In the News
Washington Examiner: NAACP v. Alabama for the 21st Century
Mark J. Fitzgibbons
Now, California’s Democrat Attorney General Kamala Harris is adding a new, extortionate twist to old tricks. Ms. Harris oversees licensing of charities and other nonprofits that wish to ask Californians for contributions, and under threat of fines and loss of tax-exempt status is demanding that nonprofit registrants file with her office their confidential federal tax return schedule listing their top donors. The ambitious Ms. Harris, by the bye, is running for U.S. Senate, and is raising money for that race…
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied injunctive relief sought by the Center for Competitive Politics against Ms. Harris. CCP was founded by former Federal Election Commission Chairman Brad Smith, an actual First Amendment scholar.
CCP is now asking the Supreme Court to hear its appeal, and is supported by a brief filed by 58 “friends of the court.”
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CCP
Comments to Montana Commissioner of Political Practices on Regulations connected to SB 289
Eric Wang
It appears that the Published Draft of the proposed rules addresses some of the concerns that CCP raised in its comments on the Initial Draft.[1] However, the Published Draft still proposes to adopt an unconstitutionally vague definition of “election activity” that contradicts the statute, and uses this term to define critical terms related to coordination and an entity’s status as a political committee. The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the “John Doe” investigation should offer a cautionary example of how campaign finance laws based on vague definitions like this can lead to disastrous results both for speakers and for regulators and prosecutors attempting to apply and enforce such definitions.
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PDF
FEC
Las Vegas Review-Journal: Federal Election Commission should stick to its narrow mission
Editorial
Ms. Ravel wants to turn the FEC into a partisan outfit that regulates the content of political speech and influences elections. Her actions come on the heels of partisan targeting by Lois Lerner, who used the IRS as an arm of the Democratic Party to unfairly scrutinize conservative groups seeking nonprofit status, as well as the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to regulate the Internet like a utility through “net neutrality” rules, the EPA’s economy-crushing climate change agenda, and on and on.
Make no mistake: We have a fourth branch of government. It’s called the regulatory branch. And it’s even less accountable than the other three.
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Wisconsin ‘John Doe’
WISN: O’Keefe: John Doe probes ‘national disgrace’
Mike Gousha
Eric O’Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, says it was raids of family homes that prompted him to defy a court-imposed gag order in the John Doe investigations. O’Keefe says the John Doe investigations have been “a disgraceful episode in Wisconsin history.”
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Lawrence Lessig
More Soft Money Hard Law: The Lessig-Mann Dust-Up
Bob Bauer
There is an additional aspect to this argument, and it has accounted to some extent for the bitterness of the partisan divide on this issue. Lessig and others have in mind specific understandings of the leading public policy challenges and the solutions to them that would qualify as “sensible.” Their position on campaign finance appears closely connected to their expectations of the public policy agenda and progress that reform would facilitate. Somewhere in this thinking, including Lessig’s, is the view that the people—meaning, one supposes, the vast majority– cannot be heard above the din of money, but that if they could be, sound progressive policies would stand a better chance of enactment.
Detecting this strain of thought, reform skeptics of a more conservative bent dig in hard against it. Of course, progressives then point to the link they see between conservative positions on campaign finance and the public policy positions that those conservatives favor. The prospects of further, fruitful conversation pretty much ends there.
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Pacific Standard: The Donald Trump of the Left
Seth Masket
This is where Trump differs from Larry Lessig. In case you’ve missed his campaign so far, Lessig is running on an extremely narrow platform: If elected, he will serve in office until the passage of his Citizens Equality Act, a hodgepodge of reforms related to voting rights, redistricting, and campaign finance. After this passes and he signs it into law, Lessig promises, he will step down, putting his vice president in charge.
This is, of course, preposterous, possibly more so than anything Trump has claimed so far. For one thing, Lessig’s campaign rests upon a grotesquely inflated conception of the presidential mandate. If voters were to somehow elect him, he’s saying, members of Congress would either be sufficiently scared of the voters’ wrath that they would pass his proposal, or he would have such long coattails that he would drag dozens of reformers into Congress who would pass his proposal. Compared to that, the idea of Donald Trump negotiating a tough trade pact with Mexico or China is eminently plausible.
