Blog
Campaign Finance Reform
By ReformNY – 12/02/11
Crossposted at ReformNY.
Every Friday, the Brennan Center will be compiling the latest news concerning the corrosive nature of money in New York State politics — and the ongoing need for public financing and robust campaign finance reform. We’ll also be linking to dispatches from around the country highlighting the national scope of this crisis. This week’s links were contributed by Matthew Ladd and Dan Rockoff.
For more stories on an ongoing basis, follow the Twitter hashtag #moNeYpolitics
NY Campaign Finance, Corruption and Politics:
1. The Buffalo News has issued an editorial calling for the state Senate and Assembly to work together to enact public financing of state elections in the next legislative session. Public financing would not only “help our state legislators clean up their collective act and limit the corrosive influence of money on their decisions,” the editorial argues, but would also “give challengers better footing to take on incumbents” and, combined with nonpartisan redistricting, make elections fairer and more competitive.
2. The $33,000 that Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner funneled to local candidates through the state Democratic Committee is “further evidence of a campaign finance system in disarray,” writes the Syracuse Post-Standard. Although Miner withdrew the contributions in the face of public criticism, steering money from PACs to campaign committees is business as usual in Albany. “It’s done all the time to get around the very lax campaign finance limits and nonexistent campaign laws in New York state,” says Barbara Bartoletti of the state League of Women Voters. “It’s not going to change until we reform the campaign finance laws.”
3. Fresh from his acquittal on corruption charges, Brooklyn State Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. has been arrested again — this time for soliciting bribes during his trial, apparently in order to pay the attorneys who represented him. Boyland is now charged with soliciting over $250,000 in bribes since he was charged in the first case; last April, mere weeks after he was released on bond, FBI agents posing as real estate investors recorded Boyland seeking money to pay his lawyers, but insisting that he needed to “stay clean” by working through a “bag man.”
4. One of the state’s key witnesses in the corruption trial of Larry Seabrook has given inconsistent accounts of her connection with the ex-assemblyman, inconsistencies that the prosecution attributes to age and memory loss. Another witness for the prosecution, Laila Yu, testified on Tuesday that three nonprofit groups connected to Seabrook received $2.1 million in city funds, in addition to overbilling the city for rent reimbursements.
5. Companies that drill for natural gas have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to state legislative campaigns, and spent over $3.2 million in lobbying, in the run-up to Gov. Cuomo’s decision on when and where to permit hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in New York State. The energy industry has also contributed to campaigns in Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio in order to elect fracking-friendly legislators. In response to public debate over the issue, the NY Department of Energy has extended its public comment period to January 11, 2012.
National stories:
6. The New York Times criticized House Republicans for their attempt to repeal the voluntary public funding program for presidential candidates, created in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The editorial points out that the justification for attempting to repeal the program — deficit savings — is especially cynical given that the Republican Party recently requested, and received, $17.7 million in public money to finance next year’s presidential convention.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Public Financing, NY Reform
By Monica Youn – 11/29/11
Crossposted at ACSblog.
That the conservative majority of the Roberts Court are champions of free speech is a trope that simply refuses to die. The New York Times summed up the Court’s most recent term by describing free speech as a “signature project” of Chief Justice Roberts, and numerous commentators have chimed in, contributing to the common misperception that the Roberts Court is “the most free speech Court in American history.” Efforts to debunk this myth, by Erwin Chemerinsky, David Cole, and Nadine Strossen, among others, have seemingly failed to make much of a dent in the popular wisdom.
Ben Sachs’ forthcoming Columbia Law Review article, “Unions, Corporations, and Political Opt-Out Rights after Citizens United,” serves as a useful corrective, and, indeed, is one of the absolutely essential pieces of scholarship that I’ve seen in the wake of the decision. But before getting into the article in more depth, let’s look at some basic numbers for background.
