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Campaign Finance Reform
By Laura MacCleery – 06/13/08
Some cases are just too ugly even
for the Supreme Court, it appears. Last week it refused to grant review to a
claim from Washington State that challenged an important principle: the
requirement that outside groups disclose their electoral spending.
The group in question, called the
Voters Education Committee (VEC), was a classic astroturf 527 group (named thus
for a section of the tax code), that omitted to register with the state as a
political committee. Its one donor—the Chamber of Commerce—funneled it a
whopping $1.5 million as part of a 25-state campaign in 2004 to push
its agenda in key Attorney General and state Supreme Court races around
the country.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Disclosure
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy – 06/10/08
Cross-posted from a Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece.
Whenever I admit to fellow guests at a dinner party that I work as a campaign finance lawyer, the following happens. Either their eyes glaze over, hoping for a rapid change of topic, or they launch into a heated discussion of why the case that decided "money is speech" is so wrongheaded—since after all, money is, well, money, and speech is something else entirely. Sad to say, the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court seem to be losing their grasp on this simple point.
Contrary to popular opinion, the landmark case, Buckley v. Valeo, never actually equated money with speech. Instead, the opinion analyzed political campaigns and concluded that lots of money is needed to get a candidate's message to voters. Buckley used gasoline as a metaphor for campaign cash. The fuel of contributions makes the campaign car go.
As Justice Stephen Breyer once wrote, "a decision to contribute money to a campaign is a matter of First Amendment concern not because money is speech (it is not); but because it enables speech." Despite this truth, the bumper sticker version—"money is speech"—has seeped into our collective unconscious.
> Read entire article here.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Fair Courts
By Mike Webb – 06/05/08
Once it was my job to monitor all three of the network
nightly news shows. Not as punishment, but as a way for the presidential
campaign that I worked for to keep track of what was and was not getting
covered. It was interesting to see which stories they covered, how they
covered them and where, in their programs, they placed them. But I was
often disappointed to see that networks tend to consider things like 120 second
consumer report segments more newsworthy than, say, a presidential candidate's
universal health care proposal.
Twenty million people get their "news" from network
broadcasts each day. I—and everyone
else—had to come to grips with the fact that these shows have lots of power
to sway public opinion. But in an ever expanding
media merger landscape where General Electric's outlets (get it—"outlets"!) don't spend a lot of time reporting on the enormous
amounts of money our government spends on the defense industry, people have to
be careful about the news nutrients they consume.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform
By Monique Chase – 06/04/08
"Brace
yourselves for the most ugly and expensive state Supreme Court election in
Wisconsin's history in 2009," warns Jay Heck, director of Common Cause
Wisconsin. In his Capital
Times op-ed, Heck takes shots at Wisconsin's legislature for failing to act
on a campaign finance reform bill, and accuses the group of quietly, "smothering
it with a pillow" during its special legislative session.
Heck's
brashness is understandable. Forget about the fact that Governor Jim Doyle
called the special session specifically
in the interests of campaign finance reform. Recent candidate special interest spending
in Wisconsin's last two judicial election cycles, makes clear that, now, more
than ever, comprehensive campaign finance reform is needed in the state.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Fair Courts, Judicial Advertising
By Laura MacCleery – 05/20/08
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Late Friday, a letter sent from Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominee Hans von Spakovsky to the White House officially withdrawing his name from consideration was made public. This is undoubtedly good news as the election season kicks into high gear, and will help to assure that the FEC will be restored to its previous, albeit minimal, functionality.
Von Spakovsky's nomination was opposed by civil rights and good government groups due to his frightening record of partisan witch-hunts and voter suppression while in the Voting Division at the Justice Department. Democrats had been insisting on an up-or-down vote for each of the nominees, including von Spakovsky, a former Bush campaign staffer and GOP operative.
Von Spakovsky was the antithesis of the kind of person needed at the Commission, which is charged with the fair and non-partisan administration of campaign finance law. The FEC has been unable to make decisions at the commission level for months, as the triangular nomination standoff between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the White House continued. While the White House had indicated that an up-or-down vote was acceptable, McConnell, who is no friend of the FEC, appeared to be holding firm in insisting on a vote on the full slate of candidates.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Voting Rights & Elections, EAC Oversight
By Bethany Foster – 05/09/08
Cross-posted from Gavel Grab
As Bert Brandenburg noted earlier this week, the Fourth Circuit delivered some good news for public financing advocates last Thursday by unanimously upholding North Carolina's system of public funding for judicial campaigns. This is a major victory for citizens concerned about fair and impartial courts.
The North Carolina decision is one of multiple recent developments on the public financing front. On the same day that the Fourth Circuit issued its decision, plaintiffs in Arizona filed an amended complaint against the matching funds provisions of that state's public funding program for statewide and legislative races. The case is back in the District Court after going up to the Ninth Circuit and then getting remanded.
Finally, in late March, a federal district court judge dismissed the core challenges to Connecticut's public financing law, ruling that the matching funds provided by that system do not violate the free speech rights of non-participating opponents and independent spenders.
Read the rest of this post here.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Public Financing, Fair Courts
05/08/08
Cross-posted from Huffington Post
While the primary elections are winding down, the money primary will continue until the party conventions in August and the official start of the general election. The decisions by the remaining presidential candidates to defect from the presidential public funding system for the primaries make it clear that the system has become a fixer-upper.
