Salon.com > Mark Schmitt

Campaign finance reform in the age of Citizens United

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:06:00 +0000

Last Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging the century-old ban on direct corporate contributions to federal election campaigns. That counts as good news in a month that included the court’s earlier decision to hear a case that challenges the aggregate contribution limits in campaign finance and Obama strategist David Axelrod declaring that he would prefer a system of unlimited contributions with full disclosure. Almost all Republicans, the Supreme Court, and a powerful faction of the Democratic Party now fall somewhere on the spectrum between skepticism and vehement opposition to limits on contributions. The flimsy remains of the post-Watergate system of campaign finance regulation are on the verge of collapse.

When did “Fix the Debt” become “protect Bush tax cuts”?

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 21:52:00 +0000

“Fix the Debt,” as you've probably noticed from the Internet ads that are now as ubiquitous as the old Netflix pop-ups, is the newest high-profile effort by Peter G. Peterson and allies to build a public movement for long-term deficit reduction. Fix the Debt appears to be an ambitious public relations and grassroots lobbying effort layered on top of the other major Peterson-funded anti-deficit groups, all of them pushing for a “grand bargain” on taxes and spending, ideally before the “fiscal cliff” (or what I prefer to call the “fiscal reset,” because it's a chance to start over and reconsider bad choices from the 2000s). These include the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Concord Coalition, the Comeback America Initiative (former Peterson Foundation president David Walker's new project), as well as groups such as the Business-Industry Political Action Committee.

Dark money obscures Congress

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:52:00 +0000

It's been tempting to treat the 2012 election as proof that money in politics doesn't matter as much as commonly believed, or that Citizens United and the emergence of Super PACs and political non-profits didn't change things as much as predicted. “Effect of 'super PACs' proved to be less than expected,” the Los Angeles Times declared in a post-election headline.

3 ways to restore progressive taxation

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:39:00 +0000

Our current tax system is a toxic legacy of the George W. Bush years. It loomed over Obama's first four years, bearing deficits that limited the scope of economic stimulus, drove inequality to astonishing levels, and led directly to the debt limit showdown of the summer of 2011 that forced us into even more dangerous policies. President Obama's second term offers a long overdue opportunity to restore the promise of progressive taxation and revenues that are adequate to our long-term economic priorities. It requires both short-term and long-term action.

The greatest failure of the tax system is not that it’s too complicated or inefficient or that there are too many “special-interest loopholes,” as House Speaker John Boehner put it on the day after the election. It's that it doesn't raise enough money and it encourages all sorts of manipulation because of the differential rates for investment income and income from work. These are not things that developed over time, as if by some natural process – they are the product of specific decisions made in 2001 and 2003 by Republican-controlled Congresses that used the budget reconciliation process to avoid any bipartisan compromise.

Mitt’s tax war on America’s youth

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:26:00 +0000

On Tuesday, Mitt Romney hinted at a key detail about his mysterious tax reform proposal. While he had previously suggested that he might eliminate some tax deductions or credits to pay for his proposal to reduce rates by one-fifth, yesterday he suggested that he would instead cap each taxpayer's total deductions at $17,000. Some questions remain, such as whether he would include the exclusion for health insurance in the cap, whether it applies to single filers or married couples, or whether it would raise enough money to pay for his proposed cuts. (Probably not.) But assume that it's a cap on the value of the biggest deductions, such as the mortgage interest deduction and the deduction for state and local taxes.

Debunking the “moocher class”

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 14:03:00 +0000

As David Brooks points out, Mitt Romney's remarks describing 47 percent of the population as, in effect, moochers who would vote for Obama because they got government benefits were not “off the cuff,” as he described them today. There is a carefully developed theory behind his words, which has seen expression in previous Romney speeches, such as one last December in which he described Obama's vision as an “entitlement society” in which “everyone receives the same rewards,” but in which “we'll all be poor.”

Happy Birthday, Social Security

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:18:00 +0000

If Franklin D. Roosevelt rejoined the living tomorrow, he probably wouldn't recognize Social Security, his greatest domestic legacy. That might sound like something a critic or skeptic of the program would say, as if it had broken faith with Roosevelt's vision or expanded far beyond its original intent.