In its first five years, from 2006 until 2011, the Roberts Court granted certiorari in 27 cases in which a free speech violation was claimed (including the speech, press, assembly, and association guarantees). In these cases, the Court held that that a free speech violation existed in nine of the cases, and that no free speech violation had been demonstrated in 18 of these cases. Thus, simply looking at the numbers, the Roberts Court has supported a free speech claim in 33.33 percent of argued cases. By way of comparison, as Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal have shown, from 1953 to 2004, the Supreme Court supported claims of deprivation of First Amendment liberties in 53.95 percent of argued cases. Thus, at the most basic quantitative level, the Roberts Court seems to be not especially protective of free speech rights.
Disaggregated, these numbers become more dramatic. Out of the nine cases where the Roberts Court has supported a free speech claim, five of those are cases in which the Court struck down campaign finance reform laws. These numbers bear out Chemerinsky’s argument that “what really animates [the Roberts Court’s ] decisions is a hostility to campaign finance laws much more than a commitment to expanding speech.”
Out of the four non-campaign finance cases in which the Roberts Court has supported a free speech claim, three — the animal cruelty videos case, the funeral picketing case, and the violent video games case — were what I will call free speech “slam-dunks” — that is, cases that were decided by an 8-1 or 7-2 majority, and in which (contrary to the usual Supreme Court’s certiorari practices) there was no split among circuit courts, and the Court affirmed the lower court decision. These free speech slam-dunks, with their colorful facts, were among the Roberts Court’s cases that have attracted the most press attention, but they are hardly indicative of a conservative majority with an expansive view of First Amendment freedoms. The remaining case in which the Roberts Court was willing to uphold a non-campaign finance related free speech claim was Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., a relatively low-profile commercial speech case in which a 6-3 majority of the Court struck down a state “prescription confidentiality” law, which barred sale or disclosure of doctors’ prescription practices to pharmaceutical marketers. An interesting case, and one which warrants more attention than it has received so far, but not really a banner-worthy free speech decision. At the same time, the conservative majority has shown itself willing to disregard free speech claims by, inter alia, government employee whistleblowers, humanitarian aid organizations, and, most pertinently for today’s purposes, unions. Thus, it seems that the most that can be said of the conservative majority’s free speech record is that “The Roberts court strongly protects speech that it likes, while allowing regulation of speech it disfavors,” as Adam Winkler has put it.
Sachs’ article illuminates a piece of this picture that has been largely overlooked by First Amendment commentators — the Court’s asymmetrical treatment of corporations and unions. To put it in simplistic terms, if you think of corporate and union general treasuries as two big piles of money, Citizens United held that both corporations and unions could spend freely on campaigns from their respective piles, but left in place existing restrictions regarding the amassing of such funds for political purposes that apply to unions, but not to corporations. Specifically, under current law and settled constitutional doctrine, employees have a right to opt out of funding union political activities, but shareholders enjoy no similar right to opt out of corporate political spending. Indeed, the Roberts Court has twice reaffirmed this opt-out right — rejecting public sector unions’ First Amendment challenges to state laws requiring affirmative authorization from non-members for political spending and upholding a ban on voluntary payroll deductions for union dues – and has granted certiorari in a third union dues case set for this term.
The Court has primarily justified this asymmetry by reasoning that in the union context, employees are “compelled” or “coerced” to fund union political speech, while investing in a corporation is a fully voluntary act. Sachs persuasively undermines this distinction, observing that:
The argument that the union and corporate contexts can be distinguished on compulsion grounds reduces to a claim that the costs of being shut out of the stock market are acceptable, but the costs of being shut out of jobs covered by a union security agreement are not. Given the very real costs involved in both contexts, however, this conclusion is not an obvious one.
Especially with regard to public employee pension plans, where, as Sachs argues, public employees may be required to assent to corporate political speech as a condition of employment, the justification for the asymmetrical treatment completely dissolves. According to Sachs, state action doctrine and the associational speech jurisprudence similarly offer no sustainable rationale for this asymmetry.
As Sachs points out, prior to Citizens United, both unions and corporations could make independent expenditures only with PAC funds — those that stemmed from “knowing free-choice donations.” But while the Citizens United majority struck down the PAC requirement for both corporations and unions, “the opt-out rights that unions must grant employees mean that, with respect to political spending, the union general treasury still resembles a PAC.”
