Washington, DC – The Institute for Free Speech published new research today finding no evidence of increased public corruption following the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.Source: New Research: No Rise in Corruption Since Citizens United
Showing posts with label Citizens United. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Citizens United. Show all posts
New Research: No Rise in Corruption Since Citizens United
Hiding in Plain Sight: PAC-Connected Activists Set Up ‘Local News’ Outlets
Some stories practically write themselves, the details simple and clear. This investigation, spurred by a reader’s tip, was no such story.Source: Hiding in Plain Sight: PAC-Connected Activists Set Up ‘Local News’ Outlets
Opinion: Time for Democrats to abandon myth about Citizens United
My fellow Democratic politicians like to campaign on overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums advocating for candidates.Source: Opinion: Time for Democrats to abandon myth about Citizens United
9 years after Citizens United, the decision lives rent-free in liberals' heads
Does the government have the power to suppress a film if it criticizes a candidate running for office? Nine years ago to this day, the Supreme Court said no and ruled in favor of Citizens United, a nonprofit group that wanted to distribute and advertise a movie criticizing Hillary Clinton.Source: 9 years after Citizens United, the decision lives rent-free in liberals' heads
Super-PACs: So easy, a college student can do it
Three Duke University undergraduate students have started their own super-PAC, FEC filings show. And even the college youths are aware how absurd that sounds.
“We started [the super-PAC] with the intention of highlighting the absurdity of the process itself,” Stefani Jones, a 20-year-old sophomore and the group’s treasurer, told The Hill.
Super-PACs are formally titled independent expenditure-only committees, and came after a string of Supreme Court decisions beginning with Citizens United v FEC. These groups can raise and spend unlimited funds as long as they do not coordinate with a candidate or party.
The group started the super-PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Yesterday, for a class project. The class is titled “Congressional Gridlock” and focuses on what causes gridlock in Congress and our political system.
via thehill.com
Yes, a college student could file the paperwork to start a Super PAC pretty easily -- it is the ongoing administration and potential legal pitfalls of running a Super PAC that cause PACs to need help from attorneys.
Yes, a college student could file the paperwork to start a Super PAC pretty easily -- it is the ongoing administration and potential legal pitfalls of running a Super PAC that cause PACs to need help from attorneys.
Citizens United Rules Stall at FEC
Roll Call News:
"After almost 18 months of discussions, memorandums and regulatory debates, the Federal Election Commission failed Wednesday to begin its process for updating regulations in light of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United.
The commission’s agenda included drawing up a set of questions to frame future discussions about bringing regulations in line with the ruling, which found that corporations, unions and nonprofits may spend their own funds on political ads. It was only the second time this year that the commission tried to tackle the project, and frustrated commissioners were unable to reach an agreement.
It’s unknown when the commissioners may try again, and campaign finance experts say the deadlock means that millions of dollars could be raised and spent on the 2012 cycle under outdated regulations."
FEC Urged to Deny Stephen Colbert’s FEC Request by CLC and Democracy 21
Stephen ColbertCLC President and Colbert personal lawyer Trevor Potter rescued himself from this issue, of course.
campaignlegalcenter.org:
"The Campaign Legal Center[1], together with Democracy 21, today urged the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to deny a request by comedian Stephen Colbert to significantly expand the so-called “press-exemption” to a number of federal election laws. The two organizations filed comments with the FEC in response to an advisory opinion request by Mr. Colbert seeking the FEC’s opinion as to whether the Viacom corporation, which owns, produces and distributes his television show, The Colbert Report, may pay for a variety of expenses of his Colbert Super PAC without disclosing any of the expenses as in-kind contributions to the PAC under the “press exemption.”"And here is a Wall Street Journal editorial on the possible *serious* unintended consequences of Colbert's gag:
Campaign-finance laws are so complicated that few can navigate them successfully and speak during elections—which is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect. As the Supreme Court noted in Citizens United, federal laws have created "71 distinct entities" that "are subject to different rules for 33 different types of political speech." The FEC has adopted 568 pages of regulations and thousands of pages of explanations and opinions on what the laws mean. "Legalese" doesn't begin to describe this mess.
