The Center for Responsive Politics revealed Thursday that corporate campaign spending has skyrocketed since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission decision in January 2010. The report comes at the same time as the first major state-level challenge to the controversial ruling.
In the run-up to the 2008 election, Citizens United, a conservative organization that has since aligned itself with the tea party, produced an attack film with the on-the-nose title Hillary: The Movie. When a D.C. court ruled that advertising and widely screening Hillary would be a violation of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, Citizens United took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a 5-4 ruling, the Court ultimately determined that corporate expenditures on “electioneering” constitute a form of protected free speech, and that neither state nor federal law can bar corporations or non-profits from using general treasury funds to support or oppose a candidate. At the time, former U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who lost his re-election bid in 2010 to tea partier Daniel Webster, called Citizens United “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case.”
The Center for Responsive Politics now finds that, following the Citizens United decision, midterm spending on campaign ads and electioneering efforts by outside interest groups (including corporations, nonprofit interest groups and unions) has quadrupled. Moreover, 72 percent of spending for ads around the 2010 election came from groups that were legally barred from such spending before the Court made its decision. Although unions and liberal nonprofits have taken advantage of the ruling, outside spending from conservative groups is where the true growth has occurred. In 2010, election spending from conservative groups without direct party connections was up nearly 10 times what it was during the last midterm election cycle. At $190.5 million, it was also nearly double the $98.6 million that non-party-affiliated liberal groups spent on the 2010 election. [Read more]
This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that will, as I previously wrote, likely determine the constitutional bounds of public campaign financing programs across the country. In that case, McComish v. Bennett, the Court will rule on whether it is legal to provide publicly financed candidates with additional public funds when they are faced with heavy spending by privately financed opponents or independent expenditure groups.
Those arguing that the law is unconstitutional claim that Arizona’s public financing law impermissibly limits the speech (in this case spending equals speech) of privately financed candidates and independent third party spenders because those individuals or groups know that their act of spending money will trigger a public financed candidates ability to get more money. Put another way, petitioners claim that if privately financed candidates and independent expenditure groups know that if they spend money, a publicly financed candidate will get more public funds, then they may chose not to spend that money at all.
First, there’s dubious evidence that privately financed candidates and independent expenditures groups have in fact opted not to spend money under Arizona’s public financing law. Even if political actors think twice before spending money, that does not mean that their speech is severely burdened. Second, petitioners seem to suggest that Arizona enact a less efficient public campaign financing system. Among other reasons, Arizona created a public financing system with a so-called “trigger” provision because it allows publicly funded candidates to have enough money to remain competitive, while preserving public funds by not wasting money on candidates who do not need additional public funds. This, for instance, is preferable to a public financing program which just provides candidates with a huge lump sum grant, whether they need the money or not. [Read more]
The U.S. Supreme Court will today hear the first challenge since the 1970s to laws regarding public financing systems for political campaigns. OpenSecrets Blog will be at the Court’s chambers covering the oral argument, but for now, here’s a synopsis of the case at hand:
The Case: McComish v. Bennett
The Issue: Arizona’s public financing system is set up to award an initial grant to participating candidates. Then, over the course of the election, additional funds — up to two times the initial amount — can be doled out to participating candidates. These so-called matching funds are allocated when certain spending thresholds are crossed by either privately funded candidates in the race or outside special interest groups that make independent expenditures in opposition to a publicly funded candidate (or in support of his or her opponent). In this legal challenge, the constitutionality of these triggers is being called into question.
The Supremes: Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has leaned toward deregulation when it comes to campaign finance issues. A 5-4 majority, led by Roberts, created a political firestorm in January last year when it overturned prohibitions on corporate money funding political advertisements in its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. In 2008, a 5-4 majority of the court also rejected a campaign finance regulation known as the “Millionaires’ Amendment” in Davis v. Federal Election Commission. [Read more]
In the first big campaign finance case since the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion last year in Citizens United v. FEC, the Court will hear arguments on Monday in McComish v. Bennett. McComish is a critical test for the Roberts Court. Will it tolerate, or will it kill off, Arizona’s public financing law, put in place to control corporate and special interest influence over the electoral process? Public financing is one of the last, best protections against corruption available in the wake of Citizens United.
