The Ohio lawmaker has collected nearly $7.1 million for his campaign and leadership committees — more than double the $2.9 million that current Speaker Nancy Pelosi has received in similar fundraising, according to data compiled by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. Another $2 million has flowed into “Boehner for Speaker,” a fundraising committee that shares contributions with the group working to elect more Republicans.
The industries giving the most to Boehner: insurance companies, drug manufacturers and Wall Street firms, all of which now face new regulations adopted by the Democratic-controlled Congress. The political action committees and employees of insurance firms, for instance, donated nearly $426,000 to Boehner’s campaign committees through June 30, according to the center’s tally, compared with $118,000 in insurance industry donations to Pelosi’s fundraising accounts. Don Seymour, a Boehner spokesman, said contributors know that Boehner “understands the best way to help create new jobs is to cut spending, stop all the tax hikes and end some of the uncertainty facing job creators.”
[Read more]
The Office of Rep. Jean Schmidt | Washington, D.C.
By JIM KUHNHENN and LIZ SIDOTI
Associated Press
WASHINGTON – In one way at least, the fight for is grossly one-sided.
Just five weeks from midterm elections, groups allied with the Republican Party and financed in part by corporations and millionaires have amassed a crushing 6-1 advantage in television spending, and now are dominating the airwaves in closely contested districts and states across the country.
The advertising mismatch, reflected in campaign documents obtained by The Associated Press, is hampering efforts by and Democratic leaders to sway a shrinking number of undecided voters. Early voting has already begun in some states, and Republicans are positioned to win a number of House and Senate seats, placing Democratic control of both chambers in jeopardy.
Helped by looser fundraising rules, about two dozen organizations intended to benefit Republicans are active this fall in ; fewer than 10 are aimed at helping Democrats. Ad spending by GOP allies over the past two months has totaled nearly $30 million in 15 states with competitive Senate or House races; Democratic outside groups have spent less than $5 million. And even more money, perhaps from even more groups, is expected to roll out in the final month of the campaign
“There’s no even playing field here,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. [Read more]
By Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam
Washington Post
A new political weapon known as the “super PAC” has emerged in recent weeks, allowing independent groups to both raise and spend money at a pace that threatens to eclipse the efforts of political parties.
The committees spent $4 million in the last week alone and are registering at the rate of nearly one per day. They are quickly becoming the new model for election spending by interest groups, according to activists, campaign-finance lawyers and disclosure records.
The super PACs were made possible by two court rulings, including one early this year by the Supreme Court, that lifted many spending and contribution limits. The groups can also mount the kind of direct attacks on candidates that were not allowed in the past.
Three dozen of the new committees have been registered with the Federal Election Commission over the past two months, including such major players as the conservative Club for Growth, the Republican-allied American Crossroads and the liberal women’s group Emily’s List.
FEC records show that super PACs have spent more than $8 million on television advertising and other expenditures, almost all of it within the past month. Groups favoring GOP candidates have outspent Democratic supporters by more than 3 to 1, mirroring an overall surge in spending by the Republican Party and its allies in recent weeks, records show.
The super PACs have “opened the door to the clearest, easiest way to spend unlimited funds on an election,” said Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman who served as general counsel to GOP presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. “This is pretty much the holy grail that people have been looking for.” [Read more]
By Kristin Jensen Business Week
Candidates, parties and outside groups have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on political advertisements aimed at swaying the Nov. 2 U.S. congressional elections, a study found.
Ad spending on House and Senate races climbed to $220 million through Sept. 15, from $135 million at the same point in 2008, according to data analyzed by the Wesleyan Media Project. The increase mainly comes from Senate races, with Florida, Pennsylvania and Nevada topping the list, the study found.
“Both Republicans and Democrats have a legitimate shot of having majorities in Congress,” spurring spending, said Travis Ridout, co-director of the project, in a statement today.
Americans’ dissatisfaction with the economy and the direction of the country is jeopardizing Democratic control of the House and Senate. Opposition to President Barack Obama has also fueled an increase in spending by Republican-leaning outside groups.
Outside groups including Crossroads GPS, advised by Republican strategist Karl Rove, have spent more than $31 million on ads for this year’s Senate races, up from $16 million in 2008, the Wesleyan Media Project found. Candidates in those races have more than doubled their spending to $121 million.
Some of the increase in non-candidate spending can be traced to the Supreme Court’s January decision that freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts from their treasuries, said Ridout, a political science professor at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.
That decision, known as Citizens United, isn’t causing many corporations to do direct advertising, said Erika Franklin Fowler, another co-director of the project. Instead, more money is flowing into issue advocacy groups that don’t have to report contributors to the Federal Election Commission, she said.
“We are seeing evidence of changing tactics as groups seek shelter in the rules for nonprofits that allow such organizations to withhold their donor names,” said Fowler, a government professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. [Read more]
The 2010 elections will prove to be a watershed of extravagant campaign spending, and how much is too much in the eyes of American voters. While the Citizens United ruling has allowed unlimited anonymous campaign spending by businesses, this unprecedented ruling by the Supreme Court has incited citizens nationwide to take back our elections from the highest bidder.