Federal law continues to impose on unions a requirement that they fund their political expenditures only with funds voluntarily and knowingly donated for political purposes. Labor law, that is, continues to impose on unions a funding requirement that Citizens United has removed from corporations.
If one takes seriously Justice Kennedy’s claim that political speech may not be restricted based on the identity of the speaker, the asymmetrical treatment of corporate and union political spending is highly constitutionally problematic.
The corporate/union political speech asymmetry may be viewed as one manifestation of a fault line that, as I have previously argued, underlies Buckley’s contribution/expenditures distinction and much of the convoluted campaign finance case law – an unresolved argument regarding the source of First Amendment value in political spending. Does such value derive from a particular spender’s voluntary decision to dedicate a particular expenditure to an expressive purpose — a.k.a., a “knowing free-choice donation”? Or should we, instead, assess such value from the point of view of the marketplace, and hold that free speech values are transgressed whenever a given restriction may lessen the amount of money that can be used for communicative purposes? One could muster strong arguments in support of either theory — but how can the supposedly “source-blind” Roberts Court continue to justify the application of one theory to corporations and a separate theory to unions? Far from imposing coherence in an area of doctrinal confusion, the Citizens United decision continues to raise more First Amendment questions than it answers.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform
By ReformNY – 11/18/11
Every Friday, the Brennan Center will be compiling the latest news concerning the corrosive nature of money in New York State politics—and the ongoing need for public financing and robust campaign finance reform. We’ll also be linking to dispatches from around the country highlighting the national scope of this crisis. This week’s links were contributed by Matthew Ladd and Dan Rockoff.
For more stories on an ongoing basis, follow the Twitter hashtag #moNeYpolitics
NY Campaign Finance and Corruption:
1. The Second Circuit overturned ex-state senator Joe Bruno’s corruption conviction, paving the way for a retrial and rejecting Bruno’s arguments for double jeopardy. The court found that “the government’s evidence... would permit a reasonable jury to find that Bruno performed virtually nonexistent consulting work for substantial payments.” As an example, the court observed that a new jury could reasonably conclude that a payment to Bruno of $40,000, ostensibly for a racehorse, was “an illegitimate gift.”
2. William Boyland’s acquittal on corruption charges related to his ‘no-show’ consulting job continues to generate controversy. A member of the jury that exonerated Boyland stated that the assemblyman “clearly did things wrong,” but that the jury “could not connect the dots” to reach a consensus on the legality of Boyland’s acts. After a relieved Boyland told reporters that he was “going to sleep and breathe” after the acquittal, The Capitol blog remarked that this “doesn’t seem much different from what he had been doing all year in Albany.”Commenting on the Boyland case, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said, “It should be a jarring wake-up call. Instead, it seems no matter how many times the alarm goes off, Albany just hits the snooze.”
3. Citing a dizzyingly long list of New York state legislatorseither convicted of or facing charges for corruption—including Joe Bruno, William Boyland, former comptroller Alan Hevesi, former Assemblymen Clarence Norman, Roger Green, and Brian McLaughlin, and former Assemblywoman Diane Gordon—City Room wryly remarks that perhaps New York’s official state motto, “Excelsior,” should be changed to “Ubi Est Mea?”, or “Where is mine?”
4. The federal criminal trial of Bronx City Councilman Larry Seabrook continued this week, as prominent Bronx lobbyist and lawyer Stanley Schlein took the stand against Seabrook, testifying that
Seabrook steered him to a local contractor looking to contract for work at Yankee Stadium. Seabrook is facing 12 counts of money laundering, fraud, conspiracy and receiving corrupt payments.
5. Further proof of the value of strong campaign finance enforcement: An undercover FBI sting culminated in the arrest Wednesday of Xing Wu Pan, a fundraiser for NYC Comptroller John Liu, for illegally funneling thousands of dollars into Mr. Liu’s campaign account. After an FBI agent posing as a businessman offered to donate $16,000—over three times the legal limit for individuals—Mr. Pan recruited 20 straw donors to circumvent the limit. He is charged with two counts of wire fraud. Mr. Liu released a statement Wednesday disavowing any knowledge of the fraud. Meanwhile federal officials continue their investigation of the comptroller’s campaign finance operations.