But, in fact, what Roosevelt would see would be Social Security's greatest virtue: its adaptability to changing circumstances. Social Security has survived, thrived, and continued to provide a base level of economic security not only through big macroeconomic shifts (such as the inflation of the 1970s) but also the transformations and uncertainties in our individual and family lives. That adaptability and continuous reexamination and improvement is the quality most in keeping with the experimental, pragmatic nature of the New Deal.

What Romney tells us about our tax code

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney last week promised ABC News he would “go back and check” whether he had ever paid a tax rate lower than 2010's 13.9 percent. He hasn't, and the questions keep piling up. This week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid repeated a rumor, attributed to a former Bain partner, that Romney had paid no taxes for 10 years. And in the New York Times on Tuesday, Michael Graetz, a former official in the first President Bush's Treasury, speculated about what might be in the returns. It's possible we'll find something in Romney's taxes that's disqualifying or suggests that he broke the law, but I doubt it. We're unlikely to learn anything about Romney from his tax returns that we don't already know – that he's a very rich man with a taste for cutting-edge financial engineering. It's what we'll learn about taxes that might shock us. The Romney tax returns are a rare opportunity to see how the tax code really works for the very wealthy and whether we want to change it in the direction that Romney has proposed or take it in the direction of real fairness and efficiency.

Let's start with the possibility that Romney paid a tax rate much lower than 13.9 in some years, or something in the low single digits. Graetz says that's “plausible” but might be “perfectly legal.” If he did, he would probably have to show real losses on his investments, which would offset his gains. These might be “capital loss carryovers” from previous years. He had a $4.5 million carryover on his 2010 taxes, from which NYU professor Dan Shaviro inferred that he probably had more losses than gains on his 2009 return – that is, he had to “carryover” the extra losses to the next year. If so, it's possible that he paid very little in taxes in 2009 – a bad year on the stock market – because he lost money. It's hard to see that as a problem, though. If Romney really lost money, he had no gains to pay taxes on.

Republicans won’t repeal Obamacare

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

“If I’m the leader of the majority next year, I commit to the American people that the repeal of Obamacare will be job one.”

– Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, on Fox News Sunday

"If you thought it was a good idea for the federal government to go in this direction, I'd say the odds are still on your side. Because it's a lot harder to undo something than it is to stop it in the first place."

– Mitch McConnell, in Elizabethtown, Ky, on Monday

With the Supreme Court ruling upholding the core of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans at every level have renewed their promise to repeal it. It is Mitt Romney's “Day One” task. Because Chief Justice John Roberts upheld the individual mandate under the taxing power in the Constitution, conservatives such as economist Keith Hennessy and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cucinelli argue, the penalties for non-compliance are now a “tax,” and the mandate can be repealed under the federal budget reconciliation process, which can't be filibustered in the Senate. That is, just 50 senators, along with a Republican vice president to break the tie, can repeal the mandate.

Take focus off the court

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:50:00 +0000

It should have come as no surprise that the Supreme Court would strike down the lower court decision to uphold Montana's ban on corporate political spending. Even if Justice Kennedy, say, had been taken aback by the public reaction to his flawed opinion in Citizens United, it is extremely rare for the Court to directly reverse itself. The more likely outcome, if the Court had taken the case rather than simply reversed the lower court's decision, would have been that it might move even further in the direction of Citizens United – for example, by indicating that it would reconsider prohibitions on direct contributions from candidates. As Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog commented yesterday, “The best way to win before the Roberts Court if you are a campaign reformer (aside from on disclosure issues) is not to play.”

The rise of the zombie candidate

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:04:00 +0000

Robert Farmer, a legendary Democratic fundraiser of the 1980s and 1990s, once described how presidential campaigns ended: “People don’t lose campaigns. They run out of money and can’t get their planes in the air. That’s the reality.” Most candidates would run out of money long before they ran out of potential votes or plausible paths to victory. The winner of the nomination would often be the candidate with enough financial reserves to keep going when the others couldn’t afford jet fuel, and Farmer’s skill was in making sure that his candidates -- Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992 -- had that advantage.