How's that for a punch line? Rich and successful television personality needs powerful corporate lawyers to convince the FEC to allow him to continue making fun of the Supreme Court. Hilarious.
Of course, there's nothing new about the argument Mr. Colbert's lawyers are making to the FEC. Media companies' exemption from campaign-finance laws has existed for decades. That was part of the Supreme Court's point in Citizens United: Media corporations are allowed to spend lots of money on campaign speech, so why not other corporations?
Whether Mr. Colbert understands that he has made the Supreme Court's point is anyone's guess. But there's nothing funny about what he has had to go through to set up a PAC, because real people who want to speak out during elections face these confounding laws all the time. And as his attempt at humor ironically demonstrates, the laws remain byzantine and often impossible to navigate, even after Citizens United.
Related articles
The Republicans’ ChutzPAC
NYTimes.com:
"The PAC founders blithely and cynically contend that the restriction really only applies to how funds are spent, not how they are solicited. This means that once a donor has given a candidate the maximum $5,000 allowed under law, the candidate could ask for thousands more to be donated to an “independent” Super PAC that everyone knows to be an aggressively partisan election weapon.
This hearkens to the million-dollar donations harvested by the Nixon campaign. The scheme should be shunned and denounced by lawmakers and candidates in both parties. Unfortunately, Democratic fund-raisers say that if the inept Federal Election Commission allows the Super PAC to go forward, they will join the new arms race."
Dem groups ask FEC to rule on Super PACs
POLITICO.com:
"'We're pretty sure that is not legal,' Lapp told POLITICO about the proposal to allow members of Congress and other officeholders to get involved in PAC fundraising -- but if the committee rules it legal, she said Democratic groups will also follow suit to ensure a fair playing field.
UPDATE: Fred Wertheimer, whose Democracy 21 advocacy group protested about the practice, raised similar concerns about the Democratic proposal.
“This would blatantly violate the law,” he told POLITICO, expressing concern that the six-member FEC, which has become increasingly prone to deadlock, would not block the practice."
A campaign-finance bill that doesn’t pass muster
The Washington Post:
"The legislation — which has no chance of being enacted, but is a window into the liberal mind — would fund the campaigns of Senate candidates by extracting a 0.5 percent tax, up to $500,000 a year, on government contractors. This has nothing to do with Citizens United, which had nothing to do with contributions to candidates or the funding of their campaigns. Citizens United said only that the First Amendment protects independent (not coordinated with campaigns) candidate-advocacy by Americans acting collectively as corporations, including — actually, especially — advocacy corporations, from the National Rifle Association to the Sierra Club.
Mitch McConnell, leader of Senate Republicans, correctly says that taxpayer funding of politics has been the subject of the largest, most sustained and most accurate polling in American history. The polling occurs every year when Americans have a chance to check a box that will give $3 — without increasing their tax liabilities — to the fund for presidential campaigns. Almost all taxpayers (91.7 percent in 2007, the last year for which there are data) refuse to participate."
Allison Hayward talks campaign finance with state AGs
Since Citizens United, a number of states around the country have enacted statutes to permit corporate political expenditures while also providing for adequate disclosure of that political spending. These laws, as well as other election-related disclosure rules, are the subject of ongoing litigation around the country. This panel will discuss the current status of campaign disclosure law. Panelists can discuss recent judicial decisions (including the Supreme Court opinions in Citizens United and Doe v. Reed) that have endorsed the value of disclosure laws in the electoral context, as well as the First Amendment arguments that have been raised in opposition to such laws.
C-Span has the video.
C-Span has the video.