Other News Nationwide:
6. A study released November 16 by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington examined campaign donations to members of key House committees and found that becoming chairman or the ranking member leads to a massive jump in donations from regulated industries. House Financial Services Committee chairman Spencer Bachus has seen contributions from all sources increase by 234 percent since 1998, while contributions from the financial industry jumped 620 percent. CRE Executive Director Melanie Sloan said, “People who are giving you that much money – it is not out of the goodness of their hearts – clearly they want something.”
7. The New York Times criticized the proliferation of “super PACS” and unlimited contributions in this election cycle, calling them a “noxious weed . . . in the lawless jungle of campaign finance.” The editorial called for the Department of Justice to pursue criminal investigationsagainst fundraisers who improperly attempt to influence the candidates, observing: “It is now clear that giving to a candidate’s PAC is equivalent to giving to his campaign; the leaders of the PAC, for all practical purposes, are the campaign’s bag men.”
8. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig advocates for a national small-dollar public funding system for Congress. He suggests giving every voter a “democracy voucher” that could then be given to any candidate for Congress who agreed in advance to finance his or her campaign by either those vouchers or individual contributions capped at $100. Lessig argues that such a program would “weaken the power of the very few to demand costly kickbacks for their contributions.”
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Public Financing, NY Reform
By Jonathan Backer – 11/17/11
James Madison once wrote, “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” By exploiting loopholes in campaign finance law, special interests have already succeeded in denying the public of essential information about the sources of money funding political speech. A farcical attempt by one group to keep the public in the dark while also coordinating its message with candidates makes for good political comedy now, but will lead to tragedy if our elected officials begin to feel the full corrupting influence of unlimited, undisclosed, corporate contributions.
In the latest installment of Stephen Colbert’s intrepid quest to expose the absurdities of campaign finance non-regulation in the post-Citizens United era, the comedian recently discussed a new attempt by Super PACs to circumvent the few constraints that remain on their electioneering activities. The Super PAC American Crossroads recently submitted a request to the Federal Election Commission seeking permission for federal candidates to appear in its purportedly “independent” ads. The group acknowledged that ads featuring candidates would be “fully coordinated with incumbent Members of Congress facing re-election in 2012.” After all, a Super PAC would obviously have to share a script and discuss the contents of an ad with a candidate in order for her to appear in it. Nevertheless, American Crossroads would like the FEC to issue an advisory opinion stating that such ads would not qualify as “coordination.”
As the Brennan Center argued in a comment to the FEC, this position runs afoul of “[c]onstitutional law, federal statutes, and common sense.” Fortunately, common sense was no barrier to Stephen Colbert, who rose to the challenge and submitted a comment to the FEC in support of American Crossroads’ request. As Colbert wrote, “The candidate would merely be appearing as a paid spokesperson, who, coincidentally, is closely aligned with the candidate that he or she also is.” To illustrate the paper-thin separation between supposedly independent Super PACs and the candidates they support, Colbert offered an illuminating metaphor:
For example, an ad in which the Kool Aid man decries our nation-wide childhood thirst problem would not necessarily be an ad for Kool Aid brand juice drink. That being said, would a tall glass of Kool-Aid solve that thirst problem? To quote one expert: "Oh, yeaaahhhh!"
Colbert’s letter far and away outstrips the competition for funniest public comment to a regulatory agency, but even the comedian’s most ardent fans recognize that the consequences of a ruling in favor of American Crossroads are far from amusing. After Colbert emailed his comment to supporters of Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow (Colbert Super PAC), hundreds of individuals emailed the FEC calling for the agency to deny American Crossroads’ request.
As one civically-engaged student, Andrew Mugica, wrote, “As a young citizen of this country, I shudder to think of the ferocity at which campaigns are currently forced to solicit donations—the thought that they will be fighting for an even bigger chunk of shadowy money absolutely terrifies me….I hope we can find ways to avoid exacerbating this problem.”
