Everyone has a “junk drawer” in the kitchen — a place to stow scissors and other odds and ends that you just don’t know what else to do with.
The Ohio House of Representatives has a junk drawer, too — House Bill 153. You think that’s Ohio’s next budget. But tucked between the 4,000-page budget’s dollar amounts and Revised Code bafflegab is a slew of ideas that, on their own, might never pass.
That fact is inconvenient to (supposedly) small-government Ohio Republicans, who for generations railed against Democratic “logrolling” — that is, winning votes for tough bills by slipping them into politically sweeter measures.
And make no mistake, even HB 153′s purported austerity is plenty sweet for the army of spenders that swarms the Statehouse like an 11th Plague of Egypt. [Read more]
An Ohio House panel approved a measure Tuesday curbing collective-bargaining rights for 350,000 state public workers, softening several measures that some Republicans opposed while strengthening other restrictions.
The most controversial amendment would enable public workers to opt out of paying union dues. Currently, workers who don’t want to join a public-employee union can pay a lower dues rate. Public unions would also have to obtain consent from members in order to use dues for political purposes.
A third measure would enable local voters to veto a labor contract that results in a taxpayer-funded spending increase. The bill moves to the full House for a vote Wednesday and the Senate later this week. Republicans hold majorities in both chambers.
Mike Dittoe, spokesman for Republican House Speaker William Batchelder, said the bill “is about being fiscally responsible,” and that lawmakers sought input from public unions on the amendments. “This isn’t about busting unions.” [Read more]
COLUMBUS – According to sources at the Statehouse, thousands of Ohioans who travelled from all parts of the state are being shut out and not allowed to make their voices heard. Sources say that only 750 people have been allowed in.
“This is the people’s house. Ohioans came from all over the state today to make their voices heard,” Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said. “To make them stand in the freezing cold and snow today is an unfathomable and unprecedented step. Thousands and thousands of people were allowed in the Statehouse last week to voice their opposition to Senate Bill 5, and they must be let in today. I call on John Kasich to immediately instruct the Highway Patrol to open the Statehouse and let these people in.”
Redfern is a former member of the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board. “I’ve seen more than 750 people in the Statehouse for a wedding,” Redfern added. “We routinely received and approved requests from associations and organizations that numbered in the thousands. What is happening now is intimidation, plain and simple. The people’s house has suddenly been closed.” [Read more]
For the first time, the Democratic National Convention will not accept donations from corporations, PACs or federal lobbyists in 2012.
Individual contributions also will be capped — another first — at $100,000, according to the contract governing the convention.
Democrats say the policy is in keeping with the fundraising focus that powered President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
“From the very beginning, President Obama has placed a high priority on increasing the influence of grass-roots and individual donors, and this convention will go further in that direction than any convention ever,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse said.
The committee aims to raise $36 million for the convention to be held in Charlotte, N.C., the week of Sept. 3, 2012. [Read more]
Private donors are helping Republicans bankroll their efforts to revise political maps that could determine which party controls the Legislature and the New Jersey delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives over the next decade, but the public may never know who they are.
By accepting donations through an outside group not legally bound to disclose its contributors, Democrats charge the GOP is skirting New Jersey’s pay-to-play law, which limits political contributions from those doing business with the state. Republicans say they are doing nothing improper.
A similar group called Reform Jersey Now raised $624,000 to fund ad campaigns that pitched Republican Governor Christie’s legislative initiatives. When the group voluntarily disclosed its donors, it was revealed some were firms that hold hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts.
Republicans are revealing few details about their other fund-raising group, called the Center for a Better New Jersey. [Read more]
A group of lawmakers and election lawyers called Tuesday for tighter state regulations on giving by political slates and limited-liability corporations, two-oft criticized ways that donors may flood candidates with money.
The recommendations are among 25 proposed by the group convened by Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler last fall to study the state’s campaign finance system.
Many of the changes would require legislative action. Top lawmakers have said they expect to entertain many bills this year aimed at reforming campaign finance, a hot topic after the Nov. 2 gubernatorial election.
