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By Adam Skaggs – 05/22/12
Crossposted at Huffington Post.
Next month marks the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. But the burglary was the tip of the iceberg: the bigger scandal involved President Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign brazenly peddling government favors for millions of dollars of political donations.
In Watergate's aftermath and the decades since, Congress strengthened our campaign finance laws. But the Supreme Court has chipped away at those reforms, making it harder to fight the corruption that flows from money in politics. Supreme Court missteps, compounded by lower court decisions, have produced the current anything-goes campaign environment.
The Court now has an opportunity to undo some of the damage. It is considering a request to take up a case out of Montana that could clarify how much leeway the government has to regulate corrupting political money. Understanding why the Court should do so requires looking at where we are — and how we got here.
Nearly a half-year ahead of the November election, so-called super PACs have already dumped more than $110 million into this election. Nonprofit groups that refuse to disclose their donors have spent millions more. Most disturbingly, million dollar donations from actors interested in specific government actions — gifts that would raise obvious corruption concerns if directly handed to candidates — are now routinely handed to super PACs whose exclusive purpose is to elect those candidates.
Functioning as shadow campaigns, these groups exist solely to elect a specific candidate. They are operated by the candidate's close friends and most trusted political advisors. Candidates and their super PACs share vendors, consultants, messages, and advertising footage. They closely coordinate their efforts: during the Republican presidential primaries, when candidates' own funds started to dry up, their super PACs repeatedly stepped up to air a barrage of attack ads. Most egregiously, candidates and their senior campaign staff appear at the super PACs' fundraising events and solicit funds for them. As Mitt Romney candidly stated: "We raise money for super PACs. We encourage super PACs. Each candidate has done that."
Perhaps most significantly, the super PAC campaign arms have rendered contribution limits to candidates essentially meaningless. Corporations and unions, prohibited under federal law from donating directly to candidates, have skirted the ban by giving to their super PACs — sometimes in million-dollar amounts. Individuals, too, have flouted the individual contribution limit, donating the maximum $2,500 to a candidate's campaign, and then turning around and writing another check to his super PAC. Last year, for example, 84 percent of donors to Mitt Romney's super PAC had given the maximum donation to Romney's primary campaign — including five contributors who each gave the super PAC $1 million or more.
Some have blamed the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision for these groups that solicit — and spend — unlimited sums to elect candidates. But Citizens United expressly declined to address the constitutionality of campaign contribution limits. While the decision gave corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited sums on electioneering, it said nothing about whether they could contribute without limit to groups working as de facto arms of the candidate's campaigns.
That said, Citizens United did play a part in permitting the emergence of super PACs. In the decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." Some lower courts read this statement as saying that election spending by non-candidate groups cannot corrupt, regardless of the groups' ties to candidates. If the Supreme Court had dictated that there could be no corruption concerns, these courts reasoned, then there could be no limits on the size of contributions to them. Thus was born the super PAC.
The problem is that these lower courts, in striking down contribution limits to groups that are anything but genuinely independent, extended Citizens United beyond the breaking point. The Montana case gives the Supreme Court a chance to put campaign finance law back on the right track. It's vitally important that it does so: public confidence in our country's elections and government has been severely undermined by legal developments after Citizens United.
Last week, Montana's Attorney General filed a brief calling on the Court to let stand his state's century-old ban on corporate electioneering. The law was adopted by Montana voters who'd watched out-of-state copper interests capture the state's government and buy off its judges. In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Brennan Center for Justice and leading constitutional law scholars argued that, contrary to Justice Kennedy's statement in Citizens United, recent developments establish clearly that fundraising and spending by groups like super PACs can, and does, give rise to corruption and widespread perceptions of corruption.
