Politico lifts the curtain on one big player in the Republicans' dark money game in
this long profile of Ohio lawyer David Langdon. It also demonstrates the devil's bargain the GOP has made with the Christian right. Here's a little bit about Langdon, who runs what's basically a dark money laundering business out of a nondescript law office in West Chester, Ohio.
Langdon is a critical behind-the-scenes player among the small army of lawyers working to keep secret the origins of millions of dollars coursing through the American political system. Thanks to his work, this unremarkable suburb is a home base for nonprofits and super PACs that pour millions of dollars into elections.
Langdon is also an unswerving legal warrior for conservative, often Christian, nonprofit organizations that together spend millions more to influence public policy and wield great influence among evangelical voters.
Since the 2010 election cycle, at least 11 groups connected to Langdon or his firm have collectively spent at least $22 million on federal and state elections and ballot initiatives around the country, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of records.[…]
Langdon was a lead author of a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which Ohio voters passed in 2004. The U.S. Supreme Court last month heard arguments on whether the Ohio ban on same-sex marriage is constitutional.
He has donated thousands of work hours to Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes itself as a nonprofit Christian legal ministry and specializes in religious freedom cases.
In addition to that, he's helping the tea party sue the IRS and represented the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List in a free speech case before the Supreme Court. His past actions include having "acted as a defense lawyer for abortion clinic protesters, filed a brief in another case on behalf of the Christian Coalition of Ohio and represented groups opposing a lesbian couple's efforts to share equal custody of their children." Given all that, and the fact that he's in Ohio, it's not surprising that he also was instrumental in helping then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell implement and defend voter suppression efforts.
His current activities, though, are pretty shadowy, revolving around the ever-evolving network of Super PACs that form and dissolve and transfer money back and forth in order to make it nearly impossible to track where any of the money originally came from. That's, of course, by design and "appears pretty clearly to be geared toward opaqueness," said Robert Maguire, an investigator for the Center for Responsive Politics.
The problem for the GOP with relying on a guy like Langdon is that a guy like Langdon wants candidates who will adhere to his kind of hardcore conservative social policies. And that is driving them into a demographic ditch.
