributions routed through nonprofits to hide the original source of the money…

“The problem is everyone in the country thinks government is rigged against them,” said John Pudner, executive director of Take Back Our Republic, a conservative government reform group.

Kansas City Star: Gov. Eric Greitens is behaving just like those ‘corrupt career politicians’

By Editorial Board

Moments after he became the state’s 56th governor, he signed an executive order banning administration employees from accepting lobbyist gifts. That night, the governor danced to “Missouri Waltz” at a ball paid for by corporations and lobbyists.

That was a bad omen, and things have only gotten worse. Just last week The Star reported that the governor’s nonprofit, A New Missouri Inc., donated $250,000 to a political action committee that’s working to protect Missouri’s new right-to-work law.

Where that $250,000 came from may never be known.

This is what happens when voters try to wring money out of politics. Insiders like Greitens find ways to get around donation limits. The forming of nonprofits does the trick quite nicely.

Instead of leading on ethics, Greitens is now leading the way around the new limits.