Gansler, who did not participate in the committee’s work, called the 53-page report “more than food for thought for legislators.” He said political slates, which can transfer unlimited amounts of money to and from anyone on them — in effect circumventing limits on donations — are “particularly crying out for reform.”
The group also suggests closing the “LLC loophole,” which now allows donors to evade limits by giving through multiple limited-liability corporations. [Read more]
WASHINGTON – The 2010 census report coming out Tuesday will include a boatload of good political news for Republicans and grim data for Democrats hoping to re-elect President Barack Obama and rebound from last month’s devastating elections.
The population continues to shift from Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states to Republican-leaning Sun Belt states, a trend the Census Bureau will detail in its once-a-decade report to the president. Political clout shifts, too, because the nation must reapportion the 435 to make them roughly equal in population, based on the latest census figures.
The biggest gainer will be Texas, a GOP-dominated state expected to gain up to four new House seats, for a total of 36. The chief losers — New York and Ohio, each projected by nongovernment analysts to lose two seats — were carried by Obama in 2008 and are typical of states in the Northeast and Midwest that are declining in political influence.
Democrats’ problems don’t end there.
November’s elections put Republicans in control of dozens of and governorships, just as states prepare to redraw their congressional and legislative district maps. It’s often a brutally partisan process, and Republicans’ control in those states will enable them to create new districts to their liking. [Read more]
Crossroads GPS—the conservative group that carpet-bombed Democrats with a wave of attack ads during the 2010 midterm election—is about to launch its first offensive of the 2012 election cycle.
The organization is rolling out a $400,000 radio ad campaign this week in the districts of 12 House Democrats who won reelection by the slimmest of margins.
The ad campaign, which urges the Democrats to support a vote this week on the tax cut package, marks one of the first major advocacy efforts by an outside group since the Nov. 2 elections and provides a clear signal as to which incumbent Democrats are viewed as vulnerable by GOP strategists in 2012. [Read more]
Local New Hampshire member president refuses to use coffee cup with national logo
The backlash against the freewheeling US Chamber of Commerce has begun.
The mammoth pro-business lobby, which overwhelmingly supported Republicans in the 2010 election cycle, is drawing ire from member organizations who believe the panoply of anti-Democratic ads crossed the line.
The Chamber of Commerce spent $75 million on advertising in the election cycle. And now, some members are beginning to walk.
Forty-plus local chambers have now issued statements trying to place distance between their local emphasis and the actions of the national Chamber, Politico’s Jeanne Cummings reported Tuesday.
Perhaps most interesting are statements issued from local chambers in key primary states: Iowa and New Hampshire. [Read more]
The newly created independent political groups known as super PACs, which raised and spent millions of dollars on last month’s elections, drew much of their funding from private-equity partners and others in the financial industry, according to new financial disclosure reports.
The 72 super PACs, all formed this year, together spent $83.7 million on the election. The figures provide the best indication yet of the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions that opened the door for wealthy individuals and corporations to give unlimited contributions.
The financial disclosure reports also underscore the extent to which the flow of corporate money will be tied to political goals. Private-equity partners and hedge fund managers, for example, have a substantial stake in several issues before Congress, primarily the taxes they pay on their earnings. [Read more]
Barely a week after Democrats’ trouncing in the 2010 midterms, due in part to a massive influx of shadowy political spending, the left is gearing up to fight fire with fire. David Brock, the former investigative journalist who founded the watchdog Media Matters for America, is trying to form a 527 political advocacy group, according to Greg Sargent at the Washington Post. In theory, the group would be akin to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads outfit, but with a liberal bent.
The revelations about Brock’s potential 527 come days after a top White House adviser, David Axelrod, opened the door for lefty groups to push back against the wave of secretive GOP cash. In an interview with Politico, Axelrod wouldn’t rule out the need for Democratic outside groups in 2012 to push back against conservative forces like American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS, the US Chamber of Commerce, and many more. While outside groups of all ideologies spent more than $400 million in the 2010 midterms, the White House anticipates the Chamber and its right-leaning ilk spending upwards of $500 million on their own to defeat President Obama. [Read more]
One result of the 2010 campaign is clear before any ballots are counted: Democracy is in danger.
