Tag Archives: money in politics

Mitch McConnell Will Fundraise With Billionaires After Saying the GOP Is Not The Party of Billionaires

by Seraphinakbj Posted on March 18, 2013

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On Friday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took a turn on the main stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the groupthinky annual confab for the young and old of the conservative movement. Dressed in a red tie and white-collared blue dress shirt, McConnell attempted to debunk one of the more pernicious myths about the Republican Party. “Don’t tell me Republicans are the party of millionaires and billionaires,” he said, “when Obama’s campaign arm is charging a half-million dollars for a meeting over near the White House.” The GOP, he later added, is “not beholden to any special interests.”

We’re not the party of the rich, McConnell insisted; we’re you.

You won’t find any objections here to McConnell’s jab at “Obama’s campaign arm”—a reference, more specifically, to Organizing for Action (OFA), the big-money nonprofit formed out of Obama’s reelection campaign. I’ve written plenty about OFA and its fundraising tactics, namely, reportedly offering donors and fundraisers access to the president and top administration officials in exchange for big bucks.

But let’s go back to McConnell’s claim that the GOP is not the party of millionaires or billionaires. For a thorough debunking, I defer to none other than Mitch McConnell.

Next week, McConnell and his wife, former Labor secretary Elaine Chao, will fly to Palm Beach, Florida, for a fundraiser at the home of millionaire John Castle, according to the Palm Beach Daily News. Then, after the Castles’ fundraiser, Wilbur Ross (net worth $2.6 billion) and his wife, Hilary, will wine and dine McConnell at their house, which is so extravagant that it has its own name, Windsong. (So does the guest house: Windsong Too.) Tickets range from $1,000 to $5,000 for the night’s events; to co-chair the event, you’ve got to pony up $15,000 to $30,000.

McConnell, of course, is in full campaign mode—even though Election Day 2014 is 18 months away and Kentucky Democrats have yet to settle on a challenger. (More on that here.) Indeed, McConnell’s fundraising blitz began the very day the 2012 campaign season ended, with a $2,500-a-head dinner hosted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Since then, he’s raised money at the home of another billionaire—New York City mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis, in January—raised money at lobbying firms, and raised money at an event sponsored by the political action committees for Koch Industries, Home Depot, Capitol One, Amgen, and Delta Airlines—all multibillion-dollar corporations.

Fundraising is McConnell’s specialty. As former Sen. Alan Simpson once observed, “When he asked for money, his eyes would shine like diamonds. He obviously loved it.” Don’t think for a moment McConnell will let his defense of the GOP get in the way of his chase for millionaires’ and billionaires’ money.

Mother Jones
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Mitch McConnell Will Fundraise With Billionaires After Saying the GOP Is Not The Party of Billionaires

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Meet Scott Prouty, the 47 Percent Video Source

by jiigy3e Posted on March 14, 2013

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“Scott Prouty.”

The fellow on the other end of the phone call pronounced his name with hesitation. For nearly a fortnight, he and I had been building a long-distance rapport via private tweets, emails, and phone conversations as we discussed how best to make public the secret video he had shot of Mitt Romney talking at a private, $50,000-per-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida. Now I was almost ready to break the story at Mother Jones. I had verified the video, confirming when and where it had been shot, and my colleagues and I had selected eight clips—including Romney’s now-infamous remarks about the 47 percent of Americans he characterized as “victims” unwilling to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives”—to embed in two articles. We had blurred these clips, at the source’s request, to make it difficult to tell where Romney had uttered these revealing comments, while clearly showing that it was Romney speaking. The goal was to afford the source a modicum of protection.

More MoJo coverage of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks:


The Story Behind the 47 Percent Video


SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters


Romney “47 Percent” Fundraiser Host: Hedge Fund Manager Who Likes Sex Parties


Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video


Obama Strikes Backâ&#128;&#148;With “47 Percent”


Who Was at Romney’s “47 Percent” Fundraiser?

The source was justifiably worried about repercussions. Once the video was posted, he might lose his job. He might face criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit. Months earlier, he had anonymously posted a snippet from the video, in which Romney nonchalantly described the work-camp-like living conditions at a Chinese factory he had visited. The source, offended by these comments, had hoped that the short clip would catch fire in the political-media world. But it hadn’t, partly because its context and origins were unknown. The source’s desire to remain in the shadows had hindered his ability to bring the story to the public.

Then James Carter IV, a freelance researcher (and, though I didn’t know it then, the grandson of Jimmy Carter) who had been sending me public documents regarding Romney’s prior business investments, had, at my request, tracked the anonymous poster down. I subsequently persuaded him to send me the full video of the fundraiser and to allow me to release portions of it, under the strict condition that I’d do whatever was possible to keep his identity hidden. He did not want to become the story. He hoped the public would focus only on Romney’s words. And through all this, he had not told me who he was, though he disclosed that he had worked at the fundraiser and insisted that he was no political partisan and had filmed Romney more out of curiosity than as part of a plan to trap the GOP candidate.

