In the News
Cleveland Plain Dealer: Ohio’s false statement law impedes political discourse
By Scott Blackburn
In the recent unanimous Supreme Court decision, Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, the court expressed deep skepticism about this type of political gamesmanship and ruled that a lower court erred in refusing to even consider whether the law is unconstitutional. The law, quite simply, puts bureaucrats (whose salaries are controlled by incumbents) in a position of declaring the validity of ads run against their bosses in the General Assembly or in the governor’s mansion. The court case was about the right of individuals to defend themselves from efforts to silence their speech.
But the reason these abusive campaign tactics occur in the first place is because the law requires that regulators accomplish an almost impossible task – arbitrating truth from falsehood in some of our nation’s oldest and most divisive political debates. What chance is there that a bureaucrat can get it right?
Even the so-called “experts” at determining political truths often fail.
In 2012, PolitiFact, a site whose sole purpose is to reveal factual inaccuracies made by politicians, rated President Barack Obama’s claim that, “If you’re one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance,” as Half True. In 2013, an almost identical claim received PolitiFact’saward for “Lie of the year.” Was the president’s statement false? If the question had been brought before the Ohio Elections Commission in 2012, how would it have ruled? Would the commission have changed its ruling a year later?
Amending the First Amendment
Townhall: Let Us Now Praise Democratic Hypocrisy
By Jonah Goldberg
“We should not mess with the Constitution. We should not tamper with the Constitution,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared when opposing a victims’ rights amendment in 2000.
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) cried in protest to notion that birthright citizenship should be revoked: “I think it’s horribly dangerous to open up the Constitution, to tamper with the Constitution.”
“I respect the wisdom of the founders to uphold the Constitution, which has served this nation so well for the last 223 years,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) proclaimed from the saddle of his very high horse in 2011, in opposition to a balanced budget amendment proposal. “Let us not be so vain to think we know better than the Founders what the Constitution should prescribe.”
Washington Examiner: Harry Reid sets up vote on campaign finance reform
By SEAN LENGELL
“Once again, Washington Democrats have forgotten that the First Amendment is meant to empower the people, not the government, and to prevent politicians from shutting down the voices of those who disagree with them,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Friday.
McConnell also said Reid’s Friday move showcased the Democrats’ warped priorities.
“At a moment of multiple domestic and international crises it is nothing short of astonishing that the Democrats who control the U.S. Senate would prioritize shutting down the voices of their critics ahead of resolving the real challenges we face,” the Kentuckian said.
IRS
Daily Caller: ProPublica And The Problem With Journalism
By Patrick Maines
In addition to its transparent ideological affinities, ProPublica has also been implicated in the IRS scandal. Though it attracted very little media attention, in November 2012 the IRS improperly gave (or someone leaked to) ProPublica the tax-exempt application forms of nine conservative groups, including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, that had not yet been given tax-exempt status.
Shortly thereafter, ProPublica published six of those applications, with their financial information redacted. And when, on May 10, 2013, Lois Lerner lit the fuse on a fire within the IRS that is burning still, ProPublica quickly published a story (and a week later a podcast) exonerating themselves of any blame, and retelling why the organization published these applications. (There was, according to ProPublica’s president, “a strong First Amendment interest.”)
Independent Groups
Wall Street Journal: Nine Decades at the Barricades
By James Taranto
James L. Buckley belongs to an exclusive club. He is one of no more than 30 men in American history to have served in high office in all three branches of the U.S. government. His wide experience makes him a penetrating critic of contemporary American government. Yet his most important legacy may be the Supreme Court case in which he was lead plaintiff: Buckley v. Valeo, which tested the campaign-finance restrictions Congress enacted in Watergate’s wake.
At the time, Mr. Buckley was New York’s junior senator. In March 1974 he had become the second member of the Senate Republican Caucus (after Edward Brooke of Massachusetts), and the first conservative one, to urge that President Nixon step down—not, the senator took care to emphasize, because he presumed the president guilty but because he thought the Nixon presidency already damaged beyond repair. “Had he taken my advice right away, he’d have been saved a lot of embarrassment,” Mr. Buckley, 91, tells me over lunch at a restaurant near his home here. Instead, Nixon clung to power for nearly five months—the 40th anniversary of his resignation is Aug. 9.
