In the News
Vote Smart: Campaign Finance: Free Speech, or Another Platform for Corruption?
Haley Engle
Some political analysts, such as Paul Jacob, have suggested that it is in America’s best interest to actually decrease campaign funding regulations even further. According to Jacob, though the current system allows the potential for a group of wealthy donors to fund campaigns that would otherwise flop, the voters still ultimately decide on each candidacy.
On a similar note, Bradley Smith says that the best solution to the campaign finance debate is to simply embrace the higher spending. He says that in this case, “the cure is worse than the disease”. Before Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, the concept of regulating campaign finance was virtually non-existent. Smith argues that legislative responses to the increase in “big money” have done next to nothing to prevent it from continuing, therefore we are better off allowing money to send a mass message.
Free Speech
Wall Street Journal: How the Exxon Case Unraveled
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of Exxon Mobil for climate sins has collapsed due to its own willful dishonesty. The posse of state AGs he pretended to assemble never really materialized. Now his few allies are melting away: Massachusetts has suspended its investigation. California apparently never opened one.
The U.S. Virgin Islands has withdrawn its sweeping, widely criticized subpoena of research groups and think tanks. In an email exposed by a private lawsuit, one staffer of the Iowa AG’s office tells another that Mr. Schneiderman himself was “the wild card.”…
In an Aug. 19 interview with the New York Times, Mr. Schneiderman now admits this approach has come a cropper. He reveals that he’s no longer focusing on what Exxon knew/said but instead on how it goes about valuing its current oil reserves.
Washington Free Beacon: NY Attorney General Accused of Skirting Public Records Law
Lachlan Markay
The New York AG’s office denied its open records request, claiming it imperiled ongoing enforcement proceedings and would compromise the integrity of its legal strategy by exposing confidential attorney-client communications.
CEI’s lawsuit is challenging that decision.
“None of the reasons Schneiderman claimed for withholding these documents are legitimate under New York law,” said Sam Kazman, the group’s general counsel, in a statement announcing the new lawsuit.
“The public deserves to know what this AG, and the other AGs cooperating with him, agreed to when it came to targeting their political opponents, and that’s why we sought the Common Interest Agreement in the first place,” Kazman said.
Los Angeles Times: Bill to ban behind-the-scenes communications with coastal commissioners is defeated in the Assembly
Dan Weikel
A bill to ban behind-the-scenes communications at the California Coastal Commission went down to defeat in the Assembly on Wednesday night after facing strong opposition from labor, business groups and development interests.
The bill sought to prohibit so-called ex parte contacts that occur outside official public meetings between coastal commissioners and developers, lobbyists, environmentalists and other parties with a stake in commission business…
Before the vote, opponents of the bill said the ban would muzzle free speech by preventing interested parties, such as labor representatives, developers and environmentalists, from expressing their views to commission members.
Independent Groups
City-Journal: Schneiderman v. Madison
Myron Magnet
Now, Schneiderman has doubled down on his assault on the First Amendment. As overseer of the state’s nonprofit corporations, he decreed that 501(c)(4) advocacy groups must disclose the names of all donors of more than $5,000, and federal district judge Sidney Stein has just upheld his rule against a challenge from conservative nonprofit Citizens United. Citizens United argued that its donors’ First Amendment rights were being infringed, since having their names disclosed would expose them to possible backlash in ultra-left-wing New York State. This is not a silly fear, as the donors to the 2008 campaign for Proposition 8, a successful California initiative outlawing same-sex marriage, discovered when death threats poured in and when boycotts of their businesses forced them out of their jobs. And that’s because ultra-left-wing California had also chilled free speech with a donor-disclosure diktat.
USA Today: With wink to super PACs, Ted Strickland pivots to women’s issues in Ohio
Deirdre Shesgreen
“In Cleveland and Columbus, voters need to know that when it comes to women and family issues, Portman stands with Trump,” the website states, referring to GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. “Both support overturning Roe v. Wade and making abortion against the law. They would defund Planned Parenthood, which so many women rely on for health services. They oppose a law requiring men and women be paid the same.”
Below that text is a link to stock video footage of Strickland engaging with voters, as soft piano music plays in the background.
Who were these items aimed at? Not Ohio voters or political reporters.
Instead, political experts say, Strickland’s campaign was sending a not-so-subtle message to super PACs, hoping for support in spreading his new women-directed message in the Cleveland and Columbus media markets.
