CCP
Where’s the corruption in speaking to voters?
Luke Wachob
Perhaps more worrisome, however, were comments by Minnesota Senator Al Franken. From The Huffington Post:
“Well-funded outside groups threatened to run ads and support challengers to Moran because of his statements, and he reversed himself to oppose hearings.
‘Doesn’t that appear like corruption? To anybody? I see members of the press nodding, involuntarily. It’s amazing,’ Franken said.”
First of all, is it common for journalists today to cheer along with politicians’ press conferences? Perhaps I should stop being mystified when media outlets uncritically repeat myths about money in politics.
But more importantly, the answer to Franken’s rhetorical question is “no.” Spending money to inform voters of a candidate’s views – or “threatening” to do so – is not corruption. It is speech. Note that Senator Franken does not accuse the groups of misrepresenting Moran’s position. He simply accuses them of publicizing it. Where’s the corruption in that?
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Independent Groups
Intercept: Hillary Clinton Used Leadership PAC as “Slush Fund” in 2008-09
Emily Kopp
But only 11 percent of the relaunched Hill PAC’s spending ultimately went to candidates, filings show. Between June 2008, when Clinton dropped out of the presidential race, and the PAC’s termination the next summer, Hill PAC raised about $3.9 million but contributed just $421,500 to candidates.
Most top leadership PACs dedicate close to half of what they raise to other candidates in competitive races, according to OpenSecrets.org. In the years after its founding in 2001, Hill PAC spent a larger proportion of its expenditures on contributions to other candidates — but still considerably less than the average leadership PAC. It spent 27 percent on others in 2002, 17 percent in 2004, and 16 percent in 2006, according to FEC filings.
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Political Parties
Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Fundraising Strategy Leaves Republican National Committee in Driver’s Seat
Rebecca Ballhaus
The presumptive Republican nominee on Thursday convened his and the Republican National Committee’s top fundraisers from each state at an event at the Four Seasons hotel here. Collectively, they will raise money for the Trump campaign, the RNC and 11 state parties. Mr. Trump is set to attend a series of fundraisers for the committee in the coming weeks.
Yet in raising money primarily for a committee that will transfer most of the money to the RNC—though the campaign will get the first cut—Mr. Trump is leaving himself largely dependent on the spending choices of others, since federal law limits coordination. The businessman, after mostly self-funding his primary, hasn’t assembled his own finance operation that would raise money solely for his campaign.
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Washington Post: Trump doesn’t have a national campaign. So the GOP is trying to run one for him.
Matea Gold
“He’s the nominee, and he’s going to make sure his views are known,” Walsh said carefully during an interview. “He’s made that pretty clear. We will leave it to Mr. Trump to speak for Mr. Trump . . . and we will keep hitting Hillary and raising money to be ready for November.”
Trump’s failure to build a truly national campaign has left it to the GOP to run one on his behalf, while also trying to extinguish the regular political brush fires set off by the unpredictable candidate. The arrangement has intensified the burden on the Republican National Committee, forcing it to absorb core campaign tasks and testing whether it has improved the field and data capabilities on which it fell short in 2012.
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Event
Cato Institute: Digital Speech under Attack: How Regulators Are Trying to Shut Down Dissent Online
June 29, 2016
In recent years political speech on digital media has again come under increasing scrutiny from regulators in Washington. This is particularly true of the FEC — which has tried to expand disclosure laws and apply campaign finance laws to unpaid political accounts on Twitter — and the FCC — which ruled last year that Internet service providers do not have a right to free speech.
But, this move toward tighter regulation has not been without its dissenters. In February of last year, FEC commissioner Lee Goodman and FCC commissioner Ajit Pai co-authored a Politico op-ed arguing that “without government regulation, political speech and civic engagement have flourished on the Internet, and ordinary citizens have had the same freedom and ability to disseminate their political opinions to a wide public audience as large media corporations.”
Is our digital speech under serious attack? What is the current status of free speech online, and what is it likely to look like under the next administration? How might new regulations impact political organizing online?
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Free Speech
New York Post: The left only wants ‘conversations’ that it controls
Jonah Goldberg
Remember, behind every obvious double standard is a hidden single standard. For instance, this year, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer came out with a book attacking libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch called “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”
When asked what the nefarious supervillains of her screed were really up to, she ominously explained, “What they’re aiming at is changing the conversation in the country.”
Well, so are left-wing billionaire George Soros and his minions. So is Mayer herself. So are all of these campus fraudsters and activists. And so is Katie Couric. But when someone on the other side of the ideological chasm questions the official narrative, they must be demonized or otherwise silenced.
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New York Times: Andrew Cuomo’s Anti-Free Speech Move on B.D.S.
Daniel Sieradski
While bills in other states have, for better or worse, gained legislators’ approval, Mr. Cuomo’s executive order is the first to be instituted without democratic ratification. After it became clear a bill with the same purpose would not pass the State Assembly, Mr. Cuomo decided he wanted to take “immediate action,” as he put it at the order’s signing, joking that the legislative process was often “a tedious affair.”
Legal scholars on both sides of the issue have raised flags. On Twitter, Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School who sits on the Academic Advisory Council of the pro-boycott group Jewish Voice for Peace, called the order “clearly unconstitutional.”
Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, who has supported anti-boycott legislation, has suggested that Mr. Cuomo’s executive order could run up against the First Amendment.