In Citizens United, a bitterly-divided Supreme Court gutted key parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, ruling by a 5-4 vote that corporations have a right to spend unlimited sums in candidate elections, effectively allowing corporations to drown out the voices of individual Americans. The majority in Citizens United sharply departed from our Constitution’s text and history. Corporations are never mentioned in the Constitution, they cannot vote in elections, stand for election, or serve as elected officials, but the Court in Citizens United ruled they can overwhelm the political process using profits generated by the special privileges — such as perpetual life and limited liability — granted to corporations alone.
The McComish case could be the next shoe to drop, or, perhaps, a turning point by the Court back toward fair elections and the Constitution. The Court will consider the constitutionality of Arizona’s Clean Elections Act, a thoughtful effort to deter both the appearance and the reality of campaign corruption by providing matching funds to participating candidates to ensure they can run a competitive race, even against a privately-financed candidate with huge reserves or a candidate with the support of corporate special interests. In a brief representing constitutional law scholars Bruce Ackerman of Yale, Lawrence Lessig of Harvard, Fordham’s Zephyr Teachout and UCLA’s Adam Winkler, my organization, Constitutional Accountability Center, argues that the Court should uphold Arizona’s law — not least because the Framers were obsessed with the possibility of our elected officials being corrupted by special interests. The Framers did all they could to make sure public servants in fact represent “We the People.” [Read more]
A week from Tuesday, when the Supreme Court returns from its midwinter break and hears arguments in two criminal cases, it will have been five years since Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during a court argument.
If he is true to form, Justice Thomas will spend the arguments as he always does: leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his eyes, whispering to Justice Stephen G. Breyer, consulting papers and looking a little irritated and a little bored. He will ask no questions.
In the past 40 years, no other justice has gone an entire term, much less five, without speaking at least once during arguments, according to Timothy R. Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Justice Thomas’s epic silence on the bench is just one part of his enigmatic and contradictory persona. He is guarded in public but gregarious in private. He avoids elite universities but speaks frequently to students at regional and religious schools. In those settings, he rarely dwells on legal topics but is happy to discuss a favorite movie, like “Saving Private Ryan.”
He talks freely about the burdens of the job. [Read more]
We learned two weeks ago that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had falsely stated on his Financial Disclosure forms that his wife had no non-investment income from 2003-2009. In fact, she had received a salary of at least $100,000 each year from the conservative Heritage Foundation. Therefore, on January 24th, our attorney Kevin Zeese wrote a letter to the Department of Justice asking that Justice Thomas be prosecuted for making false statements. The next day, we received his amended filings which showed that he had actually falsified 20 years of disclosure forms beginning in 1989 during his initial Supreme Court nomination process. We then issued a press release calling for his impeachment and an audit of every decision he has been involved with to determine if his false information undermined the fairness of the cases.
Attorney Kevin Zeese gave us a short interview explaining our campaign to hold Justice Thomas accountable and why it is such a big deal. Check it out here on YouTube. He explained that others have been prosecuted for similar conduct and that the failure to disclose information deprived litigants of their right to ask Justice Thomas to disqualify himself from hearing their cases. He pointed out that Virginia Thomas benefitted from two controversial 5-4 decisions, Bush v Gore and Citizens United.
[Read more]
She started as a congressional aide in the 1980s, became a midlevel Republican operative, then briefly left politics, reemerging in 2009 as founder of a tea party group before stepping down amid continued questions about whether her actions were appropriate for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice.
Now, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has recast herself yet again, this time as the head of a firm, Liberty Consulting, which boasts on its website using her “experience and connections” to help clients “with “governmental affairs efforts” and political donation strategies.
Thomas already has met with nearly half of the 99 GOP freshmen in the House and Senate, according to an e-mail she sent last week to congressional chiefs of staff, in which she branded herself “a self-appointed, ambassador to the freshmen class and an ambassador to the tea party movement.”
