2012 Elections

The grim future of campaign finance

The immediate reform fight is not about stopping the flow of money, but rather securing mere disclosure

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision in the Citizens United case (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

It’s not even the general election season, and we’re already seeing the electoral process dominated by super PACs, funded with unlimited donations and protected by a paper-thin veil of “independence.”

The super PACs operating in the GOP primary have managed to delay disclosing their donors until next month, but the identities of who funded these groups will be public. Groups in a different category — those that don’t ever disclose donors — haven’t started operating in any prominent way, but you can be sure they will in the fall.

I’ve recently explored how we got to this point. But what about the prospects for reform of a system that so many are disillusioned with?

To learn about what’s going on, I spoke to Fred Wertheimer, the founder and president of Democracy 21, who has been working on campaign finance issues for more than three decades.

Huffington Post is reporting that a campaign finance bill is in the works in Congress – something similar to the DISCLOSE Act of 2010 — and that you worked on the bill. What can we expect from this effort by the Democrats?

It is designed to solve a series of problems. First of all, we had more than $135 million in secret contributions injected into the 2010 congressional races through tax-exempt groups that don’t disclose their donors. These are the 501(c)(4) advocacy groups and the 501(c)(6) business associations. This legislation, like the DISCLOSE Act, will ensure that donors giving money to groups that are spending it to influence elections are disclosed.

Second, we’ve had a serious problem with disclosure of super PACs in this election. From July 1 of last year to date, we’ve had no disclosure of the donors financing the super PACs and will not get any information until early February. That means we’ve had a number of very important primary and caucus contests with voters having no idea who is putting up millions of dollars that are spent to influence their votes. All of those disclosures will come in early February, after critical contests are already over. The legislation will fix the problems that have been created by untimely disclosure by super PACs in the 2012 presidential primary elections.

Third, it will require candidate-specific super PACs to have an official take responsibility for their ads and require the ads to list the top donors to the super PAC.

With the DISCLOSE Act in 2010, it passed the House and fell one vote short of overcoming a filibuster in the Senate. What are the prospects for this new bill once it gets introduced?

The legislation this time will only have disclosure provisions and will not include a number of the nondisclosure provisions that were in the bill in the last Congress and that drew various arguments by opponents who were in fact opposed to disclosure. So this is a powerful bill that is very hard to oppose on any kind of merit argument.  It is focused only on disclosure, and it solves serious problems with disclosure by nonprofit groups and by super PACs which are playing such a major role in the elections. It’s going to be very hard to come up with arguments for voting against the bill. That’s not going to alone decide the battle, but it will focus the issue on basically one proposition: Should contributions being spent to influence elections be kept secret from the voters? Or do voters have a public right to know who is funding ads being run to influence their votes? We got a whole lot of arguments from opponents last time that didn’t address that basic question and had nothing to do with disclosure.

Last time, all the Democrats in the Senate voted to break a filibuster but we couldn’t get any Republicans. Democracy 21 and a number of other reform groups are going to work very hard to convince Republicans to vote for the new disclosure bill this time. Republicans traditionally have supported disclosure legislation, up until 2010 when politics took over. I’m not predicting what’s going to happen here, except to say that we have a stronger bill and a different dynamic this year with super PACs and the problems they have created front and center in the public’s mind.

The Senate is 53-47 right now, so you’ll need all the Democrats plus seven Republicans to get to the 60 vote threshold?

Yeah. And if it doesn’t pass this year, by the end of this year we are going to have a huge amount of secret money in our elections. And we will pursue this in the next Congress, when it will be even harder to oppose.

So let’s say this disclosure bill passes and becomes law, it really won’t stop the flow of money from the super-rich into the system?

No, it doesn’t. We are currently drafting legislation that would shut down the candidate-specific super PACs. By that I mean, the super PACs that are out there each focusing on one candidate, that are being run by surrogates of that candidate, and that are absurdly claiming to be PACs making “independent expenditures.”

How can those be shut down in the context of the Supreme Court rulings we have, including Citizens United?

The Supreme Court basically said that in order for this kind of unlimited money to be used to make campaign expenditures, the groups making them must be independent from the candidate. Citizens United did not in any way define independence. The Supreme Court in the past has used very broad language to define “independent” — that the groups must be totally independent, fully independent, not based on a wink and a nod from a candidate. The statutory language here about what constitutes coordination is broad, but the FEC has adopted a regulation that greatly narrows it. So we believe that you can define the meaning of “independent” in ways that can make clear that these candidate-specific super PACs, run by associates of the candidates, are not independent and therefore do not qualify to make these expenditures.

If that passed, though, wouldn’t that just bring us back to a 2004 situation, where, for example, the Swift Boat group was getting unlimited donations from individuals to go after John Kerry in TV ads?

