The midterm hangover having finally worn off, the 111th Congress returns today to kick off the lame-duck session, its last hurrah before its successor takes over. And the 112th Congress will look radically different, with Republicans in control of the House and the Democratic majority in the Senate significantly reduced. More…
A poll earlier this year showed that 80 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Most people want corporate campaign spending to be limited; even more want it to be transparent. So why can’t Congress pass legislation to require independently funded campaign ads to reveal More…
My article on the DISCLOSE Act today mentions that Democrats are hoping, yet hardly confident, that a stripped-down version of the bill might do the trick and attract at least two Republican votes in the lame-duck session of Congress set to resume next week. The Hill, it turns out, More…
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…
Momentum is building for Democrats to try one last time to pass a version of the DISCLOSE Act once Congress resumes, this time without the extraneous (and some say, onerous) prohibitions on campaign spending by federal contractors or companies with partial foreign-ownership. The New York Times and Politico 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:
Secret
Most Republican candidates who might nab Senate seats tonight don’t look like such good friends of the campaign finance reform community on the surface, but might a few end up lending a sympathetic ear to the cause once in Washington? At least on the topic of donor disclosure, The Washington More…
The flood of political spending, coupled with the likely defeat of campaign finance hero Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), is making the elections a pretty grim spectacle for campaign finance advocates, but The Wall Street Journal opinion page is feeling positively giddy:
As for the rest of us, we can
How much money is flowing from corporate treasuries into this year’s midterm elections? The answer, as numerous commentators have pointed out, will likely never be known for sure, as many of the political groups assumed to be receiving the most corporate money are registered under sections of the tax code More…
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision represented a major change to campaign finance law. I’ve been tracking the story of how some corporations (both for- and non-profit) and PACs have been taking advantage of the new legal landscape, looking in particular at the spending of “Super PACs,” which can More…
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