By Joe Trotter

A federal judge Monday denied a Federal Election Commission (FEC) motion to reconsider his decision to send a case involving a bequest to the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) to the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

“We are pleased that the LNC will now be able to make its constitutional arguments to the D.C. Circuit, as Congress intended” said Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) Legal Director Allen Dickerson, co-counsel in the case. “The district court was correct to certify the LNC’s case, and correct in reaffirming that ruling.”

“The District Court is correct that the government’s suppression of an individual’s choice to leave a political legacy raises serious First Amendment questions,” said co-counsel Alan Gura “We look forward to defending the right of free speech before the full Court of Appeals.”

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By Paul Blumenthal

WASHINGTON — Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Tuesday that he and two campaign finance watchdog groups would sue the IRS, challenging regulations that allow nonprofit groups to be involved in politics if they’re “primarily” devoted to a social welfare purpose.

Van Hollen said he and watchdog groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 would sue to clarify an IRS regulation that he said was at odds with the law, which requires certain groups to “exclusively” engage in social welfare to earn nonprofit status. The IRS regulation permitting groups “primarily” engaged in social welfare allows the organizations to participate in an undefined amount of political activity, said the congressman, a leading advocate of campaign finance reform and ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

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By Josh Hicks

The House Oversight Committee’s top Democrat on Tuesday released the fulltranscript of a congressional interview that he said “debunks conspiracy theories” about the IRS targeting controversy.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the committee, produced a complete interview transcript in which an IRS manager in Cincinnati said he elevated the first tea party case that led the agency to begin singling out conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

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By Tamara Keith

Throughout the transcribed interviews, both Hofacre and Muthert refer to Tea Party groups as “tea parties,” indicating either an unusual vocabulary that developed inside the IRS or a total lack of awareness of how most people talk about the Tea Party movement and individual Tea Party groups. Muthert told investigators he learned about the existence of the Tea Party movement watching CNN and describes himself as an apolitical person.

“I didn’t know what the Tea Party was or what,” Muthert said. “I still don’t know what it is.”

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By MATT PURPLE 

The NSA scandal has shoved the IRS scandal off the front pages, and it shouldn’t be that way. Our media is sprawling and pluralistic: perfectly capable of devoting substantial resources to both. But despite its size, the press tends to act less like a network of journalists dividing up concurrent stories, and more like a mindless herd of gazelles charging to the freshest breaking news item. Add in the fact that most reporters, being progressive, are more interested in covering civil liberties abuses than government attacks on conservatives, and you have good reason to believe that the press will let the IRS story fade away. 

The IRS, the Treasury Department, and Eric Holder’s Justice Department—that unextinguishable lantern of good government—are all investigating the agency’s misconduct. That, of course, shouldn’t comfort anyone. Congressional Republicans are also on the case, including the pugnacious Rep. Darrell Issa. Issa has been masterful at keeping needed investigations alive in the ADD news cycle, most notably last year when he forced the media to pay attention to Fast and Furious for a few days. But even Issa can only do so much; the gunrunning scandal still hasn’t received the coverage it deserved. 

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By Damian Paletta

Mr. Lew wouldn’t suggest what some of those recommendations might be, but he said the White House was still committed to holding responsible any agency officials that might have been involved in improperly targeting conservative groups applying for non-profit status.  

He also said the White House was going to “look beyond [the current scandal to] make sure that if there’s a structural issue in the IRS that allowed this to happen, we make sure we fix that as well.”  

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Washington (CNN) – A growing number of Americans believe that senior White House officials ordered the Internal Revenue Service to target conservative political groups, according to a new national poll.  

And a CNN/ORC International survey released Tuesday morning also indicates that a majority of the public says the controversy, which involves increased IRS scrutiny of tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, is very important to the nation. 

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Editorial

After another run of indictments and arrests of public officials, New York’s lawmakers are planning to leave Albany this week without doing anything about the scandals around them. The list of unattended priorities left for next year is long and shameful. And at the top is campaign finance reform — specifically a system of public financing that would encourage more candidates to run for office and give voters wider choices. It is hard to throw rascals out if there is nobody else on the ballot. 

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The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law really wants to know, so it has filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking an answer.

“Is a small group of Ohioans that infrequently gathers at a coffee shop to discuss public policy, and does not donate to candidates or ballot issues or buy commercials or other advertisements, a “Political Action Committee” (“PAC”) under Ohio law because one of them occasionally makes political statements in pamphlets and on his blog?” the group asks.

