As President Obama and the national Democrat establishment gear up for their billion-dollar-plus 2012 election campaign, insiders connected to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are hatching plans to protect the tenuous Senate Democrat majority. These Reid insiders are forming a “super” political action committee, called Majority PAC, to raise unlimited money in order to go on the offensive in Senate races across the country. Reid’s people are within their rights to form the PAC, thanks to the Citizens United v. FEC victory at the United States Supreme Court last year. Now all Americans are free to utilize their free speech rights in this way. However, because the entire Democrat Party machinery was against this landmark decision last year, this blatant reversal reeks of hypocrisy. President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid spent an inordinate amount of time attacking the decision and trying to defeat it through legislative means; meanwhile they lost their majority in the House and now have a fading majority in the Senate. (more)
Sen. John McCain, namesake of a landmark campaign finance reform law, said he and Democrat Russ Feingold were worried about donations coming from undisclosed sources but said “it is what it is” with regard to the vast amounts of money spent on this election. (more)
When I think of the influence money has had in U.S. elections, I’m reminded of that wonderful scene in the 1963 motion picture Cleopatra where Egypt, in a Senate vote, officially becomes Rome’s ally under some rather “surprising” circumstances: (more)
This week, many political pundits have focused on the Central Florida congressional race between Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and his Republican challenger, Daniel Webster, because of a political ad that Grayson aired. The ad compares Webster to a Taliban member and claims that Webster will force women to submit to their husbands. For those who haven’t seen the ad, it shows Webster speaking about how women need to submit to their husbands. However, the full statement from which the quote was extracted shows Webster saying the exact opposite. He was speaking to a church retreat a few years ago and specifically asked his audience to pick Bible verses that complemented their marriages. He told the men in the group NOT to pick the Bible phrase about women submitting to their husbands. (more)
The DISCLOSE Act, a campaign finance bill that forces organizations that run political advertisements to reveal their funding sources, would not take effect until after the November midterm elections if passed, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said Wednesday.
Republicans blocked the bill in July, and Schumer said he hoped the change in the bill’s date of enforcement would sway at least one Republican vote, which is needed to block another filibuster. (more)
Now that Sen. John McCain has won Arizona’s Republican primary, the question is whether the senator will move back toward the political center. (more)
The national unemployment rate is hovering around 9.5 percent and the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that in July we lost 131,000 jobs. With the current economic situation it is no surprise that President Obama wants to talk about anything but the economy. (more)
The Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan won’t hit the Senate floor until the second half of next week as part of a strategy to persuade Republicans to agree to a compact debate schedule or risk pushing back the August recess. (more)
The DISCLOSE Act, which Democrats hope will help offset some of the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC earlier this year, is nothing if not contentious. Supporters of the campaign finance reform bill say it would limit the role of money in elections. Critics claim it would unconstitutionally suppress free speech and that, for a transparency bill, it seems a little too secretive. (more)
House Democrats have agreed to alter the language in a bill that would reduce the sting of a recent Supreme Court campaign finance ruling in response to allegations from political bloggers that the legislation would restrict free speech. (more)
“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (more)
The Center for Competitive Politics has made it no secret that we think a campaign finance bill written behind closed doors by the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the past chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—and a President facing a re-election campaign in 2012—might not really be about good government, as they claim. (more)
I like John McCain. I have liked him for a long time—even when he got angry with me one night years ago in the green room at CNN. (In fact, on that occasion, he taught me an important lesson about civil disagreement—that it is OK to challenge someone’s judgment or disagree with his or her positions, but not all right to impugn motives or attack someone personally. While I didn’t think at the time that I had done that, I became a lot more careful in the future. And I commend that advice to the extreme voices that use hateful words and demonize opponents on talk radio and during many of the TV cable shows on both the right and the left.) (more)
The retirement announcement by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens brings about the usual speculation about his replacement, as well as the retrospective of the retiring justice’s career. Much will be made of the oft-described collegiality of Justice Stevens, and deservedly so. He is by all accounts a decent man, a World War II veteran, and he is beyond question a Justice who wrote opinions across the spectrums of ideology and judicial philosophy, notably defending, in dissent, Congressional action to ban the desecration of the United States flag (see Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397). (more)
The Republican National Committee and Chairman Michael Steele are continuing their push to allow corporations and individuals to make unlimited donations known as “soft money” to national committees. (more)
“It is my belief that there are ‘absolutes’ in the Bill of Rights and they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be absolutes….[The first Amendment] provides, in simple words, that ‘Congress make no law…abridging the freedom of speech or the press. I read ‘no law abridging” to mean ‘no law abridging.’” — the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black (more)
In the week since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in my case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, there has been a significant amount of hyperbole flying around the liberal blogosphere fueled by the likes of Keith Olbermann (“a decision that might actually have more dire implications than Dred Scott”), Sen. Chuck Schumer (“The Supreme Court has just pre-determined the winners of next November’s elections”), and President Obama (“It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies”). While the facts of the case have been distorted in myriad ways, there are two distortions in particular that are so egregious for such learned men that they deserve to be called on the carpet. (more)
Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Citizens United v. FEC, Jefferson Smith, Jimmy Stewart’s archetypal hero who arrived in our nation’s capital to take on the special interests, may never have made it to Washington. The film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, after all, was speech funded by a corporation. As pointed out by Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority in Citizens United, some officials at the time discouraged the film’s distribution because they did not like its criticism of Congress. Under prior precedent governing our campaign finance laws, such officials could have gone even farther and banned the film outright. (more)
The U.S. Supreme Court’s loosening of restrictions on political ad spending by corporations and others will bring some joy to hard-hit local television stations and make it even more likely that 2010 will be a record year for political ad revenue. (more)
A landmark Supreme Court decision earlier today holds that even evil corporations may spend their moneys freely to support Congressional and presidential candidates. “The so-called Citizens United case offers the Supreme Court a chance to severely curtail the free speech abuses of the Federal Election Commission,” the Cato Institute said in May of 2009. (more)