Comedians and middle-school students don’t constitute what one would describe as usual suspects for submitting public comments on advisory opinion requests to the FEC. But the legal gymnastics that groups like American Crossroads are performing to subvert campaign finance regulations touch a nerve with large numbers of Americans. A request as absurd as American Crossroads’ belongs properly in the realm of farce, and the FEC should heed the outpouring of opposition and refuse to further expose our democracy to the tragic consequences of outright corruption in the political process.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Disclosure
By Jonathan Backer – 11/04/11
For years, campaign finance reform advocates have decried the paralysis of the Federal Election Commission. The FEC’s three Democratic Commissioners and three Republican Commissioners routinely gridlock on even the least controversial enforcement matters — resulting in utterly toothless enforcement of our nation’s campaign finance laws. The roots of the Commission’s ineffectiveness were on full display in Congress yesterday, where the members of the Federal Election Commission testified before a House Subcommittee but could scarcely simulate functionality for the purposes of the hearing.
The FEC is charged with enforcing the nation’s campaign finance laws. To take any action, from routine enforcement to rulemaking to the issuance of advisory opinions, the FEC requires a four-vote majority. Because the Commission is composed of three members from each party, its habitual 3-3 votes along partisan lines mire the Commission in inaction.
Despite the desperate need for the FEC to update disclosure rules in light of loopholes created by Citizens United v. FEC, the Commission has twice this year deadlocked on votes to merely initiate the rulemaking process. The Commissioners have routinely ignored the recommendations of their own non-partisan staff, voting 3-3 against penalties for blatant malfeasance.
The behavior of the Commissioners at Thursday’s hearing mimicked the dysfunction that regularly governs FEC activity. When asked if they felt current disclosure law is adequate, the Republicans said, yes, the Democrats, no. When asked if a request for additional information from someone filing a report with Commission constituted an act of enforcement, the Commissioners again divided along partisan lines.
Unfortunately, this oversight hearing was a lost opportunity. While the hearing caricatured the tendencies of the agency, the subcommittee members failed to probe the sources of gridlock on the Commission. Instead, they spent an inordinate amount of time squabbling amongst themselves and with the Commissioners about procedural matters concerning the agency.
The blame for FEC dysfunction lies with the agency, Congress, and President Obama. Five members of the Commission currently languish as lame ducks. Their terms have expired, and they cannot be reappointed, but President Obama has made a lackluster effort to replace them, nominating no Commissioners since 2009. Fixing the FEC will take more than a Congressional hearing. President Obama needs to fill the vacancies on the FEC now with members who, regardless of partisan affiliation, believe in the mission of the agency — to enforce the nation’s campaign finance laws.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Disclosure
By Jonathan Backer – 10/25/11
Crossposted at Campus Progress.
Members of the Congressional Super Committee — a bipartisan group of lawmakers charged with cutting a minimum of $1.2 trillion from the federal budget — have just one month before their deadline. Despite the many issues that divide them, Super Committee members have at least one thing in common — they have allowed special interest influence to haunt their committee, much like the spooky ghosts known to stir up mischief this time of year.
As fans of Ghostbusters know, ghouls cannot be eliminated, but they can be contained. In the 1980s blockbuster, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis restore order to New York City by capturing evasive spirits in a high-tech containment unit. When it comes to the groups trying to influence the Super Committee, we too need a little “ecto-containment.” Special interest money will influence the decisions that the Super Committee makes, but prompt disclosure will give the public the ability to contain its ill effects by holding lawmakers accountable.
In a nationwide push spearheaded by the Sunlight Foundation this Halloween, constituents of Super Committee members will knock on district office doors to ask for neither tricks nor treats, but transparency.
As many have argued, robust transparency is the best way to keep Super Committee members working for the American people. To this end, the Brennan Center has pushed for real-time disclosure of contributions to Super Committee members, their meetings with lobbyists, and any solicitations by committee members for third-party groups. Legislators from both sides of the aisle, including Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), and Reps. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), Mike Quigley (D-IL), and James Ranacci (R-OH), have sponsored bills that would require many of these policies. These efforts have not borne fruit. But the stakes keep rising.
