Mitch McConnell is paying dividends to the Koch brothers and all big Republican donors by making his first legislative action out of the gate to
further gut campaign finance laws.
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying to use a massive appropriations bill to loosen campaign finance rules.
The Republican leader’s office is attempting to attach a policy rider to the omnibus bill that would effectively end limits imposed on coordinated spending by federal candidates and political party committees. […]
The McConnell rider would allow parties to consult with candidate campaigns on advertising or other electoral advocacy without having the resulting spending count towards their coordinated limit, so long as the spending is not "controlled by, or made at the direction of" the candidate. The change would create a loophole essentially making the coordinated limits moot.
Clearly, he won't rest until there are no limits whatsoever on campaign spending, for anybody. Current law limits spending by the parties based on a formula factoring in the national voting age population and the federal office sought—president or congress. Practically, McConnell's plan means a lot more money for the individual campaigns. The limits on donors for party committees—$64,800 for national parties, $20,000 for state parties—are much higher than for candidates—$5,200 per donor in a two-year cycle. Under McConnell's plan, the party committees would become basically just pass-throughs for the very big donors to the individual campaigns. Those direct donor limits to candidates would be pretty much gone.
After the McCutcheon ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, "jumbo" joint fundraising committees have been able to raise huge amounts of money from wealthy individual donors. For example, McConnell himself raised nearly $1.8 million for the Republican Party of Kentucky. And the Republican Party of Kentucky spent pretty much all of that money on helping him get reelected. This proposal would make it even easier for McConnell and the Kentucky GOP to coordinate that campaign. And easier for the Koch brothers to directly siphon huge amounts of cash to him.
Clean campaign organizations—Democracy 21, Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and Public Citizen—sent a letter to senators Monday, alerting them to McConnell's plans for the spending bill and urging them to oppose it.