Well, we filed complaints against the Swift Boats group and other groups in 2004, and the Federal Election Commission at that time found that they had operated illegally in the presidential campaign and fined them. The FEC findings of illegality would have prevented similar behavior in the future if we hadn’t run into the Supreme Court. However, even with the legislation we are drafting we still will have problems with super PACs that are not tied to specific candidates.

Beyond the legislation you’re thinking about drafting, is there some kind of long-term fix you have in mind? A robust public financing system perhaps?

Yes, also on our long-term agenda is empowering citizens to make small donations whose value will be multiplied by public funds. We think the longer term solution here is to provide a counterbalance to all of this influence money sloshing around in the system by literally overwhelming the system with small donations from citizens. In order to do that, we need to figure out how to master the power of the Internet in giving and raising small donations, and we have to provide incentives for these contributions, such as a 5-to-1 match for every contribution up to $200. The bottom line is, we need to be in a situation where candidates have an alternative way of financing their campaigns so they do not end up obligated to and dependent on influence-seeking money.

Justin Elliott

Justin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. You can follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin

Obama: Born in Kenya? (No)

Updated: Right-wing hacks are again insisting that the president was born overseas, but say they aren't birthers

President Obama (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

[Correction Appended] One of the Breitbart dopes has a SCOOP: Some sort of ancient press release says Barack Obama was born … in Kenya. IMPEACH. Retroactively install John McCain, we have so much Iran bombing to make up for.

This particular dope — Ben Shapiro, former boy-pundit Joel Pollak, some guy — says he is totally not a birther, at all, whatever gave you that idea, but it is very important that this forgotten old publicity pamphlet from a literary agent for a book project that never happened be unearthed and heavily hyped now, because the president was not properly “vetted” in 2008. (The idea that the president is a secret radical whose secret radicalism was not properly explored by the mainstream media is a stupid conspiracy theory that is almost as ridiculous as birtherism, by the way. We have proof that the president is not a secret radical leftist, and it is “his entire political career including his first term as president of the United States.”)

But what does producing this old booklet (that Obama did not write) with a factual error have to do with “vetting,” exactly? Well, Pollak explains that it fits a “pattern in which Obama — or the people representing and supporting him — manipulate his public persona,” by which he means “this is pointless bullshit that we’re publishing to stir up the birthers and look it worked plus we got a big Drudge link.”

Regardless of the reason for Obama’s odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama–who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media.

IMPORTANT NEW QUESTIONS ARE BEING RAISED. This editing error that Obama had nothing, personally, to do with is part of a pattern of Obama deceiving people by allowing them to believe insane things about him.

Now, coincidentally, the Arizona secretary of state is playing the “I’m not a birther but on the other hand let’s indulge the birthers” game. The president might not be eligible to be on the Arizona ballot, because of a petition, according to Ken Bennett, an American state’s No. 2 elected official. Vetting is so fun!

So, on the one hand, we have Barack Obama’s birth certificate(s), two newspaper announcements, a couple of witnesses, and nearly every single other newspaper and media account up to the point at which the birther conspiracy was invented circa late 2007. On the other hand, we have an author’s bio he didn’t write from 1991, and a petition. Obviously there is much more “vetting” to do, before we finally find the one piece of secret buried evidence that proves that it was a horrible accident that a majority of voters picked the socialist Muslim in 2008. Wake up, sheeple, etc.

[Correction: I mistakenly attributed the Big Government story to Ben Shapiro, but it was written by Joel B. Pollak. I apologize to Ben.]

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Obama’s broken immigration promise

ICE said it would target dangerous immigrants, but it's actually deporting a higher percentage of non-criminals

A man in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, stands next to the border fence as two U.S. law enforcement officers look on from the U.S. side of the fence. (Credit: AP/Raymundo Ruiz)

The Obama administration claims that it is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants while focusing on those with criminal records. But new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows that the number of deportation orders has declined dramatically since last summer and non-criminals comprise a growing percentage of those expelled from the country.

That wasn’t supposed to happen under a policy of “prosecutorial discretion” announced by ICE director John Morton last June. The goal of the policy, announced with much fanfare in the Spanish language media, was to spare “longtime lawful residents” from deportation and to focus on criminals.

Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton’s announcement.

In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.

“The agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction of its stated goals,” said Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collected the data from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.

The goal of prosecutorial discretion, Long said in a conference call with reporters, “was to target and bring before the court those with more serious criminal history. As yet we’re not seeing any change. They have not turned the ship around.”