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Mother Jones
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Meet Scott Prouty, the 47 Percent Video Source

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Will Big Donors Get Special Access to Obama? Group Still Won’t Say

by pwdt8w4 Posted on March 13, 2013

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Organizing for Action, the pro-Obama nonprofit hoping to raise $50 million to mobilize Democratic supporters around the president’s agenda, kicked off its “Founder’s Summit” on Tuesday morning at the tony St. Regis Hotel near the White House. But as ex-Obama aides David Plouffe, Jim Messina, and others spoke of the need for volunteers and donors outside Washington to pressure Congress into action on gun control, immigration, and climate change, OFA itself is still dogged by reports that big donors to the group will gain special access to the president.

At the OFA summit, spokeswoman Katie Hogan said little to satisfy the group’s critics. Hogan stressed that OFA’s fundraising plans were still in flux, and she couldn’t say definitively what the group’s interactions with the Obama administration would look like or how the organization would evolve going forward. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” she told reporters before event began.

She did say that OFA’s board meetings will be closed to the public or press. The group’s main board of directors will reportedly include ex-Obama officials such as Messina, Plouffe, and former deputy campaign director Stephanie Cutter. However, it is OFA’s “advisory board” that has drawn much of the criticism. That board, according to the New York Times, will consist of supporters who’ve donated or raised $500,000 or more, and who will receive quarterly meetings with the president.

Both the White House and Jim Messina have dismissed the notion that OFA is selling access, but neither have refuted the Times story. Reformers have blasted OFA for appearing to sell access to the president, and some have called on Obama to demand that OFA be shut down.

On Wednesday evening, Obama is scheduled to speak to the 50 or 60 volunteers, donors, and other supporters who are in DC for the OFA summit. That event will be open only to small pool of reporters assigned to follow the president, and most of the summit is closed to reporters and the public. It’s a safe bet, though, that near the top of the organizers’ agenda is a plan to raise $50 million to back Obama’s second-term agenda. As Bloomberg reported, some big Democratic givers are still worn out from the campaign, when they were pressed to give time and again. OFA’s tallest hurdle going forward may be donor fatigue.

In his own remarks, Plouffe offered an indirect rebuke to OFA’s critics. “Just the notion that there’s millions of Americans that want to be part of these debates that they’ve been closed off to in Washington, that in my mind is reason enough to march forward,” he said. “This is something that should be celebrated, not criticized.”

Mother Jones
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Will Big Donors Get Special Access to Obama? Group Still Won’t Say

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Source of 47 Percent Video To Go Public

by MalenMajure469 Posted on March 13, 2013

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On September 17, Mother Jones‘ David Corn broke a story that became a decisive moment in the presidential campaign, revealing video of GOP candidate Mitt Romney speaking candidly to donors at a $50,000-a-plate campaign fundraiser. In the video, Romney said that 47 percent of Americans

More MoJo coverage of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks:


SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters


Romney “47 Percent” Fundraiser Host: Hedge Fund Manager Who Likes Sex Parties


Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video


Obama Strikes Backâ&#128;&#148;With “47 Percent”


Who Was at Romney’s “47 Percent” Fundraiser?

“…will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them…These are people who pay no income tax.”

The story went global instantly, appearing at the top of news sites and TV broadcasts around the world, with millions of people ultimately watching the video. But amid much speculation about the source of the recording, Corn did not reveal the name of the the person who shot the video, honoring a pledge to protect his identity. Now the source himself has decided to go public: He will tell his story Wednesday night on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. We’ll have more information then, but for now, we will continue to honor our commitment not to divulge details. You can watch the The Ed Show preview here.

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Source of 47 Percent Video To Go Public

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Lockheed Martin’s Herculean Lobbying Efforts

by dx1d3x0 Posted on March 11, 2013

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

When I was a kid obsessed with military aircraft, I loved Chicago’s O’Hare airport. If I was lucky and scored a window seat, I might get to see a line of C-130 Hercules transport planes parked on the tarmac in front of the 928th Airlift Wing’s hangars. For a precious moment on takeoff or landing, I would have a chance to stare at those giant gray beasts with their snub noses and huge propellers until they passed from sight.

What I didn’t know then was why the Air Force Reserve, as well as the Air National Guard, had squadrons of these big planes eternally parked at O’Hare and many other airports and air stations around the country. It’s a tale made to order for this time of sequestration that makes a mockery of all the hyperbole about how any spending cuts will “hollow out” our forces and “devastate” our national security.

