The Atlantic: If You Thought Citizens United Was Bad, Wait for *This* Supreme Court Case

[Triana]

A Supreme Court ruling in favor of Shaun McCutcheon would set the stage for totally eliminating remaining campaign-finance laws.

. . .On October 8, the Court is going to take up the next big campaign finance case, McCutcheon v. FEC, a challenge to the overall contribution limits for individual donors to candidates and parties, limits that were institutionalized in the Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976 that undergirds Court jurisprudence on campaign finance.

McCutcheon refers to Shaun McCutcheon, who has given a lot of money to Republicans and joined with the Republican National Committee to bring the suit. Their argument starts with the idea that Citizens United’s reasoning — that limits on independent spending by corporations violated the First Amendment — should also apply to limits on what individuals can contribute, in the aggregate, to candidates and parties. Undergirding the argument is the idea that since the Citizens United ruling, parties and candidates have been put at a disadvantage compared with corporations, other groups, and individuals who are allowed to flood political campaigns with money through independent expenditures. Now, the argument goes, we need to compensate by freeing up the parties and candidates to raise more money.

McCutcheon does not directly challenge the limits on individual contributions to individual candidates and parties, just the overall limits per cycle on what individuals can contribute to candidates and parties. As such, it can seem more reasonable on the surface: If I can only give $2,500 to any candidate, why shouldn’t I be able to give $2,500 to as many candidates as I want? Right now, individuals are limited in this election cycle to contributing $48,600 to all federal candidates and $74,600 to party committees and PACs.

But here is the brutal reality if the Court agrees with McCutcheon: Presidential candidates, House and Senate party leaders, and individual members of Congress could then form joint fundraising committees with national and state party committees and leverage contributions from individuals into huge sums to support their campaigns — maximums of more than $1 million for individual presidential candidates, more than $3.5 million for committees formed by congressional leaders, and nearly $200,000 for individual congressional candidates. We know, based on past experience, that presidential candidates, congressional leaders, and candidates would quickly spring into action to create the maximum number of joint fundraising committees and maximize the number of $3 million donors — and, of course, every candidate and office holder would know who was ponying up the amounts.

THE REST:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/if-you-thought-em-citizens-united-em-was-bad-wait-for-this-supreme-court-case/280011/

[krispos42]

1. rec rec rec rec rec!

[brooklynite]

2. I'm not sure I oppose this...

...We're not talking about flooding millions of dollars into a specific race; we're talking about having the right to to contribute -- up to the legal limit -- to as many candidates as you want.

Last year, my wife and contributed to about 100 different candidates, as well as DSCC and DCCC. We didn't hit the overall limit, but we came close. This time around, the overall limit is $48,600 for all candidates (House and Senate). We have 20+ Senate races in play. If I contributed the $5,200 maximum (primary and general election), and didn't give anything to House races, I could only cover 9 of the Senate races.

[bahrbearian]

3. So you think the rich should spend more on elections ?

I wish I had that kind of dough.

[MyNameGoesHere]

5. I am wondering if you really took a moment to think before you posted this?

You are the exception to the rule. You can toss money away to help buy influence. What you are saying in essence is that only the rich should have the "power" to influence elections. Being that in America we have such an income disparity, is that really such a good idea?

[brooklynite]

7. No, I'm not

Thanks to Citizen's United, I can already throw away unlimited amounts of money. The question is, should I be limited in how much can be specifically targeted to candidates registered with the FEC, for which every dollar in and every dollar out is reported.

[starroute]

9. This is coupled with attacks on FEC reporting requirements

See what I posted below about the Western Representation PAC. Do you really think the people pushing this haven't considered all the angles? This isn't one random donor complaining about restrictions on how he spends his money. It's a multi-pronged attack, and McCutcheon himself is a setup.

[MyNameGoesHere]

10. Nothing against you but your position scares the shit out of me

any semblance of democracy is lost if the majority, and I mean those who can toss cash into the ring, have the same position. I suppose peons never were really supposed to have a voice though.

[brooklynite]

11. I'd be happy to restrcict or eliminate campaign contributions....

....but I won't unilaterally disarm. As long as the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson are playing, there are going to be Democrats with means doing the same thing.

[Jim Lane]

4. A constitutional amendment against corporate personhood would have zero effect on this case.

The OP is a good illustration of why "end corporate personhood" is a misguided goal. It's both too broad and too narrow.

It's too broad because it would strip away important protections. Do you want President Cruz or President Palin (or, right here in 2013, Governor Walker) to be able to confiscate the assets of Planned Parenthood or the Sierra Club? The Constitution says that no person may be deprived of property without due process of law. If corporations weren't persons, then the Due Process Clause would no longer restrain political vendettas.