The administration implemented prosecutorial discretion in response to complaints that young people with no criminal records continue to face deportation. But the new data will come as no surprise to student groups such as United We Dream, National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist, which continue to highlight the cases of law-abiding young people facing deportation.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has championed the case of a South Carolina man, Gabino Sánchez, a married father of two, who was arrested for driving without a license last year and now faces deportation.

“Gabino Sánchez has lived and worked and raised a family here for more than a decade and it is not in anyone’s interest to have him deported,” Rep. Gutierrez told Fox News Latino on Tuesday after a deportation hearing in North Carolina.  ”I do not understand why ICE has not followed President Obama’s guidelines and decided to move on from this case to go after someone else, someone who is a threat to his community or a serious criminal.”

In response to the TRAC findings, Gutierrez  said, “The president should make sure the Department of Homeland Security is actually following its own rules and he should proclaim proudly and loudly that he will not deport another DREAMer or anyone else who fits the prosecutorial discretion criteria.”

Continue Reading Close
Jefferson Morley

Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday).

Colorado congressman: “Obama’s not an American”

A congressman renews the GOP's big lie, and reveals the party's true ideal: Male, rich, straight, white

Mike Coffman (Credit: AP/Ed Andrieski)

Twenty-four hour news cycles are messy and chaotic, almost never fully summarizing the zeitgeist of the moment. But today is one of those rare days where the news cycle perfectly embodies the tectonic shifts in American politics — and the friction that comes from such shifts.

In the last day, we’ve learned that America has reached a demographic tipping point. For the first time in history, there are more minority births than white births in the United States, meaning we’re closer than ever to becoming a majority minority nation.

At almost exactly the same time these numbers were being released, a top Republican lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., was making national headlines with a leaked audio recording of him publicly declaring that the first African-American president is “not an American.” Here’s the audio and full quote from Coffman’s remarks at a Republican fundraiser:

“I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don’t know that. But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.”

Coffman has since issued a non-apology apology, saying that while he misspoke in questioning Obama’s birth certificate, he stands by his “not an American” declaration because Obama doesn’t “share my belief in American Exceptionalism — his policies reflect a philosophy that America is but one nation among many equals.”

It’s a deft misdirect — caught on tape making a nakedly demagogic play to White America’s reflexive fears of the “other” (in this case, denigrating a minority president as literally the “other” — i.e., a non-American), Coffman is pretending he was merely voicing his disagreement with Obama’s foreign policy. But don’t be fooled: The nation’s shifting demographics, as epitomized by today’s census numbers, is exactly what this is all about.

Coffman is running in a newly redrawn suburban Denver congressional district — one that is expected to be among the most contested in the 2012 election. Following the larger Republican strategy of racial fear-mongering, he’s spent the last year following in the footsteps of his anti-immigrant predecessor, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, championing legislation to repeal parts of the Voting Rights Act and prevent non-English ballots and end birthright citizenship for immigrants.

Put Coffman’s record together with his attack on Obama (an attack that has become all too common among top GOP leaders), add in the fact that his GOP neighbor U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn recently made headlines calling the president a “tar baby,” and remember the GOP’s successful opposition last week to a high-profile civil unions bill. It becomes clear that even in the swingiest of swing states, the national Republican Party sees its path to victory as one that eschews inclusiveness and equal rights, and instead stirs fears and resentment over the quickly changing definition of Americanness.

Ultimately, that’s what all the debates over almost every policy really comes down to. We can tell ourselves we’re fighting over taxes or contraception or abortion or gay rights or immigration or food stamps — and at one level, we most certainly are. But when policy disagreements become a justification for Republicans to claim an opponent isn’t a fellow countryman, it’s clear what we’re really fighting over is the root idea of “American.” Looked at this way, almost every policy battle has been transformed into a proxy in a Republican war to define “American” as white, straight, male and wealthy — an us-versus-them war being waged ever more intensely in 2012 because changing demographics threaten to define the term on far different terms.

We can thank today’s news cycle for making that war so crystal clear; at least it’s now painfully obvious what this moment’s political conflict is truly all about.

Continue Reading Close
David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

More Rev. Wright hate porn!

"The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama" was designed to turn on one wealthy right-winger – and even he rejected it

Jeremiah Wright (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

On the one hand, it’s almost funny. Fred Davis, the man who created hilariously bad ads for losing 2010 Republicans — Carly Fiorina’s “Demon Sheep” and Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a witch” — now wants cranky conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts to spend $10 million on an advertising campaign to take down Barack Obama. He’s teamed up with Whit Ayers, one of his collaborators on Jon Huntsman’s spectacularly terrible presidential run. Halfway through their description of “the Ricketts plan,” they describe themselves as “pirates.” Ay, matey, but are they after Obama’s booty – or Ricketts’?