Citizens United and the Myth of a Conservative Corporate America -- w/ Fascinating Graphic
Ideological Cartography:
"These results challenge conventional beliefs about the political leanings of corporate leaders. Republicans have long been seen as the party of big business. To whatever extent this label should apply, it probably owes more to the party’s policies than the composition of its support base. Although board members from some sectors exhibit conservative allegiances—notably the oil, gas, and coal industries—most corporate boards are either dispersed across the ideological spectrum, or seem to have aligned with the left, as is the case of many of the growth stories of the new economy."
Happy 1st Birthday Citizens United!
To celebrate, politicos and journalists around the country have written op-eds and articles in your honor:
Washington Post:
To the court's majority, it was "stranger than fiction for our Government to make . . . political speech a crime."Stranger still were the unwarranted attacks against the Supreme Court that followed. Most visibly, the president used his State of the Union address to accuse the court of having "reversed a century of law" and "open[ed] the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections." That statement was astonishing because none of it was true: The oldest decision reversed by Citizens United was 20 years old, not 100, and foreign corporations are prohibited from participating in elections, just as they were before. As for "special interests," many had been spending at an equally furious rate, apparently unnoticed by the president, well before this ruling.NPR:
"We're here today on what should be a happy day for those of us who sought clarity in the law, less regulation," Republican Commissioner Don McGahn said.He and the other two Republicans wanted new rules that didn't mandate disclosure of big, undisclosed contributions — the kind that financed thousands of attack ads last year. The three Democrats wanted the mandatory disclosure. So the commission deadlocked."Promoting transparency in American elections is central to the commission's mission, and this transparency in turn is essential to the success of this, the world's oldest democracy," said Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. "We don't believe in doing things in secret."
Sometimes covering election law issues is like watching paint dry. It is, I think, a challenge to make these issues interesting and accessible for a general reader. In this election there was just so much money and so much secrecy, so the stories were probably of broader interest. I cannot recall a case since Bush v. Gore in 2000 when the public has shown such interest in a Supreme Court case. That helps to make the case for covering the impact ofCitizens United.Rick Hasen II:
Whether Justice Kennedy believed that existing campaign finance disclosure law would provide for this free and instantaneous exchange of information about campaign money or whether he was instead advocating that Congress adopt such a system is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Citizens United has not only unleashed new money into the election process; actions by lower courts and the FEC, combined with an inadequate disclosure regime, have led to a system of largely undisclosed corporate, union, and individual campaign contributions flooding into elections.Columbus Dispatch:
On today's one-year anniversary of the controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling giving corporations and labor unions greater rein to spend money on behalf of campaigns, state Rep. Jay Goyal, D-Mansfield, plans to introduce legislation to ban businesses that get state contracts from making campaign contributions with corporate cash.In addition, groups are planning a protest rally in Columbus to argue for a federal constitutional amendment in response to the ruling.
The government's other argument was that our political campaigns have become too expensive, too strident, too vacuous, too uninformative, and need to be reined in. Here the court's answer was even more insistent about who has the first and last word on how much political speech Americans get to have: "In the free society ordained by our Constitution, it is not the government but the people—individually as citizens and candidates and collectively as associations and political committees—who must retain control over the quantity and range of debate on public issues in a political campaign."
As the court has recognized across the decades, despite the byzantine complexity of our restrictive and burdensome campaign-finance laws, the clash between them and the First Amendment presents a rather simple and stark choice. Either the politicians and the government get to decide how much political speech there will be and what form it will take, or the people and the groups they organize get to make that call.
And, a lovely video, produced by Citizens United itself, featuring Ted Olson, Brad Smith and others.
I'll post more links as I find them.
Related articles
McCain-Feingold Crunch -- New Flavor from Ben & Jerry?
WSJ:
"Two scoops of McCain-Feingold Crunch, please: Ben & Jerry unite against Citizens United.
Ice cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen, left, and Jerry Greenfield. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, have organized a coalition of like-minded businesses to protest a Supreme Court ruling that struck down limits on corporate campaign spending in candidate elections."