Sen. Buckley’s prescience about Watergate did not make him sympathetic to his colleagues’ post-Watergate reforms—or as he puts it, “things labeled as reforms.” Among them were the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, which limited both spending by and contributions to candidates for federal office.
Huffington Post: Campaign Finance Reformers Regroup With New Goal: To ‘Win The Debate On Solutions’
By Paul Blumenthal
WASHINGTON — Campaign finance reformers are taking their policy efforts to the hustings, raising millions of dollars in an unprecedented push to support candidates in the November elections. Among these groups, the pioneer of this electoral strategy is adjusting its tactics to advance campaign finance reform across the country. (Note: Emphasis added)
For the past decade, the Public Campaign Action Fund, headed by executive director David Donnelly, has pushed both to elect campaign finance reform supporters and to pass federal and state legislation authorizing public financing of electoral efforts. Now, with a broader mission and new funds, the group is merging with its affiliated super PAC, Friends of Democracy, and changing its name to Every Voice.
The Advertiser: Political parties should have equal footing in campaign finance world
By Stephen Handwerk and Jason Doré
Pretend for a minute you are a parish-level party leader. Working for the party isn’t your full-time job, but a part-time passion and a way to make a difference in your community. There’s an important election for the U.S. Senate coming up, and your parish party wants to print up some signs to put alongside the roadways in your area.
Should be easy enough, right? Design the sign, find someone to print them up and spend an afternoon on the weekend setting them up.
Not so fast.
Before you do any of that, you’ll need to hire a federal elections attorney to make sure you’re in compliance with all manner of arcane rules and regulations. That costs money — probably a lot more than the signs themselves.
The Advertiser: Campaign finance laws need to be rethought
The campaign finance laws at the state and federal levels were created with the intention of reducing the possibility of corruption. They were also intended to ensure that all candidates had a fair shot at being elected — not just the affluent and well-connected who could pull in large contributions.
But with the rise of super PACs, which are not subject to the same rules, the formerly (at least theoretically) level playing field has become uneven once again.
The solution is simple: Don’t just loosen campaign finance regulations — pitch ’em altogether.
Washington Post: Yet another super PAC is using big money to take on big money
By Matea Gold
CounterPAC is running full-page newspaper ads in Atlanta, Anchorage and Charleston, W.Va., as part of a campaign to pressure candidates to reject spending by groups with murky sources of funding. The super PAC says it will “act as the arbiter and enforcer of the pledge,” which is modeled after a similar agreement between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown in the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race to reject outside spending on their behalf.
Candidates who sign the CounterPAC Pledge must give 50 percent of any money spent on their behalf by a group with undisclosed donors to a charity of their opponent’s choice.
NY Times: The Custom-Made ‘Super PAC’
Editorial
Attention, parents of political candidates. There is now a way to spend an unlimited amount on your child’s campaign for Congress, completely ignoring that annoying $2,600 legal limit on what you can give. All you do is set up a “super PAC” for your kid and start writing checks. It’s not much harder than that 529 account you used for the same kid’s college education.
That’s what Martine Rothblatt, the founder of Sirius Satellite Radio, did for her son, Gabriel Rothblatt, who is running as a Democrat for a Florida congressional seat against a three-term incumbent. A group calling itselfSpace PAC has spent $58,000, so far, in promoting Mr. Rothblatt’s campaign. It has raised $225,000, all of it from Martine Rothblatt.
Candidates, Politicians, Campaigns, and Parties
NY Times: Congress Off for the Exits, but Few Cheer
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and ASHLEY PARKER
By traditional measurements, the 113th Congress is now in a race to the bottom with the 112th for the “do nothing” crown, with members of both parties frustrated about the lack of action. As of Wednesday, it had passed just 142 laws — 34 of them ceremonial — compared to the 151 passed by the same date by the last Congress, which produced fewer laws than any in history. The original “do nothing” Congress of 1947 and 1948 passed 906.
State and Local
New York –– Politico: Cuomo’s M.O. haunting him now
By Maggie Haberman
Andrew Cuomo is having the roughest stretch of his political career since flaming out of the New York governor’s race in 2002. In the years since, he’s developed a reputation as a hard-charging corruption-buster who’s often seen as a top-tier presidential prospect.
The mess is almost entirely of his own making.
There are fresh headlines every day about the commission he created to crack down on political corruption — then shut down, prompting a probe by aggressive Manhattan federal prosecutor Preet Bharara.