Citizens United
Asbury Park Press: American elections under assault
Editorial Board
The Citizens United ruling isn’t alone in tainting American elections; various attempts over the years to reform and restrict campaign spending have run into free-speech obstacles and generated unintended consequences. Or they simply haven’t worked…
It would be nice to sit back and pretend that all the campaign advertising in the world won’t unduly warp the perceptions of an electorate that will manage to cut through the noise, separate fact from fiction and make the right call. But elections don’t work that way. Even well-intentioned voters with the time and inclination to do their own research can only find out so much about all of the ballot choices before them. The lies and distortions and carefully crafted images have their cumulative effect on the masses. The louder and more frequent the message, the more likely it is to be heard, and believed.
Influence
Vox: The Clinton Foundation is not a campaign finance problem
Mark Schmitt
The Clinton Foundation shouldn’t be judged by principles we apply to campaign contributions simply because they are not campaign contributions. Campaign spending is different, and singularly vulnerable to corruption. The $3 billion that both Clintons, together and separately, have raised for their political careers, or that politicians at every level spend much of each day soliciting, has a different hold on them than does money for a foundation and should be a much greater concern…
In Citizens United, the Court found that contributions made to independent organizations supporting a candidate did not have the same corrupting hold as direct contributions. That’s the decision’s big error. In reality, candidates are just as dependent on those independent expenditures and, in some recent elections, even more dependent than on their official campaign accounts.
New York Times: The Real Clinton Foundation Revelation
Richard W. Painter
This is not the typical foundation funded by family wealth earned by an industrialist or financier. This foundation was funded almost entirely by donors, and to the extent anyone in the Clinton family “earned” the money, it was largely through speaking fees for former President Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton when she was not secretary of state. This dependence on donations — a scenario remarkably similar to that of many political campaigns — means that the motivations of every single donor will be questioned whenever a President Clinton does anything that could conceivably benefit such donors.
The Hill: Experts poke holes in Clinton Foundation’s promised donor ban
Jonathan Swan
Watchdog groups are poking holes into former President Bill Clinton’s promise that his family’s foundation will stop taking foreign and corporate cash if his wife wins the presidency.
They say it would be relatively easy for foreign governments or individuals to funnel cash into the foundation during a Hillary Clinton presidency without the American public ever learning of the foreign influence — despite the former president’s promises outlined in an August 22 open letter published on the Clinton Foundation’s website.
Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of the non-partisan watchdog Common Cause, said there were “lots of different ways” that untraceable foreign money could reach the Clinton Foundation under the current broad terms of Bill Clinton’s promise.
The States
Los Angeles Times: New campaign donation disclosure rules rejected by the state Senate
John Myers
Lawmakers on Tuesday narrowly rejected an effort to create new disclosure rules for California political mailers and money gathered from several donors into a single contribution.
Assembly Bill 700 failed by a single vote in the state Senate, needing a supermajority of 27 senators to pass.
The complex campaign finance bill became ensnared in a disagreement this month over whether it represented more or less donor disclosure. The state’s Fair Political Practices Commission voted to oppose late amendments to AB 700 regarding the disclosure rules for “earmarked” contributions.
Sacramento Bee: Liberal allies spar over Planned Parenthood bill on secret videos
Alexei Koseff
“You might be inadvertently recording conversations and posting them online in ways that violate the wording of this law,” Baker said. “That’s the problem of the bill. It isn’t limited.”
With time running out before Wednesday’s legislative deadline, amendments are still being floated to win over skeptical members of the Senate, where AB 1671 awaits a vote.
“Everyone is supportive of Planned Parenthood, because it was a terrible thing that happened to them,” said Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley. But she doesn’t want to see a solution that punishes media organizations for exposing information that would benefit the public.
It’s become a complex question of First Amendment rights, Hancock said. “These are absolutely core values.”
Greenfield Recorder: Push is on for political finance reform
Richie Davis
Silver, who cut his teeth on campaign finance reform working on an Arizona public-funding law in 1998, says polls now show that provisions like campaign funding transparency and ethics reforms are supported by conservatives and liberals alike nationwide, but he acknowledges that public campaign funding — soundly shot down in Missouri and Oregon in 2000, after being approved in Arizona and Maine — is the “least popular” element and may “create too much drag politically.”
“We think we can pass comprehensive laws that include public funding at the ballot,” he says. “That’s the theory, and we’re testing that this year. If we win, that’s going to spark a domino effect across the country with comprehensive laws like this moving forward in ballot initiatives. If we lose, it proves that public funding cannot pass via ballot initiative. That just means we’ll be moving proposals without public funding in them.”