Woman protests Citizens United decision by trying to marry a corporation
Politics - Utne Reader:
"The U.S. Supreme Court decided in the widely condemned Citizens United case that corporations enjoy the legal status of people—so a Florida woman is seeking the hand of a corporation in legal marriage.I'm rolling my eyes.
Sarah “Echo” Steiner of Lake Worth, Florida, will hold a press conference on Saturday, January 22, to announce her search for a suitable corporate spouse, reports the Undernews blog of Sam Smith’s Progressive Review, citing a Facebook press release put out by Steiner.
Citizens United specifically recognized corporate personhood when it comes to political donations, but a host of observers worry that corporate rights are going to continue to creep into realms previously reserved for humans."
Citizens United and the Constitutional Rights of Corporations
ProfessorBainbridge.com:
"There's been a (predictable) spate of academic writing lately on the constitutional tights rights of corporations prompted by the controversial Citizens United decision:"
"FEC Seems Headed for Continued Deadlock On Rule Following Citizens United Decision"
Election Law: "
A 143-page draft expected to be supported by the FEC's three Democratic commissioners includes provisions that could require disclosure of all contributors above a threshold level to groups spending money on federal campaigns. The Democratic draft also includes a proposal to restrict campaign spending by companies that have more than a minimum level of ownership or control by foreign nationals.
A rival 91-page draft believed to be backed by the three Republican commissioners excludes the proposals on disclosure and foreign nationals and concentrates more narrowly on eliminating existing regulatory provisions that restrict campaign spending by corporations and unions."
MCCL sues to stop campaign finance disclosures
Minnesota Independent:
"Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, is challenging Minnesota’s campaign disclosure rules that relate to corporations. The group lost a court case in September but has appealed the case in federal appeals court. State Solicitor General Alan Gilbert argued that the group is trying to gut disclosure laws.
MCCL has hired James Bopp, Jr., as the attorney in its appeal. Bopp was the architect behind the Citizens United case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws banning corporations from making independent expenditures in political campaigns was unconstitutional, but that laws requiring disclosure were vital to democracy. Bopp has filed suit against states across the county on behalf of anti-gay, anti-abortion and tea party groups to overturn laws that require disclosure of political spending and reporting of donors.
Bopp argued that the reporting process for corporations who make political expenditures is “burdensome and onerous” and groups that want to spend money in political campaigning should only have to file a one time, one page report. The case was heard on Thursday"
Article -Citizens United and the Political Speech of Charities
SSRN by Roger Colinvaux:
"The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission makes a Supreme Court challenge to the tax law rule that prohibits charities from involvement in political activities likely, and a reexamination of the political speech of charities necessary. Part I of the Article surveys the history of the political activities prohibition in order to emphasize that it was not a reactionary policy but quite considered, and that there are strong State interests supporting it. Part II of the Article analyzes Citizens United in detail and argues that if the Supreme Court considers a challenge to the political activities prohibition, Citizens United is distinguishable: the purpose of the political activities prohibition is not to suppress speech but to define charity; the legal setting is tax and not campaign finance; unlike the campaign finance rule, violation of the political activities prohibition is not criminal; and the political activities prohibition is by nature a rule associated with a tax status rather than a ban on corporate speech. Accordingly, the political activities prohibition, unlike the campaign finance rule, is not a burden on speech and therefore is constitutional."
With prison looming, DeLay looks to Citizens United and the Supremes
Reuters:
"“The underlying crime was that corporate money was spent on political races in Texas and that’s not true,” DeGuerin explains to NBC.
“However, the Supreme Court says that corporations have a right to participate in the political process and that’ll be part of our appeal.”
The attorney did not say whether he intends to appeal all the way to the Supremes. It’s also not clear how directly Citizens United would apply to DeLay’s case, since it preserves federal limits on direct contributions to political candidates."
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