For those of us who have followed the arguments of the so-called campaign finance “reform” community for a while, the ‘Shotgun Sellout’ deal cut between the National Rifle Association and the sponsors of the DISCLOSE Act to exempt the NRA from the bill’s most burdensome and onerous provisions is more than a little ironic.
For many years, the NRA has practically been Exhibit A in the “reform” community’s case for more stringent and restrictive laws against the right to spend money to advocate political views. Whenever they needed to find a bogeyman to scare the public with visions of “special interest” money flooding politics and corrupting system, the NRA and the money it spent on behalf of its members was often cited as an example of the dangers of unfettered free political speech.
So for the “reformers” to turn around and cut a deal behind closed doors that exempts the NRA and almost nobody else from the DISCLOSE Act’s requirements that private membership groups disclose their donors and members, suggests either a major reversal for self-styled “reformers” or that they are more concerned about other groups speaking in the upcoming elections than the NRA.
The NRA, after all, regularly endorses Democrats and is focused pretty exclusively on a single issue, one that the Democratic majority doesn’t seem terribly interested in doing anything on at the moment. The business community, on the other hand, at least as represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, appears to be very interested in criticizing much of what the Democrats have done, are doing, or plan to do, on the economy.
It’s clear where the danger lies for keeping a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, and it’s easy for “reformers” to ignore their past concerns about the NRA and money they spend in politics in order to pass the DISCLOSE Act and choke off political speech by the business community.
Before being consigned to the pile of forgotten inconvenient arguments and statements made by self-styled campaign finance reformers, I thought a reminder of a few of the things said about the NRA by the Brennan Center, Democracy 21, Campaign Legal Center, and others might be entertaining…
The lawsuits challenging the new campaign finance law look like an effort to replay a losing congressional battle, with many of the same big-time participants in the big-money game moving over to try to win a battle in the courts that they just lost with Congress and the American people…
Here’s the NRA, one of the biggest campaign money players in the country, [a group] that [has] been used to launder millions of dollars of soft money into federal campaigns…
… They are big users of big money in American politics to buy power and influence, and they want to keep the game going – at no matter what cost to the integrity of our democracy.
Democracy 21 blog post, May 13, 2002
A recent report by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania examined the “issue advocacy” expenditures of 27 organizations in the 1995-96 election cycle (groups such as the AFL-CIO, the NRA, the NEA, and the Sierra Club) and found that these 27 organizations alone spent an estimated $135 million to $150 million in election-related advertising.
…in 2008, the NRA… [a] 501(c)(4)s, spent $17 million… on independent expenditures advocating for the election or defeat of federal candidates. The current disclosure regime, however, does not require disclosure of the sources of the funds used to pay for such expenditures—as a result, the funders of these ads remain unknown.
Brennan Center testimony to Congress supporting the DISCLOSE Act, May 11 2010
…the new regulations effectively permit federal officeholders to assist special interest groups (such as the NRA…) with raising soft money, such as by appearing at fundraising events.
Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) received the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) single largest contribution to benefit any federal candidate in this election cycle — $25,000 — and his campaign has been bolstered by nearly $300,000 the NRA spent to back his re-election, Public Citizen has found.
“Senator Ashcroft may be the NRA’s best friend in Washington, D.C.,” said Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. “How else can you explain the NRA s largesse? They arm Ashcroft, and he hits his target.”
In all, the NRA has spent nearly $300,000 in this Senate election cycle to back Ashcroft, including $48,000 in hard and soft money contributions and almost $240,000 for TV and radio ads, bumper stickers and billboards.
Ashcroft has opposed gun-control measures on 13 consecutive Senate votes since 1996…
No other candidate for the House, Senate or presidency received such a huge contribution from the NRA in this election cycle, Public Citizen research shows. And many candidates wouldn’t want to collect such soft money, because it circumvents campaign finance law limits on contributions to candidates and amounts to evidence that a candidate is violating the spirit, if not the letter of the law…
… the “magic words” test allows corporations and unions to evade the prohibitions against spending directly from their general treasuries to influence federal elections. By carefully avoiding “magic words,” for example, the National (“NRA”), a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt entity, successfully evaded the campaign finance law’s source requirements.
…I am sometimes asked whether I was captive to the NRA… or some other special interest group known for donating large amounts of money.
But for obsessing about the NRA and it’s spending in politics, few statements or documents can rival the brief jointly submitted in 2003 in McConnell v. FEC by, among others, the Brennan Center, Public Citizen, Democracy 21, and Campaign Legal Center.
The brief, 75 pages long, mentions the NRA at least 30 times, primarily in the last third of the brief. Among other statements made about the NRA:
And it is why by early 1997 the Chair of the NRA’s PAC could characterize the legal standard separating “issue advocacy and political advocacy” as “a line in the sand drawn on a windy day.”
…the NRA refers to some of its 30-minute “infomercial” ads, in which some references to candidates might be deemed incidental. (Among plaintiffs, only the NRA runs such ads.)
This Court has expressly recognized that the basic reasons for limiting corporate and union campaign spending to segregated funds apply to ideological nonprofits—specifically including the NRA.
These requirements suggest that… the NRA [is not] entitled to a constitutional exemption, because [it] accepts corporate funding.
After years of attacking the NRA as “special interest #1” and saying their political spending demonstrated the need for further regulation of political speech, it appears that some in the “reform” community have decided that they didn’t mean it after all and there’s no need to apply the DISCLOSE Act to them.
Now they tell us.