In conjunction with the Center for Competitive Politics, the 1851 Center wants the high court to weigh in on how Ohio regulates PACs in the state and to review what it calls “the nation’s strictest Political Action Committee regulations.”

The legal action was filed on behalf of Edmund Corsi, a Cleveland-area blogger. Corsi blogged about state and local political issues, authored a pamphlet critical of local politicians and hosted an informal political discussion group. He is affiliated with the Geauga Constitutional Council.

Continue reading…

]]> http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2013/06/18/in-the-news-ohio-watchdog-u-s-supreme-court-asked-to-review-nations-strictest-pac-regulations/feed/ 0 http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2013/06/18/daily-media-links-618-restricting-political-speech-the-first-question-must-be-why-a-democrats-irs-about-face-and-more/ http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2013/06/18/daily-media-links-618-restricting-political-speech-the-first-question-must-be-why-a-democrats-irs-about-face-and-more/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:17:58 +0000 Joe Trotter http://www.campaignfreedom.org/?p=11074 CCP

By Tom Swanson

The simple fact is that political speech is still just speech. Elections can’t be bought in a nation of voters who aren’t for sale. Perhaps voters heard more voices, or different voices, in the cacophony preceding the 2012 elections, but, as far as anyone can tell, Americans ultimately went out and voted for the man or woman they thought most fit to lead. If corporate political speech doesn’t impinge upon this process, what’s the argument for silencing it? “Reformers” hope to make the IRS scandal their latest excuse for regulating disfavored speakers and opinions.  

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By Warren L. Dean Jr.

Mr. Van Hollen needs to understand only one simple lesson from these events. It is a lesson Richard Nixon learned the hard way. It is that the work of the IRS is off-limits to politicians, including him. That is what his constituents expect. Anything else he may say is just an embarrassing excuse.  

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By Wendy Kaminer

Of course, ACLU is not merely seeking to protect its interests in this lawsuit: It seeks to protect the interests of clients and prospective clients whose identities are revealed by the metadata, and for whom the surveillance “is likely to have a “chilling effect,” deterring them from seeking legal assistance. Maybe it could successfully assert standing to represent a client, or individual employees. But, again, the ACLU is the plaintiff in this case, representing itself, defending its own corporate constitutional rights.

“[T]he dragnet surveillance the government is carrying out under Section 215 infringes upon the ACLU’s First Amendment rights, including the twin liberties of free expression and free association,” the organization’s press release explains: “The kind of personal-data aggregation accomplished through Section 215 also constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment.”

I don’t imagine that many advocates of the People’s Rights Amendment are unsympathetic to these claims. I do expect, however, that many will continue to deny, emphatically and illogically, that eliminating corporate constitutional rights would have any effect on the ACLU’s lawsuit, or similar suits in the future.

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By Lauren French

The panel floated the idea of limiting the amount of political election activity such organizations can participate in to 10 percent of expenditures or mandate that nonprofits report total annual expenditures on lobbying or electioneering. Another potential change involves creating a new category for tax-exempt organizations engaged primarily in political activities.

Danny Werfel, the new acting IRS commissioner, has told lawmakers he’s already starting conversations with the Treasury Department on potential change.

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WASHINGTON — An Internal Revenue Service supervisor in Washington says she was personally involved in scrutinizing some of the earliest applications from tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, including some requests that languished for more than a year without action.

Holly Paz, who until recently was a top deputy in the division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, told congressional investigators she reviewed 20 to 30 applications. Her assertion contradicts initial claims by the agency that a small group of agents working in an office in Cincinnati were solely responsible for mishandling the applications.

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By Bernie Becker

“Many of these employees have been with the IRS for decades and were used to a world where how they talked about things internally was not something that would be public or that anyone would be interested in,” Paz told investigators in the first closed-door interview conducted on the IRS controversy.

“So I don’t think they thought much about how it would appear to others. They knew what they meant, and that was sort of good enough for them.”

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Obama named John Emerson, the co-chair for the campaign’s Southern California finance team, as the next U.S. ambassador to Germany. HBO executive James Costos, who raised more than $500,000 for Obama, was named the ambassador to Spain. The director of Obama’s campaign finance operations, Rufus Gifford, was slated to serve as the ambassador to Denmark.  

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By KEN LOVETT 

David Donnelly, co-founder of Friends of Democracy along with Jonathan Soros, said the super PAC was prepared to back primary challenges next year to at least some of the four breakaway Democrats who they feel failed to bring reform legislation to the floor.

