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Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) arrives at a news conference at the Capitol March 21, 2012 in Washington, DC. A group of Democratic senators held a news conference to announce new legislation “to blunt the worst effects” of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision.

With the expiration of Republican Caroline Hunter’s term today, every member of the Federal Election Commission is serving under an expired term.

Rather than replace any of the commissioners, who have been deadlocked along party lines for years trying to enforce election laws, President Barack Obama has allowed them to continue to serve. He hasn’t even nominated anyone to succeed Cynthia Bauerly, who resigned in February.

“It clearly is not a priority for the White House and given all of their rhetoric, I think it’s an embarrassment for them,” said former FEC Chairman Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center, an  advocacy group that supports strengthening campaign finance laws.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Obama “intends to nominate well-qualified candidates, and we will continue to support strong enforcement of our campaign-finance laws.”

Former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith, chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes limits on campaign spending, said the lack of new appointees doesn’t make a difference.

“The law was specifically drafted for that agency so commissioners can carry on,” he said. “They have full powers.”

In the interim, the FEC has split along partisan lines in a way that hasn’t occurred in years. More than 18 percent of enforcement cases last year were rejected because the commission divided along party lines and could not get four votes to proceed, according to Public Citizen. In 2007, before the current Republican comissioners took office, the party-line division occurred in less than 1 percent of enforcement cases.

“Instead of appointing people who had independent credentials, they appointed the hardest-nose, most intense operatives,” said former Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and co-author of the 2002 campaign finance law that banned corporate, union and unlimited individual donations to the political parties. “Now not only are there deadlocks, they’re making sure that you don’t have an agency at all.”

Original post is Obama and the FEC: Six Vacancies, No Nominations by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) hold a news conference to propose new campaign finance legislation at the Capitol on April 23, 2013.

For the first time since Sens. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, teamed up to push through a 2002 law that banned corporate, union and unlimited individual donations to the political parties, a new campaign finance bill has received bipartisan support in the Senate.

Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon today presented legislation that would require nonprofit groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and Priorities USA, started by former aides to President Barack Obama, to disclose all of their campaign spending and who’s paying for it. Such groups spent more than $300 million in 2012, keeping their donors hidden, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Previous efforts to require such disclosure have been filibustered by Senate Republicans, and not one member of that side of the aisle has been willing to cross over and back the legislation. Murkowski said that’s because those earlier bills were seen as favoring Democratic constituencies such as labor unions. This bill, she told reporters today, is neutral.

“This is a bill that is designed to be bipartisan,” Murkowski said. “The rules are the same for everyone.”

The bill would require real-time disclosure of campaign contributions and expenditures, rather than waiting for groups to file with the Federal Election Commission, sometimes after the election is over. Any group spending at least $10,000 would have to report.

The FEC would also be tasked with determining whether limited liability companies are legitimate businesses or shell corporations designed to hide the identity of donors. Restore Our Future, a super-political action committee backing Republican presidential nominee  Mitt Romney, received $235,000 from companies that were created by auto-title or payday lenders though did not disclose their business interests. Romney vowed to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law that placed those lenders under federal regulation.

At the same time, the bill would raise to $1,000 from $200 the minimum amount that would have to be disclosed. As a result, someone could collect $999 from each of 50 people at a company for the primary election and the general election and deliver almost $100,000 in donations to a candidate without having to disclose the source of the money.

 In a statement, the U.S. Chamber called the Murkowski-Wyden bill “even worse” than previous proposals to require disclosure. “If this legislation became law, money spent by a group or individual merely to explore the possibility of participating in the country’s political dialog would immediately be reportable to the government, even if the person decides later not to engage in public political speech.” The chamber said those disclosures would be “extraordinarily useful for identifying and intimidating those with different political views.”

Original post is Murkowski, Wyden Team Up: Bipartisan Disclosure Bill by Political Capital.

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Sen. Chuck Schumer arrives at a news conference at the Capitol in this March 21, 2012 file photo.

Advocates of stronger campaign finance regulations haven’t had much to cheer about when it comes to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Republican-appointed majority voted, 5-4,  to overturn decades worth of legislation and precedents in its Citizens United decision in 2010, and then last week agreed to look at whether to throw out overall limits on donations to the political parties and candidates, now capped at $123,200.

The high court today, though, declined to hear a challenge to a ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates, gladdening the hearts of those who feared that the justices would further eviscerate campaign finance regulations.

“The court exercised prudence by choosing not to even consider striking down one of the remaining limits on money in politics,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.

Added Tara Malloy, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center: “At least today, the court has decided to stay its deregulatory hand.”

Original post is Campaign Finance Reformers Cheer Court for What It Doesn’t Do by Political Capital.

Photograph by Carlos T. Miranda/The Pantagraph/AP Photo

David Gill answers a questions during a debate with Rodney Davis for the 13th Congressional District in Normal, Ill.

An unsuccessful Democratic congressional candidate and a watchdog group have sued the Internal Revenue Service for failing to regulate nonprofit groups that spend millions on campaign ads without disclosing their donors.

The lawsuit was filed today in U.S. District Court by David Gill, who lost a race for the House in Illinois, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which previously filed complaints with the IRS and Federal Election Commission. At issue is whether groups that primarily spend their money on campaigns can legally register as 501(c)(4) social welfare groups and keep their donors hidden.