Consider this a parable to help us see past the alarmist talking points issued by defense contractor lobbyists, the public relations teams they hire, and the think tanks they fund. It may help us see just how effective defense contractors are in growing their businesses, whatever the mood of the moment.

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Lockheed Martin’s Herculean Lobbying Efforts

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Coal Giant’s $10 Million Loan to Democrats Is Now a $10 Million Donation

by ghd12australia Posted on March 1, 2013

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Last summer, with organizers struggling to raise enough money for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., party planners turned to Duke Energy, headquartered in Charlotte, for help. Duke, the nation’s largest utility company, stepped up with a $10 million line of credit for the convention. Organizers insisted Duke would be repaid after the convention.

Or…not.

A Duke Energy official told the Charlotte Observer on Thursday that Democratic officials would not repay the $10 million they owe the company. Instead, Duke Energy will write off the loan as a business expense. Shareholders are expected to absorb $6 million of the cost of the loan.

In effect, Duke Energy’s “loan” has turned out to be a $10 million contribution to the Democratic convention. Duke CEO Jim Rogers hinted at this possibility in an interview with the Observer last month, when it was becoming clear the Democrats might not repay the company. “At the end of the day, we’ll do our best to get our money back,” he said. “But if we don’t, it’s just a contribution we’re making I think for the greater good of our community.”

The decision by Democratic organizers not to repay the loan smacks of hypocrisy. In the run-up to the convention, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the chair of the Democratic National Committee, vowed that convention organizers would not accept corporate money. “We will make this the first convention in history that does not accept any funds from lobbyists, corporations, or political action committees,” she said. Yet even before the Duke loan became a straight-up donation, various convention committees revealed that they accepted corporate money. One committee took in at least $5 million in corporate money to rent Charlotte’s Time Warner Cable area and a million more in in-kind contributions from AT&T, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Costco.

Asked about this hypocrisy, Democratic officials have responded by noting that their anti-corporate-cash pledge was self-imposed. Legally, they could use corporate money to fund their convention. Which, in the end, is precisely what they did.

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Coal Giant’s $10 Million Loan to Democrats Is Now a $10 Million Donation

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4 Meetings With Obama? That’ll Cost You Half a Million

by 0c4g78x Posted on February 26, 2013

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Common Cause, the good-government group founded in 1970, has a loud-and-clear message for President Obama: He should tell his former campaign aides to shut down Organizing for Action, the nonprofit group created to promote Obama’s second-term legislative agenda.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, Organizing for Action hopes to raise $50 million, and its leaders—including former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina—are courting wealthy givers to fill the group’s war chest. An elite group of donors giving or raising $500,000 or more is expected to cough up at least half of OFA’s budget. Those top-tier donors, whose names OFA says it will voluntarily disclose quarterly (which goes beyond what most nonprofits disclose), will earn a spot on OFA’s “national advisory board” and, more importantly, get to meet with Obama four times a year, according to the Times.

Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, said in a statement blasted out to reporters on Tuesday that Obama should push to have OFA shut down and should “disavow any plan” to meet with OFA’s bankrollers. “With its reported promise of quarterly presidential meetings for donors and ‘bundlers’ who raise $500,000, Organizing for Action apparently intends to extend and deepen the pay-to-play Washington culture that Barack Obama came to prominence pledging to end,” Edgar said. “Access to the president should never be for sale.”

Organizing for Action is a reincarnation of Obama’s reelection campaign, the most technologically sophisticated in history. OFA will have access to the databases and massive supporter network—2 million volunteers, 17 million email subscribers, and 22 million Twitter followers—built up by Team Obama in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. Although it is now running ads hitting lawmakers on the issue of gun control, OFA says it will not get involved in elections, focusing solely on building support for Obama’s legislative priorities, which include immigration reform, gun control, and revamping the tax code. OFA is allowed to coordinate its efforts with the Obama White House, which it wouldn’t have been able to do as a super-PAC.

But by organizing as a nonprofit, and agreeing to accept unlimited funds from corporations, unions, and individuals, OFA has been pilloried by Republicans and Democrats. They see OFA as a direct contradiction to Obama’s opposition to big-money politics and his pledge to clean up Washington’s cash-driven political culture. “It’s the right vehicle from a legal perspective, but it is breathtakingly hypocritical,” Charles Spies, a Republican lawyer who ran the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, told me last month.

Common Cause’s Edgar doesn’t begrudge the president for wanting outside help in his second term, but he says it should not come from an access-peddling outfit like OFA. “President Obama’s backers should go back to the drawing board. The president may feel that he needs help from an advocacy organization outside the White House and the Democratic Party, but any group he creates should be fundamentally different from what we now see in Organizing for Action.”

