One-Party Rule: A National Strategy Funds State Political Monopolies

[DonViejo]

NEW YORK TIMES

January 12, 2014

By his third year as chairman of the Alabama Republican organization, Mike Hubbard believed his party had just about everything it needed to win control of the state Legislature.

He had a plan with detailed, district-by-district budgets and precise voter turnout targets. He had candidates, most of them political novices recruited with an eye toward the anti-establishment fervor roiling the country.

What Hubbard did not have was enough money. Alabama law barred corporations, a deep-pocketed natural ally for state Republicans, from giving more than $500 to candidates and parties - a limit that did not apply to the state's unions.

So began a nationwide quest for cash that would take Hubbard to the Republican Parties in states like Florida and Ohio, to a wealthy Texan who was one of the country's biggest Republican givers and to a Washington organization that would provide checks from dozens of out-of-state corporations.

Exploiting a loophole in the state law and a network of political action committees in Alabama and Washington, Hubbard shuffled hundreds of thousands of out-of-state dollars into the Republican organization in Alabama, vastly outraising the state Democratic Party. On Election Day, Republicans won majorities in both the state Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction - and Alabama joined the rapidly growing fraternity of states where government is controlled by a single political party, now the largest it has been in more than half a century.

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http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/article/A-national-strategy-funds-state-political-5135321.php

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