“Today, Senate Republicans stood in lockstep with their megadonors and secretive special interests to protect the most corrupting force in American politics—dark money.” -- Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
Follow the money? Not if the Republican Party has anything to say about it.
Last month Republicans in the Senate blocked legislation that would have shone a light on the large amount of “dark money” used to help various candidates without its donors having to be identified.
The Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act – known as the DISCLOSE Act – couldn’t get the required 60 votes to overcome a GOP filibuster. The vote was 49-49 with one senator from each party absent.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has introduced the bill multiple times since
the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and subsequent rulings permitting super PACs and certain types of tax-exempt groups to spend unlimited sums in elections.
Many of those groups are not required to disclose their donors, allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to spend unlimited, undisclosed money without being identified. This creates a situation where we don’t know who’s paying big money (bribes) to help a particular candidate.
In addition to the most recent development, the bill was blocked by the Senate in 2010, and later when it was part of the Democrats’ For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, according to a story on the Opensecrets web site.
A statement on Whitehouse’s web site said the bill contained the following:
*A requirement that organizations spending money in elections -- including super PACs and 501(c)(4) dark money groups -- to promptly disclose donors who have given $10,000 or more during an election cycle.
*Measures to prevent foreign governments and their agents from interfering in U.S. elections, including in state and local ballots.
*Provisions to crack down on the use of shell corporations to hide the identity of the donor by requiring companies spending money in elections to disclose their true owners.
*A “stand by your ad” provision requiring organizations to identify those behind political ads – including disclosing an organization’s top five funders at the end of television ads.
*A requirement that groups that spend money on ads supporting or opposing judicial nominees disclose their donors.
That all seems pretty reasonable to me. Still, the Republicans hate it.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the bill is “an insult to the First Amendment,” and warned that it would amount to a partisan Democratic takeover of elections.
That’s bullshit. It doesn’t infringe on anybody’s First Amendment rights, and how is bringing these mystery donors out in the open a Democratic takeover of elections? Let me handle that one: It’s not.
Here’s the totally unsurprising level of McConnell’s hypocrisy: Opensecrets reported that in 2003, before Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited money and secret big donors, he said spending in elections should be “limited and disclosed” so that “everyone knows who’s supporting everyone else.”
That statement didn’t age well.
Sean J. Cooksey, a Republican commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, recently argued that spending by dark money groups to support or oppose candidates “is simply not a significant portion of campaign spending in recent election cycles.”
Opensecrets reported that more than $1 billion in dark money was spent at the federal level during the 2020 election. Also, it reported that federal elections have attracted more than $2 billion in spending and contributions from nonprofits since 2010, the majority of that money coming from dark money groups that don’t disclose their donors.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a significant amount of money to me.
Interestingly, the majority of that money went to Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Still, that’s the party that wants to clean up this cesspool while the Republicans shout “keep it coming.” Hopefully, these conflicting levels of integrity won’t be lost on the voters.
As expected, conservative groups have opposed the bill, but so has the American Civil Liberties Union, which claimed “it would chill the speech of issue advocacy groups and nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, or the NRA that is essential to our public discourse and protected by the First Amendment.”
The civil liberties group has cited the landmark 1958 Supreme Court case NAACP v. Alabama in which the court ruled unanimously that the state of Alabama had violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment by attempting to compel the NAACP to disclose the names of its members, who feared for their lives if publicly identified.
Sandra Fulton of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office argued in 2010 that “The harassment and attacks on members of the civil rights movement show that anonymity can in fact be a matter [of] personal safety.”
I’m sympathetic to their position, but it’s not enough to convince me that the country wouldn’t be better served if we knew who was giving money to support various candidates. It’s been written here before that our campaign finance system is nothing more than legalized bribery.
You can read the Opensecrets story here.
President Joe Biden nailed it when he said, “Dark money erodes public trust.”
You can’t look at the amount of money going either directly to campaigns or, more significantly, to super PACs and dark money groups and not think they’re buying our politicians like you might buy nectarines at your local grocery store. You pay the money, and you own them.
Money in politics is one of the biggest factors in the dysfunctionality of Congress. I don’t doubt that a lot of elected officials are following varying degrees of their core beliefs, but when you take the money to adhere to a certain position, you aren’t going to compromise. And when you aren’t going to compromise, you can’t find a middle ground to move legislation, and our country, forward.
We may not have the best Congress, but we do have the best Congress that money can buy. (Which isn’t saying much)
We should know who’s footing the bill.
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Thank you for reading my post. You can see more of my writing on my blog: Musings of a Nobody.