Event
Heritage Foundation: Advocacy and the First Amendment: Should Nonprofits Disclose Their Donors? – 9/29/2015; 12:00 PM
Critics of the current campaign process for state and federal offices are urging states and Congress to require nonprofit advocacy organizations to disclose the identity of their donors to the government, and thus the public, when they engage in political speech and discussion of issues that may affect candidates for political office. Does this violate associational and free speech rights under the First Amendment? Is this a necessary requirement for transparency in the election process? Does mandatory disclosure violate the right to privacy and can it negatively affect the ability of nonprofits to operate on behalf of their members? Does disclosure benefit the public and inform their ability to make choices in the election process?
Chairman Bradley A. Smith will be speaking.
Independent Groups
NYT: Scott Walker’s Exit Shows Limits of ‘Super PAC’ Money Model
Nicholas Confessore
While a super PAC supporting him, Unintimidated, was relatively flush with cash — on track to raise as much as $40 million through the end of the year, according to people involved with the group — Mr. Walker’s campaign committee was running dry, contemplating layoffs and unable to find enough money to mount a last stand in Iowa, a state that once favored him.
Super PACs, Mr. Walker learned, cannot pay rent, phone bills, salaries, airfares or ballot access fees. They are not entitled to the preferential rates on advertising that federal law grants candidates, forcing them to pay far more money than candidates must for the same television and radio time.
USA Today: Presidential super PACs push campaign limits
Fredreka Schouten
The rules on what amounts to coordination, however, are so narrowly defined that super PACs are increasingly acting as shadow campaigns — deploying staff to early voting states, financing feel-good biographical ads to introduce the candidates to voters and responding to attacks from rivals.
Super PACs cannot supplant a campaign entirely. Two Republican contenders, former Texas governor Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, each had the support of well-funded outside groups but dropped out of the presidential contest recently as they struggled to win voter support and secure the donations they needed to fund their own staff, travel, rent and other expenses, such as ballot-access fees.
Commentary: Democracy Is Saved
Noah Rothman
The Super PAC era was billed by those who feared it as a period in which profligate billionaires would control both candidates and the political process and leaving the average citizen out in the cold. If the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 has demonstrated anything, however, it is that, even in the era of well-funded PACs, outside money alone cannot keep a candidacy that does not enjoy popular support afloat. What’s more, you still cannot buy first place in the polls…
The scale of the threat posed by Citizens United to the very foundations of democratic republicanism is inversely proportional to the passion with which it is denounced.
Wisconsin ‘John Doe’
Watchdog.org: New emails show GAB assisting in John Doe defense after judge said stop
M.D. Kittle
He referenced the multiple challenges to the John Doe probe.
The special prosecutor went on to tell Nichol what the chairman already knew: that GAB staff members co-authored “the original brief filed in the John Doe proceedings and principally authored” other key documents in defense of the investigation.
“As I have relied upon: 1), the expertise of the GAB staff to frame the arguments justifying this inquiry into illegal campaign coordination; and 2), the original unanimous decision of the Board members that such an inquiry was warranted, I firmly believe that the continued support of the GAB staff is appropriate,” Schmitz wrote.
Tax-Financed Campaigns
NPR: Bernie Sanders Would Be The Big Winner In New Public-Funding Model
Peter Overby
The U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) Education Fund, an advocate of more limits on campaign money, has produced a model of how that would affect the early stages of the 2016 race. The analysis assumes a 6-to-1 match, so the match would turn a $200 contribution into $1,400 for the candidate…
There are cost-benefit questions: For the 12 candidates, who have reported their fundraising so far, the analysis estimates that $307 million in matching funds would have displaced $65 million in contributions greater than $200. Advocates of public financing say no one can gauge the true benefit: how many federal dollars would be saved if big donors had less sway over lawmakers.
IRS
The Hill: Hatch wonders about IRS discipline over political scrutiny
Bernie Becker
The Senate’s top tax writer asked Tuesday why the IRS has cleared most employees referred for potential improper political scrutiny since the agency’s Tea Party controversy erupted in 2013.
Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) noted that Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration had referred 47 employees to the IRS in recent years for potentially breaking the rules for reviewing tax-exempt applications.
The inspector general sent those referrals when it thought an employee’s actions weren’t criminal, leaving any potential punishment up to the IRS.
But of those 47 referrals, the IRS found that 20 employees had done nothing wrong, and another five resigned during their investigations.
Candidates and Campaigns
Washington Post: Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid
Matea Gold, Jenna Johnson and Dan Balz
In a little more than two months, his presidential bid had amassed a debt of roughly $700,000, campaign manager Rick Wiley told the governor in a call Sunday night. A pared-down effort focused on staying afloat in Iowa would still cost around $1 million a month because of ongoing costs associated with ballot access, accounting and vendor contracts.
“It’s going to be tough to raise that million a month, I’ll be honest with you,” Wiley said he told Walker, according to an account he gave The Washington Post on Tuesday evening.
Forbes: The Real Reason Hillary Clinton Wants To Overturn ‘Citizens United’
George Leef
We should hope that at this very minute, people – in unions, in corporations, in any kind of organization – are busily working on more advocacy movies: Hillary: The Movie II; The Donald: The Movie; Bernie: The Movie; Carly: The Movie, and so on. They should be free to make and show them without restrictions – such speech is at the very heart of the First Amendment.
To be sure, democracy has its flaws and one of them is that politicians and interest groups can try to stack the deck in their favor through laws and regulations. Despite our constitutional commitment to free speech and press, politicians have often tried to silence their critics…
Naturally, she and other advocates of campaign finance reform laws claim that they only want to “clean up politics” by reducing the allegedly corrupting influence of money. But the notion that politicians would only do things that are in the public interest if it weren’t for the malign presence of money is another myth.
The States
Mother Jones: California Clamps Down on Secretive Political Donations
Russ Choma
The dark-money groups lost the battle on both ballot initiatives (the tax increase was approved and labor unions are still permitted to make donations), but the specter of much more spending by similar groups pushed California regulators to act. State campaign finance rules already require any group that spends money on a California election to reveal its donors. Last week, another patch was added to regulations, making it explicitly clear that this doesn’t just apply to California-based groups, but to out-of-state and national outfits as well. The move extends California’s power to regulate dark-money groups—something few states have been wiling to do—and means that if a national group tries to step into state politics, it might be exposing its whole national network to scrutiny…
California’s crusade against dark money was launched by Ann Ravel, then the chairman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission. In 2013, Ravel was appointed to the Federal Election Commission, which she currently chairs.
Deseret News: Time to take another approach to campaign finance laws?
Editorial Board
It’s true that this kind of proposal doesn’t get money out of politics. Instead, it acknowledges the hard reality that money cannot be removed from the process, so the best way to avoid corruption is to ensure as much transparency and accountability as possible. Yes, parties will be able to accept large sums of money and spend it on the candidate of their choice, but the voters will be fully aware of who benefits from those decisions, and they can make an informed choice as to how that ought to affect their voting behavior.