But her latest career incarnation is sparking controversy again.
Thomas’s role as a de facto tea party lobbyist and — until recently — as head of a tea party group that worked to defeat Democrats last November “show a new level of arrogance of just not caring that the court is being politicized and how that undermines the historic image of the Supreme Court as being above the political fray,” said Arn Pearson, a lawyer for Common Cause, the left-leaning government watchdog group. [Read more]
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report his wife’s income from a conservative think tank on financial disclosure forms for at least five years, the watchdog group Common Cause said Friday.
Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled “none” where “spousal noninvestment income” would be disclosed.
A Supreme Court spokesperson could not be reached for comment late Friday. But Virginia Thomas’ employment by the Heritage Foundation was well known at the time.
Virginia Thomas also has been active in the group Liberty Central, an organization she founded to restore the “founding principles” of limited government and individual liberty.
In his 2009 disclosure, Justice Thomas also reported spousal income as “none.” Common Cause contends that Liberty Central paid Virginia Thomas an unknown salary that year.
Federal judges are bound by law to disclose the source of spousal income, according to Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU School of Law. Thomas’ omission — which could be interpreted as a violation of that law — could lead to some form of penalty, Gillers said.
“It wasn’t a miscalculation; he simply omitted his wife’s source of income for six years, which is a rather dramatic omission,” Gillers said. “It could not have been an oversight.” [Read more]
The Supreme Court decision Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, decided in a 5-4 decision on January 21, 2010, is a case which will live in infamy. What started out as asking permission to put a partisan movie on pay per view somehow ended up deciding that companies are people with the same free speech rights as citizens, that money equals speech, and that any limit on money spent by a corporation was a violation of their First Amendment rights, so companies should be allowed to spend unlimited amounts without even having to identify themselves. Corporations got the rights of personhood, ergo, without the responsibilities we have like spending limits, or the requirement to be publicly listed for your donation. This is not to get into the obvious inequity that corporations are really made up of other people who already have those same rights, or that corporations will have far more resources to spend with obvious financial incentives that people won’t. Seriously–what were they thinking?
Such a brazen act of judicial activism by the Roberts court was an even more partisan power grab than the decade old Bush v. Gore, which backed a partisan Secretary of State’s order that ballots in her state stop being counted so she could hurry up and award the election to the guy whose campaign she was working on. Where that decision improperly decided the outcome of one election, Citizens United has opened the floodgates for blizzards of overwhelming corporate spending in races across the country on all levels of government, from now on, unless something is done. [Read more]
You can light a birthday candle if you want to: It was a year ago Friday that the Supreme Court handed down its controversial 5-4 ruling in the case known as Citizens United, giving corporations and unions the freedom to spend as much as they like to support or attack candidates. As lawyers and advocates are discovering, it has sharply altered the debate over regulating political money. [Read more]
Happy Birthday, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission!
You’re one year old today, big boy. But just think of all the fine things you’ve done already:
[Read more]
On the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, which overturned nearly a century of restrictions on campaign spending, a progressive group has asked the Department of Justice to look into “conflicts of interest” two justices may have had when issuing the ruling.
In a petition to be sent to the department this week, Common Cause will argue that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from the campaign finance decision because of their involvement with Koch Industries, a corporation run by two conservative activists who many say directly benefited from Citizens United.
“It appears both justices have participated in political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision,” the letter alleges, as quoted at Politico.
The group will urge the department to disqualify Scalia and Thomas from the ruling. [Read more]
To mark Friday’s anniversary of a court decision that allowed corporations to sink millions into politics, Common Cause, a reform group, is asking the Department of Justice to investigate alleged conflicts of interest involving two Supreme Court justices – in hopes of forcing the court to vacate the 5-4 ruling.
Common Cause officials and at least one legal expert acknowledged the difficulty of getting the landmark case overturned in this way. But in a document to be submitted to the department Thursday, Common Cause President Bob Edgar cites appearances by Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia at retreats sponsored by Koch Industries, a corporation run by two major Republican donors who helped finance some of the new GOP groups founded after the ruling.
