Litigation

Campaign Finance: Anticipating the 2012 Elections

By Peter Hardin

In the 2010 elections, the winner and loser will be…

“Obfuscation” and “transparency,” respectively, predicts lawyer Ciara Torres-Spelliscy of the Brennan Center for Justice in a Huffington Post commentary on “the apocryphal midterm election.” The Brennan Center is a partner of Justice at Stake.

Torres-Spelliscy examines the altered campaign finance landscape that has led to heightened concern in some quarters about rising secret spending in the 2010 election (see Gavel Grab).

While it’s too late to fix the problem for this year’s elections, there’s time to do so before the 2012 presidential election cycle, she contends. Her targets for possible changes in the U.S. Code:

• Revise federal election law for greater disclosure by political spenders, such as a requirement that a political ad name its top funders.
• Pass the Shareholder Protect Act, to require a green light from shareholders before publicly traded corporations can spend directly on politics.
• Rewrite the federal tax code so public disclosure is required from those who pay for partisan, political campaign advertising through 501(c)(4) or 501(c)(6) groups, which the Internal Revenue Service does not require to report their donors publicly.

Even though the Supreme Court decided the landmark campaign finance case Citizens United back in January, the decision and ways to fix ensuing problems still are stirring widespread debate.

In addition to Torres-Spelliscy, Joe Conason takes on the task in a Salon article entitled, “The public shaming of [Justice] Anthony Kennedy: He claimed that online technology would make corporate donations instantly transparent. Now we see how wrong he was.”

Scholar Rick Hasen responds in his Election Law Blog that “the fault for lack of disclosure” falls on the shoulders of Republican commissioners of the Federal Election Commission, for their reading of current disclosure rules; of Republican Senate moderates who didn’t support a new disclosure-only law in Congress; and of Senate Democrats, who “larded up” the disclosure bill that stalled in that chamber.

Full post as published by The Gavel on October 20, 2010 (boomark / email).