In a sobering election year based on economic hardships, many candidates stressing their financial responsibility appear at odds with the way manage their campaigns, characterized by lavish spending with short-sighted goals. Worse still, while candidates and incumbents are now going out to their constituents to assure they will fight corporate America, most of them have already taken corporate America’s money.
The reality of campaigns today is that there is never enough money to get your message out enough–if even to drown out your opponent’s message by buying up outlets your opponent would otherwise purchase.
But I came across a candidate for Congress who has pledged a Clean Money campaign, by taking no money from corporations, special interests, or PACs, Political Action Committees. Surya Yalamanchili — or simply, “Chili” — showed me how he has managed a streamlined campaign depending on individual donors while proving his moxie as a public servant by running his own show.
A resident of Cincinnati and brand manager for Procter & Gamble, Chili stopped working to run for office full-time. Chili was inspired to run by the hardships he has seen Ohio face, and believes that getting to Congress is a way to help his state. Chili believes that since it is the Big Money influence in Congress that has crippled our country, someone outside of that racket has to get there to be able to challenge it.
What’s crazy: Out of all the 2010 races, Chili is one of only two candidates currently running for Congress to not take PAC money.
To get that shot at meaningful impact, Chili showed me the hustle he puts in. If Cincinnati native Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds was famously nicknamed “Charlie Hustle” for his tireless effort, Surya could surely be known as “Chili Hustle” for the legwork he does in the name of running a Clean Money campaign.
Here is a short about the grind of a political newcomer, pounding the pavement and showing where the money goes “when you can’t pay to play with the big boys, but you still want to play.”
This footage is from my documentary currently in production, PAY 2 PLAY: Democracy’s High Stakes, which explores the Citizens United decision and shows how awesome campaign reform will be. Please take a moment and help support our film on Kickstarter so that we can keep filming through the 2010 elections and capture malfeasance in action!
Surya “Chili” Yalamanchili is running as the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio’s 2nd District, against the Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt. No endorsement is implied by this exposé on shoestring campaigning.
In this first post-Citizens United election, voters are the victims of a democracy crime that the government seems unable, or unwilling, to stop despite it occurring right before our eyes.
Political operatives, like Karl Rove, are misusing the tax laws to create organizations that allow for anonymous and unlimited donations from corporations and the super-rich in order to determine the outcome of the mid-term elections in violation of election and tax laws. See American Crossroads Watch.
Organizations are being set up under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code to manipulate the outcome of the mid-term elections. A 501(c)(4) is a lobbying organization, not allowed to spend most of its time on electioneering. These new organizations are spending massively on advertising for and against candidates, developing data bases of voters, creating messages for candidates and planning get out the vote drives. These activities make them “political committees” that should obey election laws, including making the names of donors public.
As the New York Times reports “Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies would certainly seem to the casual observer to be a political organization: Karl Rove, a political adviser to President George W. Bush, helped raise money for it; the group is run by a cadre of experienced political hands; it has spent millions of dollars on television commercials attacking Democrats in key Senate races across the country.”
The central legal issue is whether groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads are “political committees” under federal election laws. Federal law defines a political committee as any group that receives and spends more than $1,000 “for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office” See 2 U.S.C. §§431(4), (8)(A) and (9)(A). In Buckley v. Valeo the Supreme Court defined the term “political committee” to encompass organizations that are either “under the control of a candidate or the major purpose of which is the nomination or election of a candidate.” [Emphasis added.] [Read more]
by Nick Wing
The Huffington Post
Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are lending their stories to a new Citizens United documentary about the rise of conservative women in America.
“Fire From The Heartland,” sponsored by the group on the winning end of a monumental Supreme Court case earlier this year that opened the door for unlimited campaign funds by corporations, is touting itself as the “first-ever film to tell the entire story of the conservative woman in her own words.”
The roster of women in the film reads like a who’s-who of the modern conservative women’s movement:
Activists, politicians and commentators such as Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, S.E. Cupp, Dana Loesch, Michelle Easton, Sonnie Johnson, Jenny Beth Martin, Michelle Moore, Jamie Radtke, Deneen Borelli, Janine Turner, and Congresswomen Cynthia Lummis, Jean Schmidt, and Michele Bachmann share their emotional stories of hardship and triumph in their fight for freedom. These women leaders are fanning the flames of liberty across the nation.
According to Dave Weigel, the movie will be released on Wednesday, September 22, as part of a five-part series of conservative documentaries.
Watch the preview of “Fire From The Heartland”:
In recent days, Ohio voters have probably seen a TV spot ripping Democratic “stimulus and debt” policies, courtesy of a group calling itself Crossroads GPS. They may also have caught an ad by an outfit called the American Action Network praising Republican Congressmen Pat Tiberi and Dave Reichert for “standing up for fiscal responsibility.” Meanwhile, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, a Democrat, is under attack from the Republican Governors Association (RGA) for being a “bad governor,” while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been touting the “pro-business” record of GOP Senate candidate Rob Portman.