It's too narrow because it wouldn't affect the 1%ers who want to flood the system with unregulated individual contributions. If spending money on elections is speech and only speech and can't be regulated (the holding that's the real error of Citizens United), then Shaun McCutcheon (a real live human being) is right in his challenge, regardless of any change made to corporate personhood.

[heaven05]

6. money, money, money, money money.

has ruined our chances at finally creating a true democracy. We will never prevail against corporations, a corrupt SCOTUS unless we can get true DEMOCRATS in high public office that are concerned with the peoples welfare. Sanders, Warren and Grayson are a start, I think.

[starroute]

8. It's that goddamned Dan Backer again

Backer is a sleazy lawyer who spends most of his time either ripping off naive Tea Partiers with PACS that spent most of their money on consultant fees to his pals or bringing case after case to overturn all campaign finance restrictions. I've been posting about him for over a year, but since he's still managing to fly under the radar, I'm going to do it yet again.

Here's part of what I posted a year ago in the context of a discussion of right-wing scammer Ali Akbar:

http://sync.democraticunderground.com/1014215800#post26

What's more interesting to me is something called the One Nation PAC that this Ali Akbar was formerly associated with. ... Its FEC filings suggest that it's a classic direct-mail fundraising scam, the kind that solicits lots of contributions but doesn't spend much on its supposed cause and mainly pays bloated fees to its directors. If you google around, you find that even the tea partiers supposedly helped by the PAC have been accusing it of being a scam.

And there's more. The executive director of One Nation PAC is Kelly Eustis, a 23 year old former College Republican whose own consulting firm has been a major beneficiary of the PAC's expenditures. Its treasurer is Dan Backer, the founder of DB Capitol Strategies. And that's where it gets really interesting, because according to SourceWatch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Dan_Backer):

In January 2011, Dan Backer, Esq. of DB Capitol Strategies PLLC filed suit against the Federal Election Commission on behalf of National Defense PAC, Rear Admiral James J. Carey , and Kelly S. Eustis 'to protect the free speech rights of individuals - ensuring that Americans remain free to contribute to political groups who speak out about issues and candidates without government imposed limits.'

The basis for the case was Kelly Eustis wanting to give $10,000 to National Defense PAC (NDPAC) to run attack ads against Democratic Representative Anthony Wiener. Since NDPAC was a traditional PAC, not a Super PAC, Eustis could only give $5,000, the maximum acceptable contribution. Plaintiffs argued that NDPAC should not have to create a separate entity to exercise its constitutional rights.

This suit was successful and led to the creation of something called Carey PACs, which are particularly insidious because they can collect both hard and soft money donations -- as long as they keep them in separate bank accounts -- and therefore undermine campaign finance regulations.

Backer is currently involved with a suit by another associate of his, Shaun McCutcheon, that aims to completely overturn the limits on how much individuals can donate to federal candidates, on the grounds that any kind of restrictions violate freedom of speech. In other words, Citizens United on steroids.

And here's something I posted last winter in a thread on a Tea Party "Day of Resistance" sponsored by the "Western Representation PAC""

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022302757#post20

Oh bloody hell -- they're involved with Dan Backer

I've posted about Dan Backer here a few times. He's a lawyer who's set up a number of conservative PACS that target Tea Partiers for donations while spending very little on actual conservative candidates. He's also been involved with a couple of Supreme Court cases seeking to loosen campaign finance restrictions.

One of those cases, which was successful, resulted in the creation of the so-called "hybrid" PAC, of which WRPAC is an example. And I see that WRPAC was also involved in requesting an FEC advisory opinion which would have allowed them to skirt normal reporting requirements for their Facebook ads on behalf of candidates. (http://www.fec.gov/pages/fecrecord/2012/march/ao2011-28.shtml)

I also found this -- http://saos.nictusa.com/aodocs/1191456.pdf -- which indicates that Backer represented WRPAC in that FEC request.

The short version is that Backer is bad news wherever he turns up. Almost everything he's been involved in is a scam of one sort or another. And the OpenSecrets report on WRPAC -- which shows them spending almost a million dollars in the 2012 election cycle but donating only $68,500 to federal candidates -- suggests this could be more of the same. (http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00461772)

Here's the link to their monthly FEC filings -- http://images.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00461772. I've just spent a little time glancing through their last two yearly summaries -- and it does seem they spend more on payroll, travel, and fundraising than on anything else.

[davidpdx]

12. It will go 5-4 for the plantiff

The might as well sue for dogs to be able to give money to political candidates because in the US Corporate Supreme Court it would win.

[KinMd]

13. Wouldn't this just mean they give the money directly to a campaign..

instead of going through PAC's?