Last week, my piece on the Federal Election Commission noted that despite the fact that three of the six members of the commission were serving well beyond their allotted terms, the Obama administration had only nominated a single replacement since taking office. Today, the Center for Public Integrity More…
Campaign finance reform groups are telling a sobering story. During the 2004 and 2006 elections, nonprofit groups reported who donated nearly every penny spent on independent advertisements mentioning candidates (called electioneering communications) to the Federal Election Commission. In 2008, they accounted for less than two-thirds of the dollars behind the More…
Yet another outside political group with practically zero paper trail (as of yet) is spending heavily against the Democrat in an obscure and heretofore uncompetitive House race in Oregon — and the affected Congressman, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), isn’t taking it lying down.
The group, called Concerned Taxpayers of More…
Here’s a textbook case for the DISCLOSE Act that’s up tomorrow for a vote. It centers on Americans for Job Security, a pro-business issue advocacy group, that has reported zero dollars in donations supporting ads that cost millions to create and air.
With the DISCLOSE Act still stalled in the Senate, President Obama took the opportunity on Saturday to scold the GOP leadership for its recalcitrance in working with Democrats at all on campaign finance issues.
The Associated Press reports that two additional nonprofits that support conservative causes — Americans for Job Security and The 60 Plus Association — have joined the election spending fray in a big way, buying $5 million in advertisements attacking Democrats in House races in swing districts across the country:
Sunday’s Washington Post has a good story detailing why the IRS, which has become the de facto agency for overseeing nonprofit groups’ independent expenditures on political campaigns, is not exactly cut out for the job.
Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.) is raising money for a legal defense fund to fight the numerous ethics charges against him. In his appeal he blames Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which he refers to as “a liberal organization,” for his present troubles, and says he’s been More…
Writing yesterday about Sunlight Foundation co-founder Ellen Miller’s criticism of White House council Bob Bauer and his commitment to transparency and disclosure, I may have spoken a tad hastily. Although Miller didn’t explicitly cite it in her post, it appears that Bauer does indeed have a long track More…
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is hitting Massachusetts GOP Senate candidate Scott Brown over an ad launched yesterday by a 527 called Americans for Responsible Health Care. The problem? ARHC is a front for Bill Binnie, a wealthy New Hampshire businessman who’s running for Senate in that More…
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