The Supreme Court should right this disastrous mess — not (just) for the sake of its own legitimacy, but for the sake of American democracy. Broad segments of the public believe the officials we elect in November will ignore the public interest to serve the few donors whose million-dollar contributions fueled the shadow campaigns that elected them. Now it's up to the Supreme Court.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Disclosure
By John Travis – 05/09/12
Crossposted at ReformNY
The New York State Board of Elections, New York City Boards of Elections, and voting machine manufacturer ES&S each released reports yesterday detailing the results of an investigation into the abnormally high numbers of lost votes attributed to “overvoting” in the South Bronx in 2010. The upshot is that a machine defect led to “phantom votes” on at least one machine used in the 2010 election, resulting in some candidates receiving more votes than they should have, and the choices of many more voters being voided when the machines detected both actual and phantom votes in the same contest. Now that the reports on how this happened are out, election officials must make sure that what happened in the Bronx in 2010 does not happen again in the future.
Voting machines record overvotes when they detect more than one candidate selected for a contest. In such cases, no vote is recorded for any candidate in the overvoted contest, regardless of the voter’s actual intent. The Brennan Center first uncovered a high number of overvotes in the South Bronx while reviewing documents produced for discovery in a litigation it brought against the State and City. It published its findings in Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes; the report notes that in some election districts up to 40% of the votes cast did not count.
The investigations conducted by the City, State and ES&S conclude that the unusually high overvote rates were not due to voter error, but rather a malfunction in the voting machine once it became heated after a couple hours of use. The malfunction resulted in a distortion of the ballot images as read by the machines, causing blank ovals to appear darker than they should have. The machines registered these darker images as votes. These “phantom votes,” either led to some candidates getting extra votes (if no candidate had been chosen by a voter) or overvotes (if the voter had filled out a different oval for another candidate in the same contest).
While the machines in New York provide voters with a warning when ballots cannot be read because of overvoting, the warning used complex election jargon that gave voters misleading cues about their options. Voters in these predominantly Hispanic South Bronx districts apparently chose to override this message without understanding the result was that their votes were not counted. Fortunately, as part of a settlement agreement reached with the State, New York’s voting machines will be reprogrammed before the presidential election in November with an overvote warning message that uses plain language that more clearly explains to voters if the machine is having problems reading their ballot.
We applaud the State and City Boards for conducting a thorough investigation of this matter. The State Board of Elections has forwarded their report to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission so that it can be distributed to other jurisdictions across the country using the ES&S DS-200.
However, more steps need to be taken to prevent lost votes in the future by detecting these problems when they arise. Election officials in New York should publish election results by precinct and report the number of overvotes in each contest. Rockland County already does this. The only reason the Brennan Center was able to discover this anomaly was by reviewing documents obtained in the course of litigation. Had we not done so, the problems in the South Bronx would have likely gone undetected and the machines would continue to be used election after election. It should also be noted that we did not receive complete data from New York City or from other jurisdictions in the state that use the DS-200. As a result, there is no way of knowing where else these kinds of problems may have happened.
Tags: Democracy, NY Reform, Other Reforms
By Jonathan Backer – 04/02/12
The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root — radicalis, so radical politics quite literally involve altering society at its roots. The playbook for radical change closely resembles the winning strategy for the smartphone favorite, ‘Angry Birds.’ Any casual ‘Angry Birds’ enthusiast knows that one cannot win by launching birds at individual pigs suspended in precarious structures. Rather, one must target the foundations of the structures themselves and bring them toppling down on top of the unassuming pigs. So too with radical politics.
Recent developments in the area of campaign finance reform contain the telltale signs of ‘Angry Birds’ politics.
Last week marked the 10-year anniversary of the enactment of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), better known as McCain-Feingold. The landmark piece of legislation closed the soft money loophole, which allowed large individual, corporate, and union donors to make unlimited contributions to political parties. It also created more robust regulation for campaign advertisements that air in the days immediately before an election or primary.
