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Other Reforms
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy – 05/20/09
Cross-post from The Hill's Congress Blog.
As Court watchers eagerly await the latest decision on campaign finance in a case called Citizens United, new research from the Brennan Center indicates that the Roberts’ Court’s first campaign finance decision three years ago, Randall v. Sorrell, suffered from a key empirical flaw. In that case, the Court wrongly assumed that low contribution limits hurt challengers and entrenched incumbents.
This misperception is still widely shared. At the Brennan Center’s recent conference, “New Horizons for Reform,” panelist Professor Allison Hayward, a skeptic of campaign finance reform, asked whether reformers should really focus more on incumbency than they do on limits on money in politics. This is a false dichotomy. The Brennan Center has long worked to address both money in politics and the strength of incumbency. Our work on campaign finance reform, redistricting and voting rights is intended to assure that the basic structures of democracy are geared to truly capture the voters’ collective will, so that those incumbents who no longer serve the public will face a realistic prospect of electoral defeat.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms
By Angela Migally – 05/14/09
The banking industry, recently described by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) as the “most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill,” has maintained its hold over Congress even after causing the current financial meltdown. While discussing the mortgage crisis on Bill Moyers’ Journal on May 8, Senator Durbin, co-sponsor of the Fair Elections Now Act (FENA), stated that the “way we finance our campaigns” lies at the heart of the current crisis. His solution is FENA, a bill that will provide public financing to congressional candidates.
By giving congressional candidates the option to run their campaigns with money free of any strings attached, FENA ensures that politicians will not make legislative decisions out of a sense of indebtedness to large contributors but will vote their conscience. Senator Durbin declared that now is the “time for us to move to public financing, for the good of the country,” and it certainly seems that the potent combination of economic collapse and political challenges means that there is no time like the present to fully consider how to change business as usual in Washington.
At a press event on Monday May 11, Representative Larson (D-CT), co-sponsor of the House version of FENA, stated that due to the bill’s importance, he hopes to push the bill through the House before the end of the summer. The House version of FENA, co-sponsored by Rep. Larson (D-CT) and Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), now has 31 co-sponsors.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Contribution Limits, Other Reforms, Public Financing
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy – 05/14/09
Cross-post from Huffington Post.
Last week's TARP stress test results reminded us to ask ourselves: now that the federal taxpayer owns nearly 80% of AIG, are AIG's interests ours? We own a quarter of Citibank; does that mean the bank's desires are now in sync with ours? Is Bank of America—currently afloat with $45 billion in taxpayer dollars—now truly America's bank? In a word: No. The political interests of bailout recipients aren't necessarily consistent with public interest which is one reason recipients should be held accountable for all political or partisan spending they do with our money.
Government ownership of big portions of the economy could threaten democracy; for one thing, it creates massive conflicts of interest for those who manage bailed out companies. Do they have a fiduciary duty to the taxpayer or the companies they manage? What happens when those duties aren't perfectly aligned? Alarmingly, if not surprisingly, the AIG bonus debacle suggests managers' inclination to act in the corporate, not the public's, interest.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Disclosure
By Andrew Boyle – 05/13/09
A widely attended conference convened by the Brennan Center for Justice brought together academics, activists, politicians, Obama Administration officials and even an actor in a packed hall at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on May 8th (click here to learn more about the conference).
The event, "Money in Politics 2009: New Horizons for Reform," was kicked-off by a presentation by Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME) and closed with a ringing call of public funding of federal elections by the actor Sam Waterston. During the day were presentations by a variety of experts and commentators including Peter Overby of National Public Radio's Power, Money and Influence, Fred Wertheimer, President of Democracy 21 and Professor Allison Hayward of George Mason University School of Law.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Contribution Limits, Other Reforms, Disclosure, Public Financing
By Andrew Boyle – 05/08/09
A day-long conference, "Money in Politics 2009: Horizons for Reform," convened by the Brennan Center [
click here to see agenda, and follow on
twitter: #bccfr], will take place today, May 8th, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The focus is on innovations that address the nexus between money and politics. One such proposal is the Fair Elections Now Act ("FENA"). The Act would build on successes in the states with systems of voluntary public funding of elections.
Embracing their role as "laboratories for democracy," three states, Arizona, Connecticut and Maine, enacted voluntary public funding programs for legislative and statewide elections following well-publicized scandals to reduce the power of well-heeled special interests and to enhance the participation of ordinary citizens as both candidates and voters in the political process.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Contribution Limits, Other Reforms, Disclosure, Public Financing
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy – 04/30/09
The Washington Post reported recently that top TARP recipients paid a collective $22 million dollars to lobby Congress over the previous six months. In a recent interview, Assistant Majority Leader, Senator Dick Durbin observed wryly that, "the banks—hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."
Getting out of the financial crisis will take disciplined regulation of the financial industry. If Senator Durbin, who is number two in the Senate and who has worked on the bailout as well as consumer credit and related issues, is not able to gain traction to resolve the crisis, improving transparency of political spending by TARP recipients, as we called for in a letter to TARP overseer Elizabeth Warren several weeks ago, is a crucial next step.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Contribution Limits, Other Reforms
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy – 04/28/09
"Watch this space," could easily have been the not-so-subtle subtitle of TARP's Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky's (SIGTARP) 250-page
report to Congress released last week. Barofsky wrote that:
SIGTARP has initiated, to date, almost 20 preliminary and full criminal investigations. Although the details of those investigations generally will not be discussed unless and until public action is taken, the cases vary widely in subject matter and include large corporate and securities fraud matters affecting TARP investments, tax matters, insider trading, public corruption, and mortgage-modification fraud.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy – 04/09/09
AIG made headlines for giving out millions of dollars in bonuses after receiving billions of dollars in federal bailout funds. But the issue of bonuses is really just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, taxpayers do not really know how banks and other corporate recipients of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have used the money.
The lack of transparency inspired the Brennan Center to write to Elizabeth Warren, the Chair of TARP’s Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), to urge greater disclosure of political spending by those entities saved by the taxpayers.
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Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Disclosure
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