All of these groups are based in D.C., not Ohio. And only one of them, the RGA, is required to disclose its donors — and only a few times a year. Which makes Ohio look less like a boxing ring for the candidates than a chessboard for invisible well-funded operatives hundreds of miles away.
Ohio is hardly unique. From Washington to Florida this election season, candidates risk being drowned out by a flood of advertising from a robust new network of little-known conservative political outfits. “Shadow Republican groups formed by longtime party officials and party operatives are raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this election,” says Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan campaign-finance-reform group, “most of which is going to come in the form of secret undisclosed contributions.” [Read more]
[Excerpt]
If you don’t think the stakes are large — and I want you to consider this — right now, all across the country, special interests are planning and running millions of dollars of attack ads against Democratic candidates. Because last year, there was a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United. They’re allowed to spend as much as they want without ever revealing who’s paying for the ads. That’s exactly what they’re doing. Millions of dollars. And the groups are benign-sounding: Americans for Prosperity. Who’s against that? (Laughter.) Or Committee for Truth in Politics. Or Americans for Apple Pie. Moms for Motherhood. I made those last two up. (Laughter.)
None of them will disclose who’s paying for these ads. You don’t know if it’s a Wall Street bank. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company. You don’t know if it’s an insurance company. You don’t even know if it’s a foreign-controlled entity.
In some races, they are spending more money than the candidates. Not here because here the candidate is spending a lot of money. (Laughter.)
They’re spending more money than the parties. They want to take Congress back and return to the days where lobbyists wrote the laws. It is the most insidious power grab since the monopolies of the Gilded Age. That’s happening right now. So there’s a lot of talk about populist anger and grassroots. But that’s not what’s driving a lot of these elections.
We tried to fix this, but the leaders of the other party wouldn’t even allow it to come up for a vote. They want to keep the public in the dark. They want to serve the special interests that served them so well over the last 19 months.
We will not let them. We are not about to allow a corporate takeover of our democracy. We’re not about to go back to the days when special interests took advantage of Main Street families. (Applause.) We’re not going to go back to the days when insurance companies wrote the rules that let you languish without health care because you had a preexisting condition. We’re not going to go back to the exact same agenda we had before I took office.
A lot has changed since that last election, but what hasn’t changed is the choice facing this country. It is still fear versus hope. It is still the past versus the future. It is still a choice between sliding backwards and moving forward. That is what this election is about. That’s the choice you will face in November.
By Brody Mullins
An increasing amount of political spending this election will come from outside political organizations on the right and left. Some of these groups are funded by corporations; some are funded by labor unions.
But much of the political spending won’t be accounted for.
So three liberal organizations have started a new effort to try to reveal more information about political ads run by outside groups. The organizations – MoveOn.org Political Action, Media Matters Action Network and ThinkProgress.org – say they will fact check ads, investigate who is behind the spending and “force candidates supported by these ads to disavow them,” according to a press release announcing the new effort.
The groups said their goal is to “fight back against the flood of corporate and billionaire financed advertisements being run in support of Republican candidates nationwide.” [Read more]
A video summarizing shareholder approval requirements proposed in the wake of Citizens United.
by John Wellington Ennis
For all of his grand-standing and sustained demands for jobs, Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner (OH-8) might not seem like one fearing the loss of his own job. Even in an Ohio that has been among the hardest hit by the economy, John Boehner has not let job insecurity threaten his tireless devotion to protect the rights of Wall Street executives and lobbyists. In a curious defiance tacked on to the anti-government Tea Party movement, it has been a persistent point of pride for Boehner to loudly fend off the U.S. Government from exercising any restrictions to campaign finance or any effort to regulate the financial markets which led to the economic crash, and instead sought to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70 so that more federal money could be earned off working Americans.
In a campaign year galvanized by the Supreme Court decision Citizens United, allowing unlimited corporate spending on elections without requiring disclosures, John Boehner stands to take in more money than ever before for himself and his party. The business of saying “No” to whatever comes from a Democrat has only become more rewarding for the man who cried out “Hell no!” on the House floor during the health care debate. Indeed, John Boehner’s histrionics may be more well-known than his Snooki-like tan. It is entirely possible that no other current or recent member of the U.S. House of Representatives has wept as much while addressing Congress as John Boehner.
So it is with interest that many have taken to watching the race in southern Ohio’s 8th Congressional district, where newcomer Justin Coussoule has stood up to challenge U.S. Rep. Boehner in this fall’s elections. A West Point graduate and attorney, Coussoule’s assured demeanor strikes a marked contrast with Boehner’s trademark hysteria, and his ability to discuss politics while not becoming unbridled suggests an unflappable leader not prone to pander to polarizing tactics.
In this exclusive interview at his family’s home in Ohio, Coussoule shared with me his reasons for running, his concerns about a representative devoted to out of state donors instead of constituents, and how he hopes to restore civility and practicality to Washington, calling John Boehner an embarrassment to the citizens of Ohio’s 8th District.
Justin Coussoule’s website: www.coussouleforcongress.com
www.johnennis.tv