That sounds hyperbolic. But whatever remains of the quaint notion—call it a myth—that in a democracy citizens are more or less equal is in the process of being shredded, due to the rise this year of super PACs and secretive political nonprofits. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision and other rulings, a small number of well-heeled individuals (or corporations or unions) can now amass a tremendous amount of political influence by throwing an unlimited amount of money into efforts to elect their preferred candidates. And certain political nonprofits, such as Crossroads GPS—the outfit set up this year by GOP strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie (which with an affiliated group is spending about $50 million)—can pour tens of millions of dollars into the elections without revealing the source of their campaign cash. [Read more]
WASHINGTON — Democratic Rep. Dina Titus has outraised her Republican challenger, Nevada physician Joe Heck, by more than $1 million.
But the millions collected by the candidates in their battle to represent Las Vegas still fall well short of the nearly $6.8 million that special-interest groups and political parties have pumped into the race, making it one of the House contests attracting the most outside spending. Much of the money is flowing into negative advertising. [Read more]
Pity the campaign finance reform activist. For years he’s fought to wring big money out of politics and shine a spotlight on who’s funding campaigns. But less than a decade after that shining moment for the campaign finance reform movement, the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (known as McCain-Feingold after its two chief Senate sponsors, John McCain and Russ Feingold), its successes are unraveling and its prospects look dimmer by the day.
The 2010 elections will likely see more than $300 million spent by conservative independent groups who disclose little or nothing about their donors. (Pro-Democratic unions will spend perhaps half that, though their funds come from rank-and-file members, not outside donors.) That comes on the heels of a January 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which declared that corporations and unions are entitled to spend their money on direct electioneering — meaning to help or defeat candidates — as a function of their free speech. Campaign reformers say the Citizens United decision has effectively served as a green light for a new torrent of corporate cash that’s being funneled in the political system through intermediary groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which take advantage of legal loopholes to keep their donors anonymous. [Read more]
A coalition of Senate Democrats asked the Federal Election Commission on Monday to rewrite its rules so that foreign interests are unable to influence federal elections.
Sen. Al Franken and 14 of his colleagues argued in a letter that FEC guidelines on the political operations of foreign companies “have grown out of date.”
“We write with a simple request: that the commission use this process to repair and strengthen protections against foreign influence of American elections,” the Minnesota Democrat wrote in the letter, which was also signed by Majority Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (N.J.). [Read more]
As Democrats and Republicans spar over whether foreign money is polluting the midterm elections, a simple point is often overlooked: Hundreds of foreign corporations already play an integral and perfectly legal role in American politics through their U.S. subsidiaries.
Political action committees connected to foreign-based corporations have donated nearly $60 million to candidates and parties over the past decade, including $12 million since the start of 2009, federal contribution records show. Top donors in this election cycle include PACs tied to British drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, which together account for about $1 million; Belgium’s Anheuser-Busch InBev, at nearly $650,000; and Credit Suisse Securities, at over $350,000.
The donations must come from U.S. citizens or residents, and they make up a small fraction of overall political giving. Nonetheless, the role of foreign companies and their U.S. subsidiaries has become particularly sensitive in this year’s midterm campaigns, which have featured widespread voter dismay over the economy and eruptions of anti-foreign rhetoric from both parties. [Read more]
PAY 2 PLAY Blog
In the wake of recent revelations about foreign spending on U.S. elections, President Obama has called out the Chamber of Commerce for its anonymous donors toward campaign ads in a series of speeches over the weekend. Karl Rove has at once made uncharacteristically desperate efforts to deflect this from becoming an issue in the home stretch of the midterm elections. As Shakespeare observed in Hamlet, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
When Obama took to the campaign trail for the long weekend last Thursday, the news had spread from Think Progress’ report on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce receiving money from foreign donors. Obama intoned to a crowd in Chicago“Right here in Illinois, in this Senate race, two groups funded and advised by Karl Rove have outspent the Democratic Party two-to-one in an attempt to beat Alexi — two-to-one. Funded and advised by Karl Rove.”
Karl Rove went to the last refuge of the scoundrel, Politico, and was quick to change the subject with a non-denial bringing up talking points about the stimulus and healthcare reform. [Read more]