The campaign finance ‘reform’ group Common Cause has been waging a fierce crusade against wealthy libertarian donors Charles and David Koch and their supposed involvement in and benefit from the Citizens United decision. The anti-Koch campaign includes an effort to ferret out supposed links between the brothers and various other individuals and organizations, which perhaps most closely resembles a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon gone seriously awry.
As might be expected in such a witch hunt, facts tend to get overlooked and ignored. Just today, in a blog post promoting the efforts of Common Cause to funnel even more tax dollars into the campaigns of politicians in Los Angeles, they make the following claim:
Keep special interests at bay in Los Angeles
We know Citizens United has unleashed a torrent of undisclosed corporate and union spending at the federal level. It overturned a century of laws and decades of legal precedent. Common Cause has decided to do something about it.
We filed a complaint with the Department of Justice asking for an investigation of Justices Thomas and Scalia for attending a strategy session hosted by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch in Rancho Mirage, Calif., at the same time the Court was considering the case of Citizens United v. FEC in 2008.
The most obvious fact that Common Cause ignores is that the Tillman Act, the century-old law referred to here, is still alive and kicking, untouched by Citizens United. But I’m so used to this misrepresentation of the law by ‘reformers’ that I barely even notice it anymore.
More importantly is that Common Cause is simply wrong when they claim that Justices Scalia and Thomas attended Koch-hosted events “at the same time the Court was considering the case of Citizens United v. FEC in 2008,” as anyone even moderately familiar with the Gregorian Calendar could tell them.
In their own letter to Justice Justices Scalia demanding he submit to their inquisition, Common Cause states the following:
…On Jan. 21, the Los Angeles Times reported comments by Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg that you and Justice Thomas had attended Federalist Society dinners in southern California during January 2007 and ’08, respectively…
So according to Common Cause, Justice Scalia attended a Koch gathering in January of 2007. Problem? The Citizens United lawsuit was not even filed until December 14, 2007.
As their press release notes:
CU Files Suit over Limits for Issue Ads
New Court Battle with FEC over Hillary Clinton
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 14, 2007Dan Wilson dwilson@sbpublicaffairs.com 703.739.5920
Washington, D.C. – As it prepares to release its hard-hitting political documentary, Hillary: The Movie, Citizens United, a grassroots advocacy organization, led by election law attorney James Bopp, Jr., today filed suit against the Federal Election Commission, arguing that issue-oriented television ads are protected by the First Amendment and should not be subject to disclosure requirements under McCain-Feingold campaign finance law…
So Scalia’s attendance, however minimal or significant it may have been, occurred well before Citizens United was even filed in U.S. District Court, and certainly not while the Supreme Court was “considering the case” as claimed by Common Cause.
Justice Thomas’ attendance apparently occurred in late January 2008, after the January 15 decision by the U.S. District Court rejecting Citizens United argument. But the case was not docketed by the Supreme Court until August 2008, again well after Thomas supposedly attended the gathering hosted by the Koch brothers.
So Justices Scalia and Thomas attended, however briefly, the Koch-hosted gatherings in January of 2007 and January of 2008, respectively, while the Supreme Court did not even begin to consider Citizens United until August of 2008.
Now, it’s possible that the good folks at Common Cause are simply unfamiliar with where January falls in the calendar, perhaps instead relying on the original Roman calendar that simply didn’t include the winter months, or maybe even the Republican Calendar of the bloodthirsty Jacobins. This would at least explain why they didn’t realize in Thomas’ case that January comes before August each year.
More perplexing is their inability to see that 2007 comes before 2008 in the case of Justice Scalia. Perhaps they were laggards in their elementary school math lessons on numerical sequence? Or maybe there’s a time machine involved…
More likely, of course, is that in their rabid pursuit of the Koch brothers and rage at the Supreme Court for standing up for the First Amendment, Common Cause has simply abandoned even the pretense of rational thought and fairness, and are simply blindly flailing away at their chosen bogeymen with arguments that they either know to be false, or simply don’t care whether they are true.
These inconvenient facts for Common Cause are ultimately irrelevant to their campaign against the Koch brothers and Justices Scalia and Thomas, of course. The alleged aim of the complaints being filed by Common Cause is to force after-the-fact recusals by Justices Scalia and Thomas in the Citizens United case based on conflicts of interest, thereby vacating and overturning the decision. Few people take their hysterical ravings on this subject seriously, given the fact that the Koch brothers weren’t even a party to the case in which a conflict of interest is alleged.
Still, the inability of Common Cause to get even basic and readily available facts straight, like whether Justices Scalia and Thomas attended Koch-hosted gatherings at the time Citizens United was under consideration by the Supreme Court, is a signal of just how deeply disconnected from reality or disinterested in the truth some ‘reformers’ have become in the wake of Citizens United.
