In the News
The Hill: Activists twist Watergate to stigmatize corporate speech
Bradley A. Smith and Luke Wachob
It should go without saying that legal contributions to super PACs or nonprofits to publicize support for candidates or issues are not in the same arena as illegal contributions to candidates given in exchange for explicit favors.
Reputational risks should be considered in every decision companies make, from marketing their products to contributing to nonprofits. Politics is not unique in this respect. Companies may offend certain customers or shareholders by contributing to art museums that put up controversial displays, or theaters that perform controversial plays. Such offending content may even be political in nature.
In most cases, however, companies decide the benefits of being engaged in the community outweigh the risks. They understand that reasonable people will not hold them responsible for every action from every group that indirectly receives a penny from them. Indeed, polling has found that huge majorities believe it is appropriate for companies to engage in politics when their businesses are affected.
CCP
The NRA’s Political Spending is No Different From Any Other Group’s
Joe Albanese
What’s more, concerns about some of this spending being “dark money” (which has accounted for less than 5% of total political spending federally since 2010) are also overstated. There is an abundance of public information regarding what ads the NRA has run, which candidates those ads supported or opposed, and a litany of other information about its political activity, just as with every nonprofit that does not itemize its donations. For the political arms of the NRA, the names, addresses, occupations, and employers of citizens contributing more than $200 in an election cycle are also publicly disclosed.
Moreover, so-called “dark money” groups like the NRA, Planned Parenthood, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or the Sierra Club are well-known to anybody who follows politics even remotely. Their goals and positions are hardly unknown or unfamiliar – indeed, they tend to be explicitly stated on their websites.
In this sense, the NRA’s political activities are unremarkable when compared to the political activities of other organizations – after all, many groups spend as much or more on political activities, report their funding sources and targets to a similar extent, and single-mindedly focus on one issue area. The demonization of the NRA seems less the result of any wrongdoing regarding campaign finance, but rather because political speech restrictionists also happen to strongly disagree with the group’s views.
Analysis of Multnomah Co. Measure for 2016 General Election
CCP Staff
This November, the citizens of Multnomah County, Oregon – the county where the City of Portland is located – will be asked to approve “A Fair Elections and Clean Governance Charter Amendment” (“Amendment”). The Amendment may impact the First Amendment rights of all citizens of Multnomah County and nonprofit organizations in particular. Accordingly, the Center for Competitive Politics (“CCP”) provides the following analysis of some of the Amendment’s provisions affecting these groups as an informational guide to compliance issues to prepare and watch out for, if the Amendment is ultimately approved.
CCP takes no position on the merits of the Amendment as a whole, and emphasizes that the provisions on which this analysis focuses constitute only a small portion of the changes proposed by the measure…
Tax Financed Campaigns
Wall Street Journal: Taxpayer Political Financing by Decree
Editorial Board
The Democratic Party’s campaign to limit (some) money in politics has led to some bizarre outcomes, and in California lawmakers are on the verge of forcing voters to subsidize campaigns against their wishes. A bill now on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk would legalize public financing by “amending” a voter referendum that categorically banned public financing.
California’s Political Reform Act specifies that no taxpayer money may be spent by the government on political campaigns. The political spending provision, which passed by voter referendum in 1988, has governed for decades in the Golden State. No matter. Earlier this summer state lawmakers passed a bill to provide taxpayer funding while claiming simply to be clarifying the bill that outlaws it.
FEC
U.S. News & World Report: Debate for Democracy
Ann M. Ravel
Of course, money is necessary to any successful campaign. Candidates and political parties need to hire staff, organize and get their message out. Money is one of the means to inform voters about the issues in the campaign so that they can make their choices. The problem is not that there’s too much money, per se. Rather, one problem is that the vast majority of it comes from a tiny, wealthy and highly unrepresentative segment of people that may have disproportionate ability to influence policy. Another problem is that a substantial sum of it – hundreds of millions of dollars in recent elections – comes from undisclosed sources.
CRP: FEC stalemates on how to deal with foreign-owned companies spending in elections
Ashley Balcerzak
When the FEC took up the issue again at its public meeting Thursday, commissioners deadlocked on everything proposed — as they often do. The members disagreed about how far to wade into the issue: Democratic members wanted to create new rules, while Republicans thought clarifying existing law in a statement did the job. (Or as Chairman Matthew Petersen put it: “We shouldn’t burn down the house in order to roast the pig.”)
Republican Commissioner Lee Goodman drafted a document that walked through the legal framework and history of the foreign national ban, and how it applies to U.S. subsidiaries. It also extended a safe harbor rule for corporations. Super PACs, Carey committees and corporate PACs must sign a certification that ensures they aren’t knowingly accepting illegal foreign funds.