He said his group is also likely to spend big bucks to target Senate Republicans it believed could be defeated next year.

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A federal judge Monday denied a Federal Election Commission (FEC) motion to reconsider his decision to send a case involving a bequest to the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) to the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

“We are pleased that the LNC will now be able to make its constitutional arguments to the D.C. Circuit, as Congress intended” said Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) Legal Director Allen Dickerson, co-counsel in the case. “The district court was correct to certify the LNC’s case, and correct in reaffirming that ruling.”

“The District Court is correct that the government’s suppression of an individual’s choice to leave a political legacy raises serious First Amendment questions,” said co-counsel Alan Gura “We look forward to defending the right of free speech before the full Court of Appeals.”

The case stems from Tennessee resident Raymond Burrington, who passed away in 2007 and left in his will $217,734 to the Libertarian National Committee (LNC).  Because the amount exceeded the annual limit on contributions to national party committees, the LNC was forced to place funds in escrow.  Since then, the committee has only been allowed to withdraw amounts totaling the annual contribution limit.

Under a provision in the Federal Election Campaign Act, Judge Wilkins certified the constitutional question raised by the case to the en banc United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in early March.  In response, the FEC filed a motion to alter or amend his decision, claiming that applying contribution limits to the bequest does not violate the First Amendment, that the court applied strict scrutiny instead of “closely draw” scrutiny, and that the ruling could lead to a proliferation of similar litigation.

In his opinion denying the motion, Judge Wilkins wrote “The Court fails to see how it committed a ‘clear error’ of law by pursuing a course of action that the agency counsel agreed was legally permissible when specifically asked.  The fact that the agency now appears to be having second thoughts about its position does not satisfy the Rule 59(e) standard.”

The lawsuit seeks both the full amount of the bequest and also the ability to implement a planned giving program that would solicit bequests exceeding the annual contribution limit.

The suit hinges on the argument that because there is no reasonable possibility of any quid-pro-quo agreement between candidates, parties, and deceased contributors, there is no corruption interest justifying any law preventing the LNC from having immediate access to the bequest.

A copy of the ruling can be found here.

Failing to gain support for their efforts in Congress, “reformers” have pursued more burdensome campaign finance regulatory actions through other regulatory bodies – most notably the Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Communications Commission. This movement has left supporters of free political speech on the defensive. The national conversation in many media outlets tends to be framed around corporate corruption, “dark money,” and business entities “buying elections.” We are rarely reminded by politicians or members of the media that the Citizens United decision, boiled down to its essence, was an expansion of free speech and an affirmation of the First Amendment. It allowed more political participation by more people in more ways. Our default assumption ought to be that this is a good thing. When someone calls for anyone’s free speech to be restricted, our first question should be “why?”

The burden, then, is on so-called “reformers” to show why more free speech is inherently a bad thing. The Supreme Court has established, in the form of various Constitutional standards and tests, that the First Amendment doesn’t protect malicious or dangerous speech under certain circumstances. Corporate political speech hasn’t been seditious, slanderous, or obscene. We are supposed to believe, then, that corporate speech is dangerous simply because it’s corporate, and Congress, the IRS, the SEC, the FCC, someone—anyone—needs to restrict it.

But the 2012 elections make that a difficult argument, as some reform-minded members of the media have acknowledged. If 2012 was the reformers’ nightmare scenario – an Armageddon of independent corporate spending that trumps all free speech concerns – how exactly has our nation suffered? People went out and voted, as they have for centuries, and they re-elected President Obama, maintained a GOP majority in the House of Representatives, and left the Democrats in control of the Senate. Is this the catastrophe that supposedly justifies muzzling certain speakers?

The simple fact is that political speech is still just speech. Elections can’t be bought in a nation of voters who aren’t for sale. Perhaps voters heard more voices, or different voices, in the cacophony preceding the 2012 elections, but, as far as anyone can tell, Americans ultimately went out and voted for the man or woman they thought most fit to lead. If corporate political speech doesn’t impinge upon this process, what’s the argument for silencing it? “Reformers” hope to make the IRS scandal their latest excuse for regulating disfavored speakers and opinions.

The next few months could be transformative for the IRS. It could be transformative for campaign finance law, too. Instead of adding caveats and asterisks to the First Amendment to fend off imagined threats, we should be striving to make political speech as free and open as possible, so voters can gather as much information and evaluate as many viewpoints as they care to before they cast their votes in 2014.

