In the News

CPI: Statehouses, not Congress, hosting biggest political money fights

By Ashley Balcerzak

State lawmakers this year are engaging in full-throated debate on campaign finance proposals – with some surprising outcomes.

New Mexico’s secretary of state may have found a way to enact rules that the governor vetoed months before…

In April, Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, vetoed legislation that doubled contribution limits but tightened donor-disclosure rules.

Just two months later, newly elected Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver proposed a campaign-finance rule that included elements of the failed bill, though not the increased contribution limits. This angered opponents of increased disclosure requirements…

“The proposed rule attempts to legislate rather than implement existing law,” Tyler Martinez, an attorney with the conservative Center for Competitive Politics and no relation to New Mexico’s governor, wrote in public testimony to the secretary of state.

CPI: Democrats say ‘Citizens United’ should die. Here’s why that won’t happen.

By Sarah Kleiner

Seizing on the specter of Russian election influence, they’ve ramped up their quixotic effort – with minimal effect – to blunt Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision that unleashed a torrent of special interest spending on U.S. elections.

In doing so, they’ve introduced two dozen bills related to money in politics…

Bradley A. Smith, a former Republican chairman of the FEC, said campaign finance deregulation, in general, makes sense.

Smith, founder and chairman of pro-deregulation nonprofit Center for Competitive Politics, sees many of the Democratic proposals on the table now as efforts to rig the system in their favor.

The FEC, for example, isn’t as divided as some people make it out to be; the vast majority of money raised and spent in U.S. elections is already disclosed; and government probably shouldn’t be in the business of financing campaigns, he said.

There’s strong reason to believe people such as Sens. Chuck Schumer and Sheldon Whitehouse want reform because “they think it will stifle speech that opposes their agenda,” Smith said.

CCP

Campaign Finance Regulations Don’t Exist to Make Politicians’ Lives Easier

By Joe Albanese

Issue One’s series of interviews with former lawmakers continued last week with a discussion featuring Charlie Bass, a Republican Congressman from New Hampshire from 1995 to 2007 and 2011 to 2013…

First is the topic of spending disparities between candidates. In his very first answer, Congressman Bass characterizes his experience with campaign finance mainly in those terms: “I was always outspent, with one exception. I was not one of those guys who spent a lot of time fundraising. As a result, I usually had to make do with somewhat less than my opponents.”

Concern with the spending of one’s opponent is a perennial grievance of politicians on the wrong side of a financial disparity… However, the desire to not be outspent certainly isn’t a justification for changing the law to make campaigning easier for you and harder for your opponents…

The logic of ever-greater regulation, at least from the perspectives of lawmakers themselves, seems more rooted in “I don’t like having to raise more money” than “raising money corrupts government.”

Free Speech

The Intercept: In Europe, Hate Speech Laws are Often Used to Suppress and Punish Left-Wing Viewpoints

By Glenn Greenwald

This is how hate speech laws are used in virtually every country in which they exist: not only to punish the types of right-wing bigotry that many advocates believe will be suppressed, but also a wide range of views that many on the left believe should be permissible, if not outright accepted. Of course that’s true: Ultimately, what constitutes “hate speech” will be decided by majorities, which means that it is minority views that are vulnerable to suppression…

Indeed, the ACLU was borne out of an attempt by former President Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from his policy of involving the U.S. in World War I. It then spent decades fighting censorship efforts aimed at communists, socialists, civil rights groups, and LGBT activists. When you empower society to outlaw ideas it hates most, that is who is most vulnerable. Civil liberties lawyers were successful in defending those groups only by upholding the principle that state censorship of political viewpoints is always impermissible.

The Courts

WisBar News: Former Walker Aide, Target in John Doe Probe, Loses Seventh Circuit Appeal

By Joe Forward

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that Cynthia Archer, a former aide to Gov. Scott Walker, cannot pursue claims against six Milwaukee prosecutors and investigators who targeted her in a John Doe probe.

The three-judge panel in Archer v. Chisholm, No. 16-2417 (Aug. 29, 2017), ruled that the case “presents troubling accusations of a politically motivated investigation” but “Archer has not met her burden in overcoming” a defense of qualified immunity.

Archer alleged that defendants, including Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, engaged in a “continuous campaign of harassment and intimidation” against her and others who supported Act 10, which curtailed the bargaining rights of unions.

CPI: Campaign regulation foes targeting state-level restrictions

By Ashley Balcerzak

Federal courts – not the White House, not Congress – have triggered the most earthshaking changes in how recent U.S. elections are funded.

Think Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, where the Supreme Court allowed corporate spending in elections.

Or SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, which created super PACs…

Having won significant battles at the federal level, political groups and libertarian nonprofits are now targeting state-level rules in district and appellate courts across the country.

The effects could be wide-ranging. The most notable battles deal with when groups need to disclose their donors, and whether contribution limits trample on donors’ freedoms of speech and expression…

Few states have managed to change their contribution limits in the legislature. So, many groups are turning to the courts to erode the restrictions.

Taxpayer-Funded Campaigns

Governing: The New Strategy for Limiting Money’s Role in Elections

By Alan Greenblatt

Public financing forces taxpayers to underwrite candidates whose views they may find intolerable, says Brian Balfour, executive vice president of the Civitas Institute, a free market think tank in North Carolina.

“There’s a moral argument against compelling people to pay for the speech of others, oftentimes candidates with whom they disagree,” he says…

An arguably bigger problem that public funding could create, though, is one that Hisam Goueli had: For his city council campaign, he received nearly $20,000 through the democracy voucher program. But, the money arrived the day before the August primary — too late to do him any good…

Goueli also complains that only candidates who already have strong organizational backing can take full advantage of the program because of the high demands of collecting qualifying signatures.

That seems to run counter to the promise the program held, which was to level the playing field for candidates who may lack deep-pocketed support. The Seattle program has also been challenged in court and police are investigating an alleged case of fraud, in which a candidate is accused of fabricating individual donations in order to receive funding through the voucher system.

KRQE Albuquerque: City council candidate accused of campaign finance fraud for public funding

By Madeline Schmitt

An Albuquerque City Council candidate has been accused of campaign finance fraud. Specifically, that his team did not properly collect campaign contributions needed to qualify for public funding…

“This is, I think, political retribution for a lot of the work I did at places like SWOP,” he told KRQE News 13…

The complaint states that when Benavidez’s campaign reps were out seeking at least 381 people to contribute $5 on the spot, to qualify Benavidez for $38,000 in public financing, some of the reps may have broken city ordinance.

Namely, the OIG report says several citizens interviewed claimed they contributed no money or just $1 or $2 to the campaign, but not the necessary $5. In some of those cases, people said the campaign reps still got their signature and promised to cover the money.

When the reps were interviewed, one said she didn’t think that was a “big deal.” Another thought contributions less than $5 were OK.

Benavidez calls it human error.

“But really, I mean, it was a very ethical operation,” Benavidez said.

The States

Courthouse News: Campaign-Finance Sunlight Bill Clears Key California Senate Committee

By Derek Fleming

A bill aimed at illuminating dark money in political campaigns landed in a key California Senate committee Tuesday, and its author said the legislation is “long overdue.”

Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco, wrote Assembly Bill 249 to end the practice of obscuring the names of donors to campaign advertisements. He brought the bill before the Senate Standing Committee on Elections and Constitutional Amendments, telling members that “unprecedented” spending on campaign advertisements over the last several years has negatively impacted voters and the democratic process…

If passed and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, AB 249 will be the strongest campaign advertisement finance law in the nation.