Democrats rejected the effort, saying they wanted something more binding (though they said they’d want to include these suggestions in the procedure to establish new rules).
Independent Groups
Washington Post: Super PAC tries to plug holes in Trump’s ground campaign
Julie Bykowicz
Great America PAC is rolling through some of campaign 2016’s most contested states, opening offices and registering voters. In a presidential race where Trump has paid little attention to the ground game, this outside group has decided the best way to support the GOP nominee is to take such matters into its own hands.
“We look at it as, how do we fix the missing pieces of the campaign?” said Ed Rollins, lead strategist for Great America.
The group is using a different playbook — both in how it raises and spends money — than the usual super PAC. It has struggled to land major donors, but has toiled since January, making it one of the most senior and active outside groups in the Trump orbit.
Political Parties
San Francisco Chronicle: A few steps to overcome American ‘vetocracy”
Francis Fukuyama
Getting money out of politics would require a different strategy. A different Supreme Court might reverse Buckley vs. Valeo and Citizens United and again permit greater regulation of money in politics. Short of that very long-term prospect, it might be possible to walk back the current regulatory regime to channel more money to the parties so that wealthy outside insurgents have less opportunity to manipulate individual races…
In the end, no set of institutional changes will overcome deep divisions within American society. But in the age of clamoring outsiders, it is important to keep in mind the need to change our institutional rules rather than simply blowing them up.
Wisconsin John Doe
American Prospect: Scott Walker Leaks Could Force Supreme Court to Confront Dark Money
Justin Miller
Not only has the Walker scandal roared back into the spotlight, it may be headed for the Supreme Court. In April, the special prosecutor in the case called on the high court to overturn the state Supreme Court’s decision to end the investigation, arguing that coordination on issue advocacy is, in fact, illegal, and that the plaintiffs didn’t receive a fair trial because the two justices failed to recuse themselves. The Supreme Court is expected to announce later this month whether it will hear the case.
Candidates and Campaigns
USA Today: Clinton, Trump face fresh scrutiny on ethics
Fredreka Schouten
For her part, Clinton has spelled out specific policies on one issue closely related to government integrity: campaign finance. They include a pledge to sign an executive order requiring companies with federal contracts to disclose their political donations. And she has promised call for a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in her first 30 days as president.
The 2010 decision authorized corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence candidate elections.
“That was a total yawn for me,” said McGehee of Clinton’s Citizen United pledge. “There’s not much the president can do in a real sense” to advance a constitutional amendment, she said. “And it’s not going to get through Congress.”
Observer: Hillary Clinton Campaign Systematically Overcharging Poorest Donors
Liz Crokin
“We get up to a hundred calls a day from Hillary’s low-income supporters complaining about multiple unauthorized charges,” a source, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of job security, from the Wells Fargo fraud department told the Observer. The source claims that the Clinton campaign has been pulling this stunt since Spring of this year. The Hillary for America campaign will overcharge small donors by repeatedly charging small amounts such as $20 to the bankcards of donors who made a one-time donation. However, the Clinton campaign strategically doesn’t overcharge these donors $100 or more because the bank would then be obligated to investigate the fraud.
The States
Miami Herald: Appeals court declines to put campaign-finance rules on ballot
Douglas Hanks
A state appeals court declined Thursday to place a campaign-finance proposal back on the Miami-Dade ballot, handing opponents, including the county itself, a victory in their legal fight against the petition drive to impose new restrictions on campaign donations.
The 2-to-1 ruling by the Third District Court of Appeal declined to reinstate a lower court’s ruling that ordered the question on the ballot. That Sept. 9 decision by Judge William Thomas found the group backing the petition drive had gone through the proper steps needed to win a slot on the ballot, and that county commissioners exceeded their authority last week when they declared the proposal too legally flawed to go before voters.
County lawyers appealed, an action that brought an automatic freeze of Thomas’ order. The group behind the petition, An Accountable Miami-Dade, asked the appeals court to lift the freeze, known as a stay, but Thursday’s decision rejected that request.
Gotham Gazette: Campaign Finance Board Considers Rules Changes, Including Controversial ‘Coordination’ Proposal
Samar Khurshid
Some of the more significant changes on the table deal with independent expenditures, which are anathema to the CFB’s mission of minimizing the effect of money on elections. In that vein, the CFB put forward three proposals, the first of which is perhaps the most important one in the entire package.
It would add two new factors to determine whether a campaign is coordinating with independent expenditure entities. The board would monitor whether a candidate raised funds for an independent spender or if the candidate and the entity had the same employees. If any of these factors, along with six others that the board already considers, are met in an election cycle, “the Board will assume an expenditure was coordinated unless there is evidence to the contrary,” reads a post on the CFB website.