By Maggie Thurber

In conjunction with the Center for Competitive Politics, the 1851 Center wants the high court to weigh in on how Ohio regulates PACs in the state and to review what it calls “the nation’s strictest Political Action Committee regulations.”

The legal action was filed on behalf of Edmund Corsi, a Cleveland-area blogger.  Corsi blogged about state and local political issues, authored a pamphlet critical of local politicians and hosted an informal political discussion group. He is affiliated with the Geauga Constitutional Council.

Read more…

By Matt Nese

The Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) is pleased to announce the addition of Tom Swanson and Luke Wachob to our External Relations Department.  

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By Robert Ehrlich Jr.

In over two decades in politics, my least favorite political type was the unabashed “hot dog,” that media-seeking missile who would happily sell his grandmother for a 30-second hit on the evening news. The most dangerous place in the world is between such an animal and a television camera.

This personality type is plentiful on Capitol Hill, where the most outrageous statements of the day are sure to lead that evening’s headlines. After all, 5,000 Capitol Hill reporters have to report something of interest every day.

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By John D. McKinnon

But the interviews reveal significant IRS mismanagement, according to Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) and House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.). “This looks like, at best, complete management failure and, at worst, intentional” misconduct, Mr. Camp said last week.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee goes further, suggesting the findings indicate a possible coverup of wrongdoing. “We’re learning about…officials who had reason to believe something was very wrong but tried keep that under wraps for as long as possible,” he said in a statement released over the weekend.

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By George Will

More recently, she has been head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, which has used its powers of delay, harassment and extortion to suppress political participation. For example, it has told an Iowa right-to-life group that it would get tax-exempt status if it would promise not to picket Planned Parenthood clinics.

Last week, in a televised House Ways and Means Committee hearing, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), Salvi’s former law partner, told the riveting story of the partisan enforcement of campaign laws to suppress political competition by distracting Salvi and entangling him in bureaucratic snares. The next day, the number of inches of newsprint in The Post and the New York Times devoted to Roskam’s revelation was the number of minutes that had been devoted to it on the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs the night before: Zero.

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By Vince Cogliane

“We have not been contacted by any federal investigative agency and, to date, none of our clients have been contacted or interviewed by the FBI,” Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice told The Daily Caller on Thursday. The ACLJ has filed suit against the IRS on behalf of 25 conservative groups, with additional groups being added in the next couple weeks, according to a spokesman.

“I have been very surprised that I have not heard from anybody and frankly, none of my clients have. I talk to other tea party leaders on a regular basis,” said Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer largely credited with pushing the IRS abuses to the forefront.

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By Patrick Temple-West and Karl Plume

Threats are nothing new for IRS workers. In their unpopular line of work, IRS agents face hundreds of threats annually, including death threats, TIGTA data shows.

But it is unusual for senior IRS executives to get personal threats, said Steve Walsh, a former agent with TIGTA who worked on security for some former commissioners.

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By Bob Bauer

Greg, it seems, may be overstating his assurances that “intent” is not, as a matter of law, a permissible factor in the test of whether a 501(c)(4) organization is engaged in “political intervention.” This is an important issue for those disinclined to have the federal tax law enforcement agency ferreting out the possible political intent of issue advocacy communications.   

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The National Popular Vote plan (NPV), which will guarantee the presidency of the United States to the winner of the popular vote in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, is poised to pass its halfway mark to implementation after both houses of the Rhode Island General Assembly passed the bill yesterday with votes of 30-4 in the Senate and 41-31 in the House. The vote earned real bipartisan support, including more than 75% of members of each major party in the state senate. 

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By Mike DeBonis

The donations spanned a decade, the statement said, and were made in the names of firm employees as well as their family members and friends, who were then reimbursed at Thompson’s direction.

The statement said the firm has cooperated with federal investigators over the past 15 months and has “instituted very strict policies and controls.” The firm was known as Thompson, Cobb, Bazilio and Associates (TCBA) until July, when Thompson sold his 79 percent stake to partner Ralph B. Bazilio.

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House Speaker Brendan Sharkey said Connecticut “still has among the toughest campaign finance laws in the country” and this year’s “adjustments are a small, measured response” to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on campaign spending. 

Read more…

 

Tom Swanson has joined CCP as an External Relations Associate. He recently graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in Philosophy. Before joining the Center for Competitive Politics, Tom worked as a Programs and New Media Intern for the America’s Future Foundation in Washington, D.C. Prior to his time at America’s Future Foundation, Tom spent time as a Parliamentary Intern for Dan Rogerson, MP in the British Parliament in London.