Davis, Ayers and friends should remember that Obama sent in special ops to take out Somali pirates in 2010. These pirates’ fate might be similar. Politically, of course. I’m not suggesting anyone use violence against them. And they’re not suggesting anyone use violence against Obama, of course — although their pitch is chock-full of eliminationist rhetoric. From its title, which promises to “stop [Obama's] spending for good,” to its description of being “locked, loaded and ready” to “hit Barack right between the eyes” and bring about “his demise,” the memo the New York Times released today is right-wing hate porn, designed for maximum titillation to Ricketts, its intended audience. It may not have worked on Ricketts, whose PAC disavowed the plan Thursday afternoon after a day of negative publicity. But will it work on anyone else?

I doubt it. The 54-page PowerPoint is certainly a quick, fun read, a guide to the profiteering right-wing id. I loved the idea that they wanted to unveil the whole campaign in Charlotte during the Democratic convention: I can’t think of anything that would get the oft-divided Democratic Party fired up better than right-wingers with flyover Rev. Wright hate porn. Although the plan is supposedly designed to demonstrate Obama’s “incompetence,” it’s hard to see what Wright’s views have to do with Obama’s competence – unless you’re of the opinion that nothing says “incompetence” like a black man having something to do with another black man. The writers reassure Ricketts they’ve minimized the risk of being charged with racism by lining up a “highly literate” (that must have been hard) black spokesman, Larry Elder, whom they’re paying $25,000 to serve as frontman. (If I were Larry, I’d talk to an employment discrimination lawyer: I think a white guy would get more than $25,000 to front a $10 million ad campaign. Not to mention to sell his soul.)

Can the Wright fear-mongering work? I think it mainly plays with people who wouldn’t vote for the president, anyway. I’m one of the few liberals who wrote with concern about the Wright revelations back in 2008. I didn’t want to believe that Obama looked the other way as Wright preached the unredeemable evil of the United States (and most white people), along with self-defeating theories of black difference and downright lies about genocide. But I never believed Obama shared those opinions. I assumed he admired Trinity’s social work and political connections. I didn’t think he spent a whole lot of time in its pews or listening to Wright’s views. Still, I thought it was fair to look at what Obama’s ties to Wright told us about his politics – and like most people, I quickly decided: not much.

Four years later, independents are able to see that Obama has in fact been a fairly hawkish president, whose foreign policy certainly didn’t come from the Jeremiah Wright hymnal. In fact, his expansion of drone warfare, with its inevitable civilian casualties, is precisely the kind of thing Wright and other foreign policy critics think can result in “chickens coming home to roost.” And it’s not like the media ignored Wright, either. Remember that whole race speech candidate Obama had to make in March 2008 – against the advice of strategists who worried it would backfire?

The notion that the Wright mess didn’t get adequate attention comes down to one fact: that John McCain wouldn’t greenlight a lurid strategy to blacken Obama (literally and figuratively) with scary ads about Wright. For that, McCain earns derision from his former campaign advisors: They call him “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused, burdened with a campaign just as confused.”

What is Mitt Romney saying about the so-called Ricketts plan? He told reporters this morning he hadn’t had time to read the papers (typical Romney bravery), although he’d already done his own Wright-baiting in a February interview with Sean Hannity. By this afternoon, the Romney campaign released a statement disavowing the proposal (and Romney himself then told the conservative Townhall site that he would “repudiate” the Super PAC’s ad strategy). Even Ricketts did the same, in a statement from his PAC saying “he is neither the author nor the funder of the so-called Ricketts Plan to defeat Mr. Obama that The New York Times wrote about this morning…. [I]t reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.” (Jeff Zeleny of the Times later Tweeted that a reference on page 46 of the plan suggests that it had received tentative approval at a meeting in New York.)

You can decide whether or not you believe that. I think it’s good news that even Joe Ricketts can be shamed out of such a crude and racialized appeal. That doesn’t mean we won’t see such appeals in the months to come, just that they probably won’t come with a prominent billionaire’s name on them.

Continue Reading Close
Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.

Jon Huntsman for New York City mayor?

Yes, please. It would be very funny to see him lose

Yes, Jon Huntsman should definitely run for mayor of New York, because I never tire of watching Jon Huntsman get rejected by voters. The best part of a Jon Huntsman campaign is when his well-heeled supporters very sincerely and tragically argue that the fact that no one wants to vote for Jon Huntsman is a sign that the Republic itself is in peril. They would get so sad and melodramatic when he got 10 percent of the vote.

Now, there is no evidence that Jon Huntsman is planning for run for mayor of New York City, but one of his annoying daughters tossed this one out there last night:

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Page 1 of 199 in 2012 Elections