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4 Meetings With Obama? That’ll Cost You Half a Million

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The Supreme Court Won’t Hear "Citizens United on Steroids" Case

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on February 25, 2013

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That whooshing sound you just heard was campaign finance reformers breathing a deep sigh of relief. On Monday morning, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit named Danielczyk v. United States, a challenge to one of the oldest laws in campaign politics: the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates.

The case stems from donations that two Virginia businessmen, William Danielczyk and Eugene Biagi, made to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Danielczyk and Biagi gave to Clinton’s campaign under the impression that they would be reimbursed by the private equity firm that employed them. Instead Danielczyk and Biagi were prosecuted by the Department of Justice for violating the century-old ban on corporate contributions. They responded by fighting to dismiss the charges. Their attorneys argued that the Supreme Court’s logic in the Citizens United case—that independent expenditures do not corrupt or create the appearance of corruption—applied to donations directly to candidates. Thus the ban on corporate donations, they argued, was unconstitutional. In 2011, a federal district court agreed with Danielczyk’s lawyers and dismissed the charges, but the case was later reversed on appeal.

When Danielczyk reached the Supreme Court, supporters of tougher campaign finance laws feared that the court might go even further than Citizens United by demolishing the ban on direct corporate donations, one of the last remaining pillars of campaign finance law in US. They had reason to worry: Last week, the high court agreed to the hear the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, another troublesome case in the eyes of the reformers. McCutcheon challenges the overall cap on what donors can give to candidates, parties, and political action committees, currently set at $46,200 to federal candidates and $70,800 to parties and PACs over a two-year election cycle. That limit is nearly 40 years old, dating back to the post-Watergate era, and if it falls, the reformers fear that future challenges to, say, the limit on donating to a candidate (now at $2,600 a year) could fall, too.

The Supreme Court could, sometime down the road, reconsider the corporate donation ban. But for now, the reformers have received a small bit of good news at an otherwise bleak point in the political money wars.

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The Supreme Court Won’t Hear "Citizens United on Steroids" Case

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Lawsuit Tries to Ban Dark Money Groups From Funding Political Ads

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on February 20, 2013

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

A former Illinois congressional candidate and a government watchdog organization have teamed up to sue the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the agency should bar dark money groups from funding political ads.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by David Gill, his campaign committee and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, is the first to challenge how the IRS regulates political spending by social welfare nonprofits, campaign-finance experts say.

As ProPublica has reported, these nonprofits, often called dark money groups because they don’t have to identify their donors, have increasingly become major players in politics since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in early 2010.

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Lawsuit Tries to Ban Dark Money Groups From Funding Political Ads

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SCOTUS to Consider Challenge to Campaign Donation Limits

by sssaa Posted on February 19, 2013

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This morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (PDF), a case challenging the nearly 40-year-old cap on aggregate contributions to federal candidates, parties, and political action committees (PACs) as a violation of donors’ right to free speech.

Thanks to the court’s Citizens United decision in January 2010, donors can already give unlimited funds to super-PACs and 501(c)(4) groups, which are ostensibly prohibited from coordinating directly with the candidates they support. However, under federal law, donors are limited to giving no more than a total of $46,200 to federal candidates and $70,800 to parties and PACs during any two-year election cycle. Overturning those limits would not affect how much a donor could give an individual candidate (currently $2,600 per year), but a donor would potentially be able to cut a single multimillion-dollar check to a joint fundraising committee set up to distribute funds to multiple House and Senate candidates and state party committees. That committee could technically funnel the entire donation to a single candidate through a series of transfers.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that restricting outside contributions violated the First Amendment, it overturned 100 years of legal precedents. If it takes a similar track in McCutcheon, laws limiting campaign contributions that date back to 1974—and affirmed by the court in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo—would be overturned.

“If the Supreme Court reverses its past ruling in Buckley, the Court would do extraordinary damage to the nation’s ability to prevent the corruption of federal officeholders and government decisions,” Fred Wertheimer, president of the reform group Democracy 21, said in a statement. “It would also represent the first time in history that the Court declared a federal contribution limit unconstitutional.” Democracy 21 has been involved in the McCutcheon case since it was dismissed by a DC district court and subsequently appealed; the group is preparing an amicus brief defending the constitutionality of the current donation limits.

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine, told Politico that the outside spending groups that arose from Citizens United made aggregate limits less important but wrote that the “broader significance” of the McCutcheon case is that it could make future constitutional challenges against contribution limits much harder to defeat.

Yet the current justices have shown that they are sympathetic to some limits on campaign fundraising. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote in Citizens United, argued in 2003 that donor caps on loosely regulated “soft money” were constitutional “under Buckley‘s anticorruption rationale.”

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SCOTUS to Consider Challenge to Campaign Donation Limits

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