The Presidential Election Campaign Fund, the bank account that holds public funding for the primary, Republican and Democratic national conventions and the general election, has grown to approximately $250 million. Like about 10 percent of other federal income tax filers this April, we both checked off the box to earmark $3 for the fund. Yet this election cycle, sadly, marks a high—or low—point for the number of viable presidential candidates who turned away public financing during the primary.
The amount actually distributed by the presidential fund is likely to reach an all-time low in the 2008 election season. At the end of 2007, a total of about $20 million was given to candidates who opted into the matching funds program. That's less than 2004's $27 million, and is even below the $25 million disbursed in 1976. It's become obvious that the system needs a makeover.
Why are fewer front-running candidates participating? Take this week's Indiana primary, where the two Democratic candidates spent nearly $10 million combined on paid advertising alone. In Pennsylvania, the pair spent an estimated $20 million total for April's primary, a record for the state. To receive public funding this cycle, a candidate had to agree to limit spending to $3.2 million in Indiana and $6.5 million in Pennsylvania under the FEC's formula.
To receive matching public funds in the primary—up to $250 for every donation up to the current federal limit for individuals of $2,300—candidates agree to abide by state-by-state spending limits set by an arcane formula: $200,000 plus cost of living adjustment since 1974, or the voting age population multiplied by 16 cents, whichever is greater. This formula is out-of-whack: each state has a unique political calculus, which varies among candidates and election cycles.
According to the Federal Election Commission's formula, does it make sense for the limits for New York, Florida and Texas to be roughly the same (respectively, $10 million, $9.5 million and $11.6 million)? On the other end of the spectrum, the limit for New Hampshire (and Maine and Vermont) is $841,000. Given the Granite State's "first-in-the-nation status" for the primaries, a cap of less than $1 million is not a 2008 reality.
There was little incentive for the three presidential front-runners to use the $42 million each available this year for the primary, given these spending limits, when they can raise similar sums in a single month. Unfortunately, the $85 million lump sum available per candidate for the general election may be headed for the similar fate if the presidential nominees of one or both parties turn it down. That would be the first time a party candidate rejected public financing in the general election since the program began in 1976.
The 1974 amendments to the federal election law (FECA) establishing the current system were meant to safeguard the presidential campaigns from the influence of wealthy donors who could call the shots as campaign insiders on White House policy. The program worked well for two and a half decades, turning many long-shot candidates into household names: most notably and successfully, an Arkansas Governor named Bill Clinton.
But except for cost-of-living adjustments and a tripling of the check-off from $1 to $3, not much has changed with presidential public funding since its inception 30 years ago. For starters, it has failed to take into account the changing face of fundraising. Rare is the traditional rubber chicken dinner where candidates come face-to-face with supporters and sing for their supper. Following her victory in the Pennsylvania primary Sen. Clinton's campaign claimed it raised $10 in a 24-hour period. And, on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, GOP candidate Ron Paul raised over $6 million in a single day on the web. In a fairly recent phenomenon, independent expenditures and 527 advertising will likely total hundreds of millions of dollars by year's end.
The current $42 million cap for the primaries is ludicrous when candidates can collect as much in a month, which Sen. Obama's campaign reported last month and in February, when the total take was actually $55 million. The alternative is a primary lump sum grant that will free candidates from static state-by-state spending limits so they can tailor the money to their electoral needs. And with the recent arrival of front-loaded primaries and caucus, the public money should be distributed before December, since the campaigns begin in earnest months earlier.
In the general election, candidates who use the lump sum should be empowered to remain competitive even if facing a privately funded opponent who can spend without limits. State public funding systems have solved this problem by disbursing additional "fair fight funds" to match the money spent by nonparticipating candidates, up to a pre-set cap. Moreover, the rapidly growing amounts of money spent on independent expenditures require that we equip publicly funded candidates with the ability to respond. Candidates should be given more money to enable them to answer attacks and control their own message.
Late last year, Sens. Feingold (D-Wis.) and Collins (R-Maine) and Reps. Price (D-N.C. and Shays (R-Conn.) anticipated these issues and introduced the Presidential Public Funding Act. The bills do most of what's suggested here and more, including raising the check-off to $10 for individuals and $20 for couples to account for the increased grants.
In pointing out the failings of the current system, we're not suggesting that people should stop checking off their tax returns; We'll continue to do so. The system of public financing for presidential candidates plays a valuable role in democratizing the election and avoiding a spectacle in which contenders for the highest office in the land are seen groveling for dollars from wealthy special interests. We should do what it takes to save the system, which worked well for decades. The next Congress should consider and pass FECA, version 2.0.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform
By Laura MacCleery – 04/24/08
Cross-posted from The Nation web site.
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a campaign finance case,
Davis v. FEC. This Court has had a rather ominous track record on
campaign finance reform since the appointment of Chief Justice John G. Roberts
and Justice Samuel Alito, and the Court's reactions to the argument do not bode
well for those who care about limits on the role of money in politics.
The lawsuit concerns an obscure area of a major federal law enacted in 2003,
the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). But given the Court's considerable
hostility to rules on campaign finance, demonstrated by two recent, closely
decided decisions on contribution limits in Vermont and issue advertising in
campaigns, the argument was yet another important sign of where the Court is
headed on campaign finance matters.
A two-time-losing federal "millionaire" Congressional candidate, New York
businessman Jack Davis is challenging the so-called "Millionaire's Amendment"
section of BCRA, which relaxes various contribution limits for opponents of
candidates who intend to spend more than $350,000 of their own money on a
campaign for federal office....
> Continue reading this piece at the Nation.com
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Contribution Limits, Public Financing
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