When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Citizens United, opponents of campaign finance reform hailed the decision as the death knell for McCain-Feingold. Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin declared BCRA to be “decimated.” Former Republican National Committee general counsel Jan Witold Baran praised the Supreme Court for declaring “most of the fabled McCain-Feingold law unconstitutional” and cheered the end of “legislative meddling with campaign speech.”
But, as former Senator Russ Feingold insisted on the decade anniversary of the legislation he championed, BCRA remains almost entirely unharmed, but its foundation has collapsed under a barrage of ‘Angry Birds’ attacks. In a Roll Call interview, Feingold argued that he and Senator McCain “put a brick on top of a wall, and the brick is intact, but the wall was smashed.” The soft money loophole, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, allowed the political parties to collectively spend more than $170 million on campaign advertisements during the 2000 election, 55 percent of advertising spending during that cycle. Some of the top soft money donors in the 2000 election included unions, such as SEIU and AFSCME, and corporations, such as AT&T, Microsoft, and Phillip Morris, which before Citizens United could not spend directly on campaign ads.
The soft money loophole remains closed, but now, thanks to Citizens United, unions and corporations need not spend through the vehicle of a political party in order to influence the outcome of an election. In the 2010 midterm elections, the first after Citizens United, outside groups spent more than $300 million, almost a 50 percent increase (adjusted for inflation) over the amount of soft money spent on ads in the 2000 cycle. So far in the 2012 election cycle, outside spending has increased more than fourfold over the same point in the 2010 election. In many primary elections, super PACs and other outside groups using corporate and union funding have dramatically outspent the candidates. In the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, super PACs funded 91 percent of the ads.
Such a paradigm shift in how our elections are financed is clearly a symptom of an ‘Angry Birds’ style attack on our campaign laws. Citizens United overturned law that dates back to the Tillman Act of 1907 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. As long as there have been mass politics in the United States, there has been law to protect mass democracy from corporate influence. Until now.
But Citizens United is not the only evidence of ‘Angry Birds’ democracy afoot. The Supreme Court may overturn the Affordable Care Act by narrowing the federal government’s power under the Commerce Clause to a pre-New Deal interpretation. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker refused to negotiate reduced benefits with unions and instead dismantled the collective bargaining rights that the state innovated. On the left, the Occupy movement has responded to regressive tax policies, deregulation, and attacks on safety net programs by condemning the underlying issue of income inequality.
In an era of Angry Birds politics, political victory cannot be achieved through incremental change. Improvements at the margins are too precarious when opponents are willing to expend great political energy to destabilize the foundations. With respect to campaign finance reform, creative policymakers must restock the aviary with proposals for federal public financing that will amplify the voices of small donors. Policies that reduce barriers to voting would promote civic engagement, making it harder for special interests to co-opt people through disingenuous spending sprees.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Public Financing
By Adam Skaggs – 02/07/12
The mock outrage at President Obama’s campaign for blessing contributions to the Super PAC supporting him, Priorities USA, is a distraction from the real questions about today’s campaign finance environment — how to stop the abuses, and who will provide the leadership needed to achieve meaningful change.
The president’s apparent about-face — from condemning “the corrosive influence of money in politics” in the State of the Union to his campaign’s announcement that it will “do what [it] can, consistent with the law, to support Priorities USA” — provided plenty of fodder for critics. But it’s not surprising. In 2008, Obama reversed course, too — he first planned to participate in the presidential public financing program, but later eschewed it when it became clear he could raise more money outside the system.
The reality in 2012 is that no candidate with a serious chance of winning can afford, in the words of Obama for America campaign manager Jim Messina, to “unilaterally disarm.” The campaign fundraising arms race this election cycle, like it or not, involves Super PACs. They’ve already dumped $40 million of slash-and-burn attack ads into the Republican presidential primaries. Karl Rove’s Super PAC alone, working with a related non-profit group, raised $51 million last year.
However disappointing it was to campaign reform advocates, the only surprise about the Obama campaign’s decision to play by the same rules is that it waited this long to make the announcement. Any campaign that doesn’t take advantage of the rules that permit super spending by Super PACs doesn’t stand a chance.
The Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Citizens United v. FEC helped enable the Super PAC takeover of elections (as did other court decisions), but the Supreme Court isn’t entirely to blame. Under the Court’s decisions, the only groups that can raise and spend unlimited sums are groups that are completely independent of the campaigns. The candidate-specific Super PACs are anything but.
Why do these groups, which look like shadow arms of the campaigns to any common-sense viewer, operate under rules designed for groups that are wholly independent of campaigns? In large part, the answer has to do with the Federal Election Commission.
In 2010, the FEC issued an advisory opinion that green-lighted Super PACs: as long as a group tells the FEC it’s not affiliated with any campaign and won’t make direct contributions to candidates, it can raise and spend without limit. Later, in spite of laws providing that groups like Super PACs can’t coordinate with candidates and still claim to be independent, the FEC said that Super PACs could legally do a whole lot that looks like coordination. Only at the FEC can a group run ads that are “fully coordinated” with a candidate and still say it is “wholly independent” of his campaign.
The FEC was created under the Federal Election Campaign Act, enacted 40 years ago today, and the last four decades have shown that the agency isn’t up to the task of enforcing the nation’s campaign finance laws. The Alice-in-Wonderland approach it has taken to the Super PACs dominating this year’s election is just its latest failure.
Congress should replace the FEC with an agency that will actually carry out its mission. (While it’s at it, Congress could fix the Super PAC problem by passing laws that give real meaning to words like “independence” and “coordination.”) The abuses that will inevitably emerge from this year’s orgy of Super PAC spending should be sufficient to galvanize support from both sides of the aisle to pass meaningful campaign reform.
But even if partisan gridlock in Congress continues to stymie legislative reform, the president can take a significant step toward addressing the current state of dysfunction at the FEC. Five of the six commissioners who “lead” the agency are serving with expired terms, and the president has the power to appoint competent replacements committed to enforcing the nation’s campaign laws.
A coalition of reform groups under the leadership of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has been calling on President Obama to do just that — since 2009. So far, the president has ignored the calls to appoint new leaders to the FEC.
There is no excuse for further delay. If President Obama is genuinely concerned about the “corrosive” impact of big money in our elections, he should demonstrate it with action, not rhetoric.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms
By Jonathan Backer – 01/30/12
Throughout the 2012 election, candidates have piously condemned Super PACs for lowering the level of political discourse. These same candidates have simultaneously derived enormous gain when these purportedly independent groups used unlimited contributions to tar and feather their opponents. Recently, in South Carolina, Gingrich criticized Romney’s Super PAC for airing inaccurate ads, but the former Massachusetts governor washed his hands of the ads, saying, “I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form. My goodness, if we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.”
Two politicians, however, have now mustered more than rhetoric to rein in the Super PACs. Last week, U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and Senator Scott Brown called for Super PACs and other outside groups to stop running ads in their election. To provide a disincentive for Super PACs to ignore their request, Brown and Warren each vowed to donate 50 percent of the cost of all such ads to charity. Most groups have reluctantly agreed to abide by the request.
Both candidates demonstrated genuine concern for the role of Super PACs in the political system. Brown criticized Super PACs for “trying to buy elections and do[ing] things inappropriately.” Warren praised the agreement as an attempt to move “beyond talk to real action to stop advertising from third-party groups.” Both candidates should be commended for taking concrete steps to change the tone and restore accountability to their electoral contest.
The goodwill of candidates, however, should not be the only barrier to unrestrained and secretive corporate spending in politics. Government needs to restore common-sense rules so that the public can hold outside groups accountable in the post-Citizens United era. Reportedly, Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Robert Brady (D-PA) will soon introduce legislation that would require outside groups to disclose the underlying sources of their funding. Such legislation would be an important first step to ensuring that outside groups are held accountable in future elections.