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SEC
Bloomberg: Democrats Pressure SEC to Force Disclosure of Political Spending
David Michaels
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is being dragged into the 2016 presidential election — and it has nothing to do with how it regulates Wall Street.
More than 40 Democratic senators signed a letter Monday urging SEC Chair Mary Jo White to require that public companies disclose their spending on political campaigns. The issue risks driving another wedge between White and many Democrats who see her as the best remaining hope for restricting corporate campaign cash.
“We ask that you make this a top priority for the SEC in the near term, and inform us of the basis for your decision should you not plan to include it on the commission’s agenda for the upcoming year,”
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Candidates and Campaigns
Bloomberg: Next Stop for Kanye West: FEC Paperwork?
Ali Elkin
Though perhaps overshadowed by the Nicki Minaj-Miley Cyrus feud, Kanye West tried to become the take-home story of Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards by announcing that he will seek the nation’s highest office. But no, he’s not planning to take on Donald Trump. The rapper is planning to wait until the next campaign.
West culminated a long and rambling award acceptance speech by saying, “And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.”
…In the meantime, a political action committee called Ready for Kanye has submitted its statement of organization to the commission.
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Concord Monitor: How much for that political ad? Depends on who’s buying
Casey McDermott
If you tune in regularly to the 6 o’clock evening news on WMUR, you’ve likely seen one of the ads touting Chris Christie’s record, produced by his campaign. You’ve likely also seen another ad touting the same candidate, produced by a super PAC called America Leads.
The campaign, it turns out, ended up with a better bargain during the Aug. 3 newscast: Their spots during the 6 p.m. newscast cost $1,400 per slot, while the PAC had to pay $4,000 for each of its ads during the same time period.
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Huffinton Post: Donald Trump and Campaign Finance Reform
Fred Wertheimer
The bottom line: Donald Trump should not be viewed as a credible or helpful messenger for the campaign finance reform movement since he is not supporting and promoting the comprehensive campaign finance reforms essential to repairing the system, he is raising money for and receiving support from the same kind of individual candidate Super PAC that he is attacking his opponents for using, and he is asking the public to trust him on faith that, unlike other politicians, Trump can receive big money contributions without being influenced.
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The States
AP: New Mexico secretary of state charged with theft
Russell Contreras and Susan Bryan
The attorney general’s investigation stemmed from a confidential tip the office received in July 2014. Duran was accused of funneling contributions intended for her campaign into personal accounts for her own use.
According to the complaint, the investigation centered on deposits of large amounts of cash as well as campaign contributions into both personal and campaign accounts controlled by the secretary of state. The movement of money often culminated with cash expenditures at casinos throughout the state, the complaint states.
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Santa Fe New Mexican: Duran case highlights risk when elected officials enforce campaign finance laws
Justin Horwath
In two of the 64 criminal charges that Democratic Attorney General Hector Balderas filed Friday, Duran, a Republican, is accused of tampering with public records and violating the state’s campaign finance law by underreporting contributions from Mack Energy. The oil company is headed by Mark Chase, who declined to comment to The New Mexican about the allegations.
The episode reflects the complications involved when an elected official is in charge of enforcing campaign finance laws. New Mexico is one of the few states that doesn’t have an independent, nonpartisan body to handle ethics complaints concerning campaign money.
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Florida Watchdog.org: Anti-corruption group’s ethics boards face ethical problems
Yael Ossowski
Just eight months after it was created to eliminate corruption in local government, the Tallahassee Ethics Board seems to have ethics problems of its own.
At the end of its July meeting, board members quietly agreed to hire as their legal counsel the very same law firm that represents the city commission — which the board is supposed to police.
“It was all done behind closed doors,” Peter Butzin, chair of Common Cause Florida and until now one of the ethics board’s key supporters, told the Tallahassee Democrat. “We don’t even know who made the decision.”
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