The Project on Government Oversight estimates that the average Super Committee member, since being appointed, has raised an additional $2,270 per day in campaign contributions. (That’s more than many people earn per month.) One Super Committee member, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), reportedly raised twice as much in the third quarter of 2011 as he did in the second. The Sunlight Foundation reports that PACs for 19 of the biggest political donors — corporations like Lockheed Martin, the National Association of Realtors, Pfizer, and Chevron — donated a total of $83,000 to Super Committee members in the three weeks after their appointment.
On top of that, Politico reports that in the past six weeks, 200 companies and special interests have reported that they are lobbying Super Committee members. The Washington Post found that 100 former staffers for Super Committee members currently work as lobbyists. And according to the Huffington Post, half of the lawmakers on the Committee currently employ former lobbyists. The revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street, while nothing new, has a magnified potential to distort policy given the amount of power wielded by these twelve members.
Moreover, the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC has greatly expanded the role of supposedly independent political groups. Lawmakers, including Super Committee members, face more pressure than ever to fundraise for these groups and secure a larger piece of the third-party spending pie.
But between now and Thanksgiving, when the Super Committee must submit its proposals, information about these means of influence-peddling will remain cloaked in darkness. The Federal Election Commission will next report candidate contribution data on Jan. 31, 2012, long after the Super Committee reaches a final verdict. Even worse, the major independent spenders have all devised mechanisms to hide the identity of their donors, so we may never know who donated to these political powerhouses at Committee members’ requests. And, members have refused to create a public log of lobbyist meetings with their staff — this information too may never see the light of day.
But it is not too late for the Super Committee to voluntarily adopt these common sense rules. That’s why grassroots activists around the country are heeding the Sunlight Foundation’s call to celebrate Halloween by haunting the House and Senate — and you should too. On Oct. 31, visit the district offices of Super Committee members and call for greater transparency. With enough support, we can trap the ghosts of special interest influence in an “ecto-containment unit” of simple disclosure policies.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Disclosure
By Jonathan Backer – 10/14/11
Unresolved problems persist as the super committee — a bipartisan group of 12 lawmakers charged with cutting a minimum of $1.2 trillion from the federal budget before Thanksgiving — begins its work. Unfortunately, the committee has made minimal efforts to provide transparency concerning the dollars meant to influence their decisions. On Sunday, for example, Sen. Max Baucus, (D-MT), a member of the super committee, will attend a $5,000 a plate dinner ($10,000 for hosts) at Oceana Restaurant in Midtown Manhattan to raise funds for a PAC called Montana Senate Victory 2012. Even in the midst of the committee’s deliberations, the public has no information about the special interests spending thousands for Senator Baucus’ attention.
Voices on the left and the right have called for super committee members to promptly disclose campaign donations they receive. Sen. David Vitter, (R-LA), last month introduced legislation that would require super committee members to disclose donations of more than $1,000 within 48-hours of receiving them, citing the values of openness, transparency, and “plain good government.” Reps. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), Mike Quigley (D-IL) and James Ranacci (R-OH) have introduced even tougher super committee disclosure legislation, which would require members to disclose donations in excess of $500 within 48-hours and keep a public log of their meetings with lobbyists. Rep. Loebsack said such disclosure was necessary because “the only people members of this committee should be listening to are the American people.”
But, as Sen. Baucus’s presence at the Montana Senate Victory 2012 event demonstrates, industry groups have many avenues through which to wield influence over super committee members. Closed-door, high-priced, off-the-record events such as the Oceana event give powerful interests access to super committee members that average Americans — the people with the most at stake in the committee’s deliberations — simply do not have. That’s why the Brennan Center has repeatedly called for super committee members to disclose their involvement in soliciting funds for third-party groups, including PACs like Montana Senate Victory 2012, but also the less transparent members of the post-Citizens United milieu — SuperPACs, 527s, and 501(c)(4)s and (c)(6)s.
PACs like Montana Senate Victory 2012 file quarterly fundraising reports with the Federal Election Commission. But PACs closed their books on the summer quarter on September 30th, meaning that the public will have no idea what groups recently had Senator Baucus’s ear until January 31, 2012 — long after the super committee has closed up shop and Congress has rendered a final verdict on which programs and what people will shoulder the brunt of fiscal contraction. That’s not a fair way to conduct a national debate of this magnitude.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms
By Elizabeth Kennedy – 09/26/11
Crossposted at The Hill's Congress Blog.
Have Washington’s partisans found something to agree about?
In a rare moment of agreement, it seems members of both parties want to take action to prevent political spending from leading to political favoritism.
In an unexpected reversal, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has launched an investigation into White House ties to campaign donors seeking government contracts, loans, and other benefits. This move comes just a few months after news of an executive order that would bring greater transparency to government contracts was leaked to the press — and a few months after Issa came out against such efforts.
At the time, Issa was against requiring companies bidding on government contracts to disclose their political spending, including any currently-masked spending done through third-party groups. Now, as chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he wants to probe the system for granting government contracts and regulatory approvals.
In this moment of rare bipartisan agreement, President Obama should sign his draft executive order without delay.
Often, political spending by those seeking to do business with the government takes place in the dark, as front groups with innocuous names run harsh political attack ads without revealing the true source of their funds. When voters don’t know where the money is coming from, they can’t detect which deals are truly in the public’s interest, and what is improper political payback.
Since the draft executive order leaked this spring, we’ve seen multiple stories of political spending leading to political favoritism, most recently involving Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry. The New York Times reported that “a review of Mr. Perry’s years in office reveals that one of his most potent fund-raising tools is the very government he heads.” Bloomberg reported that “Perry has a public record of rewarding his political donors with jobs and state contracts.” For example, a major Perry donor received an environmental permit for a radioactive waste dump, despite concerns it would contaminate a critical source of drinking water. Three members of the technical review team resigned to protest the permit’s approval. One of the commissioners, (who, though appointed by Perry, voted against the permit and then did not rejoin the commission), said “[e]verybody was aware that this was an important item for the people that were seeking the license as well as for the governor’s office.”
The same “crony capitalism” that infects Texas politics can threaten the federal contracting process. Without transparency, corruption in the contracting process can lead to sweetheart deals that benefit the recipient of the contract and the recipient of the political contributions at the expense of taxpayers. The executive order would unearth some of the millions of dollars in secret spending that is playing an ever greater role in our political system.
Back in May, Issa characterized the administration’s attempts to shed light on financial relationships between government contractors and the beneficiaries of their electoral spending as “Chicago hardball politics that will clearly lead to a chilling effect on contributions by those required to participate.” But companies seeking to curry favor with governmental representatives are not shy about letting them know they’ve provided financial support in one way or another. The only people currently in the dark are the American people. Issa himself has lobbied executive agencies for the types of loans he is now investigating, but he now says this is “a back-door easy way to end up with corruption in government.” We need the executive order to keep these financial relationships out of backrooms and expose political spending to the light of day.
And Issa has company — Rep. Ralph Hall is also examining whether political spending played a role in actions taken by the White House. In a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, Hall wrote that “[w]hile some may call it a coincidence . . . we remain skeptical that shortly after two separate sets of meetings and meeting requests, LightSquared employees made five-figure donations to the Democratic Party.” This is the same information that the executive order would bring to light about political spending by companies. Expanding the information available to citizens, watchdog groups, and Congress itself will enable these groups to uncover any questionable contracting decisions linked to financial relationships.
Critically, requiring the disclosure of political spending by those seeking government contracts will not only fight corruption, but also prevent the appearance of corruption and political favoritism, which has a corrosive effect on confidence in government. And knowing that these financial relationships will be disclosed will help deter any contracting decisions not made in the best interest of the American people.
The draft executive order states, “It is incumbent that every stage of the contracting process – from appropriation to contract award . . . be free from the undue influence of . . . political favoritism.” The recent actions of Issa and Hall indicate that, though they both voted to block the effectiveness of the executive order should it be signed, they support this goal. President Obama should take this opportunity to sign the executive order and increase transparency and accountability in political spending to prevent political favoritism.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Disclosure
Page 2 of 19 pages < 1 2 3 4 > Last »
Permalink