“I’m excited to join CCP in defending the First Amendment and the freedom of political speech it guarantees,” said Tom.

Luke Wachob is a proud native of Buffalo, New York and a 2013 graduate of James Madison University with a B.S. in Public Policy and Administration. Prior to joining CCP as an External Relations Associate, Luke interned in 2012 at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), where he researched and blogged about free speech issues at universities.

“I’m excited to be able to join the fight to make political speech free, by keeping government out of politics.”

Tom and Luke will contribute to CCP’s efforts by researching and writing about political speech issues. We look forward to their contributions.

This past week, my office received a phone call at 1:23 a.m. from an organizer at MoveOn.org who threatened to oust me from office unless I embrace a bill calling for taxpayer funding of political campaigns. The call came as no surprise as people who call empty offices in the dead of night have no real intention of entering into meaningful discussion.

So I’ll share my position here. To be clear, I consider taxpayer financed political campaigns to be one of the most blatant exploitations of hard-working New Yorkers I have come across. Proponents claim it cleans up elections by taking money out of the game. It doesn’t. It merely substitutes your tax dollars for private donations.

Under the proposed system, politicians would suck up approximately $250 million to fund their election campaigns, and the operative word is “approximately” because the figure would most certainly be more. If it passes, your money would be used to blast out negative television ads, interrupt dinners with robo-calls, and stuff mailboxes with junk – all the things you love so much about politics.

 Continuing:

The Center for Competitive Politics cited the system as the worst in the nation, saying, “The abuse of public funds is so severe and the record of corrupt practices and other misdeeds are so rampant, particularly in the City of New York, that such a system cannot possibly live up to the ‘clean’ moniker that has been assigned to it by proponents.”

Now, these same special interest groups want to extend this model to the entire state? No thanks. This plan has little to do with honest elections and everything to do with increasing their political influence.

Most notably, why should anyone be forced to fund a candidate with whom he or she disagrees politically, morally, ideologically, ethically or philosophically? Thomas Jefferson wrote, “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” I happen to agree. How responsive would candidates be to constituents when they can count on no-questions-asked financing to prop them up?

]]> http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2013/06/14/in-the-news-ny-state-senator-jack-martins-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning/feed/ 0 http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2013/06/13/wall-street-journal-on-farris-v-seabrook/ http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2013/06/13/wall-street-journal-on-farris-v-seabrook/#comments Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:53:37 +0000 Joe Trotter http://www.campaignfreedom.org/?p=10989 Our friends at the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit in June of 2011 on behalf of Robin Farris, challenging Washington’s contribution limits (Farris v. Seabrook) of $800 for recall campaigns. IJ argued that because there is no opportunity for corruption in the recall attempt, the contribution limits are not constitutional. In November 2012, a U.S. District Court decided in favor of Ms. Farris and IJ.

After losing in court, Washington’s Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) decided to define IJ’s pro bono legal work as in-kind political contributions, and threatened to fine Ms. Harris for not reporting the work in the recall campaign’s disclosure documents. As the Wall Street Journal points out, this move has the potential for widespread implications beyond a simple fine (Disclosure as a Political Weapon):

Such a finding is a potential killer for a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) like IJ. If free legal services can be categorized as an in-kind political contribution, IJ could lose its federal tax exemption because 501(c)(3) nonprofits are expressly prohibited from any direct engagement with political campaigns.

The same logic would apply to many tax-exempt groups that offer free help for civil-rights plaintiffs. This includes such left-learning groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice and the Campaign Legal Center. IJ says it has identified more than 100 cases in which a nonprofit has represented someone on a campaign-finance case. Without those services, few non-wealthy Americans would have the resources to challenge campaign-finance laws that restrict speech.

The suit also reveals the overbroad nature of campaign-finance limits by attributing a political interest when none existed. The Institute for Justice had no stake or interest in the recall of Dale Washam. It offered to help Ms. Farris because part of its mission is to defend people whose First Amendment rights are violated.

Although the justification for campaign finance laws is that they are necessary for fighting corruption, this entire case demonstrates the dark side of regulation gone amuck. From artificially low contribution limits imposed in a situation where no corruption nexus exists to PDC’s retaliatory actions, events in Washington provide a first-class example of how all kinds of campaign finance laws are ripe for abuse.

We wish IJ the best of luck in dealing with PDC’s utterly shameful actions.