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IRS
Bloomberg BNA: Keep the IRS rider out of bills, Democrats say.
Colleen Murphy
The House Appropriations Committee shouldn’t bar the IRS from addressing confusion over permissible political activity for 501(c)(4) organizations, 43 House Democrats said.
Future funding bills shouldn’t include language that “handcuffs the IRS in issuing, revising, or finalizing guidance on permissible political activity” on the topic, according to a release accompanying the letter.
The committee approved a fiscal year 2017 funding bill June 9 that blocks the Internal Revenue Service from any activity on tax code Section 501(c)(4) regulations and cuts the agency’s funds by $236 million.
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Congress
Washington Post: This would be a nice first step on campaign finance reform
Editorial Board
Mr. Jolly, now running for the Senate seat that fellow Republican Marco Rubio has said he will vacate, has taken a pledge to practice what he preaches — and has less than $600,000 in campaign cash to show for it. Maybe that helps explain why the Stop Act has only 10 co-sponsors. Locally, Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) said he would support a gavel-to-gavel ban on fundraising but has not decided whether to support one that applies out of session as well. Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) knocked the Stop Act as a distraction from what he considers the real campaign-finance reforms the country needs.
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Influence
ABC News: How Clinton Donor Got on Sensitive Intelligence Board
Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross, and Cho Park
Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff…
Fernando’s lack of any known background in nuclear security caught the attention of several board members, and when ABC News first contacted the State Department in August 2011 seeking a copy of his resume, the emails show that confusion ensued among the career government officials who work with the advisory panel.
“I have spoken to [State Department official and ISAB Executive Director Richard Hartman] privately, and it appears there is much more to this story that we’re unaware of,” wrote Jamie Mannina, the press aide who fielded the ABC News request. “We must protect the Secretary’s and Under Secretary’s name, as well as the integrity of the Board. I think it’s important to get down to the bottom of this before there’s any response.
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Broward Sun-Sentinel: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream co-founder wants Wasserman Schultz defeated
Anthony Man
Cohen wrote, she “used her power to help special interests at the expense of everyday Americans. All of you aren’t Democrats. I get that. But when one of the two major political powers is led by someone who enables corruption, we all have a problem.”
Cohen wants people do donate to the Mayday super PAC, which says it works to elect candidates dedicated to campaign finance reform. Giving money to Mayday, Cohen said in his email – also posted on the organization’s website – would help challenger Tim Canova defeat Wasserman Schultz in the Aug. 30 Democratic primary.
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Candidates and Campaigns
The Hill: Trump super-PAC co-chairman says Trump unable to self-fund campaign
Harper Neidig
“The Trump campaign, at this point, is (playing) catch-up,” he said. “I think the dilemma was, he talked about self-funding his campaign, he self-funded his primary, now he certainly doesn’t have the resources, or says he doesn’t have the resources, to self-fund the rest of the way, so it’s a scramble to get the money and get the resources together.
“I mean we will get there,” Rollins added, “it’s just right at this particular time, we are not prepared to counter attack, at least the PAC I am involved in doesn’t have the ability to counter attack.”
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Huffington Post: Donald Trump Trails Hillary Clinton Significantly In The Money Race
Paul Blumenthal
Donald Trump is starting the general election match-up against Hillary Clinton in a precarious financial position. By the end of April, the most recently available period for campaign disclosures, the Trump campaign and groups that will support him trailed Team Clinton by more than $200 million. At the same point in 2012, Mitt Romney and his team trailed President Barack Obama by about $65 million less than that.
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Washington Post: This simple staffing chart tells the story of the 2016 campaign
Philip Bump
Part of Donald Trump’s current effort to prove that he can win the general election just fine, thank you, is to downplay the fact that Hillary Clinton has far more staff than he does. As a general rule, more staff allows you to better contact voters, since it means more robust campaign operations in more places.
Trump, who’s either trying to prove that he doesn’t need to raise as much money as Clinton or trying to explain away worries that he can’t, is trying to spin Clinton’s numbers advantage as a negative. (See his tweet from the Infamous Twitter Fight of June 9: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up?”) It is a negative, from the standpoint that it costs more money, and clearly Trump did OK with his smaller staff during the Republican primary. But as a general rule, the sort of rule Trump likes to ignore, a bigger staff allows for a more robust campaign.
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The States
Buffalo News: Campaign finance reform will restore trust in government
Andrew M. Cuomo
In its noblest of moments, the Supreme Court has been a champion of equality and democracy. With Citizens United, it destroyed an individual’s right to participate in the political process.
To right this wrong, my counsel has issued an opinion that spells out permissible conduct for these groups – so there are no ambiguities in state law. Together with my legislation, these protections institute the strictest anti-coordination measures in the country.
A candidate wants to form his or her own PAC? Family members want to create an independent expenditure committee to support their relative’s run for office? A candidate’s advisers suggest that the group run an advertisement? Not in New York.
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Greenville News: One last chance at ethics reform
Editorial Board
South Carolina legislators have one more opportunity this year to pass an ethics reform package that would bring some added accountability to the General Assembly, although the options still available to them do not go nearly far enough.
The Legislature has been debating ethics reform for four years and has made very little progress on the issue. This year, a compromise was reached that would have led to at least some improvement, but the talks stalled as the two-year legislative session wound to a close. Chances of progress now appear slim. If lawmakers don’t pass an ethics reform bill, it will be their most significant failure of this legislative session.
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