It's Wednesday, August 31, and Day 199 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell decided no nominee would get any Senate attention: No meetings, no hearings, no votes. It's also Day 168 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy. So what's the Senate up to?
They're still on recess, which would give them plenty of time to read this new report from the Wesleyan Media Project and the Center for Responsive Politics, on what the courts—and particularly the Supreme Court—have done to flood our electoral system with dark money.
In the 2000 election, dark money nonprofits aired more than 34,000 advertisements, according to the report. This number dropped by half to slightly above 15,000 for both the 2004 and 2006 elections before skyrocketing to over 158,000 in 2008. By the next presidential election in 2012, dark money groups ran over 383,000 ads. […]
Previous examinations of the surge in dark money looked at this disclosed spending [post-McCain-Feingold]. The new report’s look at actual advertisement airings adds a new wrinkle to this by providing a measure that goes back before the McCain-Feingold disclosure requirements were put in place.
Or as Robert Maguire, political nonprofit investigator for the Center for Responsive Politics, says, "This shows more conclusively than any study done in the past that there really is a change in quantity that goes along with court decisions and the lack of oversight of these groups that has allowed nonprofit groups to be a much more tantalizing vehicle for people who want to hide their political spending."
Translation: the 2010 Citizens United decision and the listing of disclosure rules made all the difference, as the graphic below demonstrates.
Just look at the huge chunk of ads for Senate races in 2012 and 2014. Think that my be a reason Mitch McConnell and his Republican senators are so committed to their blockade? Because the big spender on these ads has been Karl Rove's group, Crossroads GPS, which aired more than 207,000 ads since 2010, "50,000 more ads than the second most prolific ad buyer, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce." You know those ads weren't for Democrats.
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