Despite widespread public opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and multiple exhortations by the president for Congress to act, Senate Democrats were unable to overcome a Republican filibuster to pass the DISCLOSE Act, a bill requiring interest groups to name the donors behind their campaign ads, More…
Commenting on the undisclosed cash that was spent in the 2010 elections and the campaign finance reform battles that lie ahead in Congress, Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer makes it clear in a statement that reform advocates are praying for a scandal to revive the urgency of their cause:
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce isn’t just using its cash to flood the airwaves, reports the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard this afternoon; it’s also been investing in its own publishing platform, running both a national site and a network of local publications that focus on legal issues (like More…
The vast Koch Industries-led cabal of GOP donors, free-market ideologues and titans of industry is real, it turns out, and The New York Times has obtained the letter that proves it. Before the 2010 midterms are even over, the company led by Charles and David Koch has sent out More…
More data are in concerning the new Super PAC, Alaskans Standing Together, formed to back Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in her write-in re-election bid for Senate. The group’s FEC filings reveal that all nine of its contributors are Alaska Native corporations that have previously secured business through federal contracts. More…
Another day, another Section 501 nonprofit under scrutiny for its political activity. Today The New York Times profiles the American Future Fund, which does not disclose its donors but was revealed in interviews last week to have been founded with seed money from Iowa businessman Bruce Rastetter, a co-founder More…
In early August, an obscure measure called Proposition C — which prohibits the government from mandating the purchase of health insurance — passed overwhelmingly in a Missouri referendum and soon became national news. While seen by many legal scholars as a largely symbolic act of defiance, the new statute More…
The issue of foreign money finding its way into U.S. elections is always sure to get people’s blood boiling. When President Obama suggested that Americans for Prosperity — a 501(c)(4) group that sponsors Tea Party rallies but declines to disclose its individual donors — might be receiving foreign funding in More…
Oil giant Exxon Mobil spent less money on lobbying in the second quarter (April to June) of this year than it did during the same period last year, despite ongoing efforts by the Obama administration and Congress to reshape the way oil companies can drill offshore in light of the More…
Born and raised in Missouri’s conservative, rural eighth district, Tommy Sowers served in the Army as a Ranger and a Green Beret, and then as a professor at West Point. Now the unorthodox Democrat — a critic of the bank bailouts and President Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan — is More…
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