James Madison defended the role of a robust federal government in our political system by saying, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” If all candidates were as attuned to the perils of unlimited and opaque political spending by corporations as Brown and Warren are, perhaps we would not need campaign finance regulation. But there are too many candidates who are willing to rhetorically distance themselves from outside groups while doing nothing to rein in their worst practices. It’s time for government to play a proactive role in protecting our democracy again.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms
By Jonathan Backer – 01/06/12
Recently, the Montana Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on corporate independent expenditures. This is a direct rebuke of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down a federal ban on corporate independent expenditures, largely based on the assumption that such spending inherently cannot corrupt elected officials.
The majority opinion in Citizens United, authored by Justice Kennedy, concluded that “independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption” and that “there is only scant evidence that independent expenditures even ingratiate.” But, thanks to a procedural quirk, the case shot up to the Supreme Court before anyone in the case could engage in any real fact-finding. So, Kennedy’s conclusion was little more than an untested hypothesis, not supported by any hard evidence.
When presented with evidence of corruption in a similar case, Justice Kennedy came to a totally different conclusion. Caperton v. Massey dealt with a West Virginia Supreme Court justice who failed to recuse himself from a case involving a CEO who spent nearly $3 million on independent expenditures in support of the justice’s election. Because the independent expenditures constituted the vast majority of spending in the judicial election, Justice Kennedy concluded that the justice should have recused himself because “no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, [and] similar fears of bias can arise when…a man chooses the judge in his own cause.”
Though Kennedy never said that the independent expenditures in Caperton had a potentially corrupting influence, “bias” and “corruption” are cut from the same cloth. Quite simply, a serious fact-based analysis of the role of independent expenditures in the West Virginia Supreme Court election led Kennedy to correctly conclude that large independent expenditures have just as much capacity to influence policymakers as a direct contribution — if not more.
Perhaps taking its cue from Caperton, the Montana Supreme Court engaged in a similarly thorough fact-based analysis of independent expenditures and reached a similar conclusion. Upholding the law, Justice McGrath argued that citizens adopted the law in a populist revolt against the “naked corporate manipulation” of the state — at that time, one mining company controlled “90% of the press in the state and a majority of the legislature.” Justice McGrath concluded that corporate money clearly corrupted Montana’s government before the adoption of the law and would do so again if permitted. McGrath and the other justices on the Montana Supreme Court (even those who dissented) tried to use fact-based analysis in order to expose the lack of factual basis for the Supreme Court’s conclusion in Citizens United that independent expenditures inherently cannot corrupt.
The recently concluded saga of the Republican Iowa caucuses provides more evidence than ever before of how strained the court’s rationale was in Citizens United. Candidate super PACs spent two-thirds of the $12.5 million worth of ads in Iowa under the legal illusion of non-coordination with the candidates. The plurality of those ads — 45 percent of all ads run in Iowa — came at the expense of Newt Gingrich, who once cheered Citizens United as a “great victory for free speech.” Of course, where you stand depends on where you sit — Gingrich now complains of Super PACs, the progeny of Citizens United, "[T]hey have no responsibilities, they have no connection to any pattern of reasonable politics, and it’s a model I hope we can get beyond..."*
Gingrich’s about-face on campaign finance reform is cynical, but it represents a recognition by many that a Supreme Court ruling rooted in ideology rather than reality creates the potential for countless unintended consequences; consequences far more dire for our republic than a stymied Gingrich presidential campaign. The Montana Supreme Court decision — which the plaintiffs will appeal to the Supreme Court — is an opportunity for the Court to face facts and recognize the corrupting influence of corporate independent expenditures, just as it did in Caperton. Will it seize the day and save American elections? Stay tuned.
*This post previously attributed a quote to Newt Gingrich saying that “[c]ampaign finance law has made a mockery of our political campaign season.” The quote should have been attributed to Mitt Romney.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms
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 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 – 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
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