“It appears both justices have participated in political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision,” the Common Cause petition asserts. [Read more]
January 18, 2011 – The U.S. Supreme Court on January 21, 2010, scuttled the longstanding American tradition of prohibiting overt corporate spending to influence elections in its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
On the one-year anniversary of the decision, this report offers an assessment of its impact. We provide a brief history of the legal restrictions on corporate involvement in elections and the events that led to the Citizens United v. FEC decision. We document the dramatic increase in outside spending in the 2010 elections and assess the enhancement of power that corporate lobbyists now enjoy. Finally, we discuss a comprehensive package of legislative and constitutional reforms that can be pursued at the federal, state and local levels to mitigate the damage caused by Citizens United v. FEC—or to reverse it altogether.
Until not long ago, Arizona politics were an open sewer of corruption. But the state adopted a system of public campaign financing in 1998, and, since then, more than half of all candidates for office in Arizona have opted for this money.
Not anymore. Last June, in the middle of a political campaign, the Supreme Court — which seems at times to be on a crusade to remake the American electoral landscape — thrust itself into an ongoing lawsuit and froze the crucial element of the financing system. [Read more]
Former Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor recently appeared to come to a similar conclusion about the majority decision reached by their former colleagues in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Committee earlier this year: it was a “mistake.”
In an interview between the two in Newsweek, Stevens, who stood on the dissenting side of Citizens United, characterized the final decision in the case as a failure that he would like to see readdressed:
O’Connor: I suppose the court has had occasion to change its view on certain issues over a period of years. Do you see any on the horizon that you think the court might well reexamine as things go on?Stevens: Well, you know, Sandra, I dissented in a lot of cases, and I’d like [the court] to reexamine them all [laughs]. I don’t expect them to, but I think they made a serious mistake in the [Citizens United] campaign-finance case, in which they overruled the portion of an opinion you and I jointly authored [on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law]. And I think you might share my view. [Read more]
WASHINGTON — Almost 40 years ago, a Virginia lawyer named Lewis F. Powell Jr. warned that the nation’s free enterprise system was under attack. He urged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to assemble “a highly competent staff of lawyers” and retain outside counsel “of national standing and reputation” to appear before the Supreme Court and advance the interests of American business.
“Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court,” he wrote, “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”
Mr. Powell, who joined the Supreme Court a year later in 1972 and died in 1998, got his wish — and never more so than with the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
The chamber now files briefs in most major business cases. The side it supported in the last term won 13 of 16 cases. Six of those were decided with a majority vote of five justices, and five of those decisions favored the chamber’s side. One of the them was Citizens United, in which the chamber successfully urged the court to guarantee what it called “free corporate speech” by lifting restrictions on campaign spending.
The chamber’s success rate is but one indication of the Roberts court’s leanings on business issues. [Read more]
The Supreme Court has decided to review a 1998 Arizona law which provides public financing to qualified candidates. This decision will likely define the constitutional boundaries of public financing laws across the country.
Critics claim programs that provide public funding for candidates are welfare for politicians, that the public should not be forced to support candidates with whom they disagree, and that public funds could be better spent in other areas. Proponents, on the other hand, contend that these programs provide qualified candidates who may not have access to campaign funds with the opportunity to run competitive campaigns, allow candidates to spend time with all of their constituents and not just those who can provide campaign donations, reduce corruption or the appearance of corruption, either of which may arise as a result of private contributions, and increase public confidence in their elected officials.
In an effort to allow publicly financed candidates to remain competitive in the face of heavy opposition spending from privately financed opponents or independent expenditure groups, many public campaign finance laws provide so-called “rescue funds.” These rescue fund provisions now stand on constitutionally shaky ground because of the Court’s 2008 decision in Davis v. FEC. [Read more]
“It’s not too late to limit or reverse the impact of the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Citizens United v. FEC,” says Fran Korten in a recent article for Yes! Magazine. Korten puts forth 10 ideas that would help limit or reverse the Court’s decision, including: