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Tonight, Netroots Nation is hosting its 5th regional salon featuring Professor Lawrence Lessig. On tap, a discussion of his latest project, Change Congress, a non-partisan reform initiative working to fight the influence of money in politics. A live stream will be broadcast (streamed) here, and anyone can submit questions via twitter. The event begins at 7:15pm PST.
His Netroots Nation keynote is posted on the right.
Disclosure forms aren't the sexiest thing in politics. Yet this admittedly dry topic may land Stevens in jail and could be one of the factors that cost Palin a shot at being Vice President.
Recent disclosure reports are now providing a great amount of detail into contributions made by registered lobbyists, and the result is...lobbyists are loyal?
As a result of the 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the disclosure reports that have been released give insight to the specifics of lobbyist contributions. Lobbyists are now required to file semi-annual disclosure reports, detailing contributions made individually and contributions made as leaders of an organization. A public database created by the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives contains all the details of the disclosure forms; the reports indicate that lobbyists donated over $140 million to campaigns in the first half of 2008.
Given the recent slew of politicians being caught and investigated for accepting inappropriate donations and favors from special-interests, it is no surprise that the presidential candidates' fundraising strategies are getting a closer look. Large donations—and the motives behind them—are a murky issue, though hardly a partisan one; for every billionaire hedge-fund manager who raises more than $100,000 for Sen. Obama, there is an oil-trading company owner who bundles over $50,000 worth of contributions for Sen. McCain.
With bundled donations, special-interests can sidestep the contribution limits in campaign finance laws by allowing one individual to collect money from a variety of sources, thereby "bundling" the small donations into one large sum and delivering it to a candidate. It is no surprise that the collector in this scenario (or what the New York Times in an important editorial today aptly called the "hunter gatherer") can use this method of fundraising to their advantage, bringing in the usual suspects of special access and favors to the world of campaign finance. By controlling the contributions of many different donors, the bundler has more power (and a larger sum of money) than if he or she donated alone.
An edited version of this posting appeared as a guest post on the Anderson Cooper 360 blog June 20.
Barack Obama's decision to opt out of public funding for the general election is not a surprise. It was so well telegraphed, he should take out a patent.
The presidential public funding system worked well for three decades after it was enacted in the early 1970s. It leveled the playing field, boosted competition and reduced corruption. Think of it this way: in the first five elections under presidential public funding, a challenger beat an incumbent president three times. There's no congressional district in America with that much competition!
But the presidential system needs repair, for reasons among those prompting Obama to turn away the federal funds. Principally, candidates simply don't get enough money to mount a fully strong race in a modern election. The amount, when it was set, was about two thirds of the amount spent by the McGovern campaign of 1972—in other words, two thirds of the least successful presidential campaign in modern history!The real question is what will Barack Obama—or John McCain—do to reform the system when one of them takes office?
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.
(Cross-posted from The Hill Blog)
Recent weeks have seen a ratcheting up of promises by outside groups to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the presidential race. On the right, $2 million is expected from a conservative 501(c)(4) called "Defense of Democracies" for election-related opposition to House Democrats who oppose the President's electronic spying plan. Another non-profit, Freedom's Watch has pledged to spend some $250 million opposing the Democratic nominee.
And progressive groups recently floated a $400 million target for both electioneering communications and voter mobilization efforts. While the Campaign Finance Institute reports that a record $143 million was spent in 2006, that then-shocking total today looks like chump change.
A short history of how we got here is in order. As a new legal analysis and summary by the Brennan Center makes clear, before passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 ("BCRA"), campaign finance laws applied only to "express advocacy" - an advertisement for or against a candidate that used specific "magic words," such as "vote for" or "vote against." This test made it impossible to distinguish "sham issue ads" (ads that avoided these magic words, but were nonetheless intended to influence an election) from genuine issue ads (ads that advance a position on a public issue)...
Continue reading this piece at The Hill Blog.
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