Republican-leaning outside groups spent more than $3 million against Gill, who lost an open seat race to Republican Rodney Davis. The American Action Network, which does not disclose its donors, spent $2.6 million of that total, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

“Voters should know who is funding political advertisements, so that they have the information necessary to properly evaluate the claims contained therein,” Gill said. “By its inaction, the IRS has allowed shadowy groups to influence elections under a cloak of darkness.”

Bloomberg News reported in May that the drug companies’ trade group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, donated $4.5 million to the American Action Network in 2010.

Original post is Unsuccessful Democratic Candidate Sues IRS Over Regulating Non-Profits by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Americans for Prosperity Group activists attend a rally in Manhattan on Sept. 20, 2012 in New York City.

President Barack Obama has made it clear that he despises the tax-exempt nonprofit groups that play in politics.

Yet now his own campaign is becoming one of them.

The nonprofit Americans for Prosperity — a frequent target of Obama’s criticism — decided the “moment of sheer hypocrisy was too blatant to pass up,” AFP spokesman Levi Russell said.

So the group made an online video.

The jaunty minute-long spot, which will be circulated on friendly blogs and through AFP’s social media sites, intersperses clips of Obama mentioning Americans for Prosperity, him decrying nonprofits in politics and news segments about Obama’s new nonprofit.

“Well, that’s a change in tune,” a narrator says. The video concludes, “President Obama, let’s get real. It’s time to stop the hypocrisy.”

Obama for America, which spent $737 million to get the president re-elected, is converting from a political committee into a tax-exempt nonprofit. Aides involved in the project have told reporters that the group, now called Organizing for America, will voluntarily disclose donors.

Like Americans for Prosperity, it isn’t legally required to do that. AFP President Tim Phillips said his group spent more than $125 million on the 2012 elections, including an effort to try to oust Obama.

AFP has drawn attention because of its ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, who founded it a decade ago. The brothers, worth a combined $89.8 billion, have contributed to numerous nonprofits that help fund the anti-tax Tea Party movement.

Original post is Anti-Obama Nonprofit Calls Out Pro-Obama Nonprofit: ‘Hypocrisy’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images

Participants in the Occupy Wall Street protest, masked as President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney, take part in a rally to mark the one year anniversary of the movement in New York, Sept. 17, 2012.

Wall Street outdid the legal profession in raising money for Republican Mitt Romney, making him the first major-party presidential nominee in at least two decades who didn’t rely on lawyers as his biggest source of funding.

The BGOV Barometer shows that Romney, who lost his White House run in November, raised $21 million from employees in the securities and investment industry and $14 million from lawyers, lobbyists and others working in law firms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks campaign contributions.

President Barack Obama, like every other major-party nominee going back to at least George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992, saw attorneys and others at law firms provide the most money to his campaign, with $27 million in contributions. The securities and investment industry was less generous to Obama, the first time in at least 20 years Wall Street wasn’t among the top five sources of a presidential candidate’s contributions.

“There are a lot of lawyers in America and a lot of lawyers with the financial means to make contributions to campaigns,” said Michael Toner, co-chairman of the election law practice at Wiley Rein LLP and a former Federal Election Commission chairman. “Political giving is a part of the culture. It’s really in the DNA.”

Many lawyers work at firms that also lobby. While Obama’s campaign didn’t accept donations from registered lobbyists, it took in contributions from others who work in the same law firms. For example, his 12th biggest source of campaign contributions, $400,390, came from attorneys and others at DLA Piper not registered to lobby, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The firm was paid $7 million through the first nine months of 2012 by clients such as Aetna Inc., Comcast Corp. and Raytheon Co.

Lawyers were Romney’s third-biggest source of donations, behind both Wall Street and employees in the real estate industry. The legal profession had been the No. 1 giver to every major-party presidential nominee since at least 1992, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

A co-founder of the Boston-based private-equity firm Bain Capital LLC, the former Massachusetts governor took in more money from Wall Street than any other nominee since the modern campaign finance system was put in place for the 1976 elections following the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Romney’s Wall Street fundraising was fueled both by his investment background and by anger at Obama, who successfully championed new financial regulations in response to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics.

“This is partly because of Romney, how attractive he was to the securities and investment industry because he viewed them as one of their own, and partially a reflection of what has happened in finance and how this administration has responded,” she said.

Even as Obama raised more than $700 million for his re-election, his 2012 campaign was the only one in 20 years where securities and investment employees weren’t among a major-party nominee’s top five sources of contributions. Wall Street employees gave Obama $6.1 million, ranking 10th, after giving him $16 million in 2008, when they were his third-largest source.

While 13 financial firms were among Romney’s top 20 sources of campaign cash, none appeared on Obama’s list of top industry donors, after five showed up in 2008.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employees gave $1 million to Obama for his 2008 campaign, more than any other company’s. This time, a similar amount went to Romney, making Goldman his top source of contributions. Obama took in about $200,000 from employees of New York-based Goldman.

“A lot of business and a lot of Wall Street felt they needed government involvement and assistance in time for the ’08 election,” said Bruce Heiman, whose clients at K&L Gates LLP include Charles Schwab Corp. “You then had an overreaching by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. You had a response and reaction to that.”

Former U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said Wall Street should have expected the White House to respond the way it did to the financial crash.

“Watching what some of the largest financial institutions did, it’s not reasonable to believe that would not result in additional oversight and some regulatory burdens,” said Dorgan, a senior policy adviser at Arent Fox LLP.

Original post is Romney’s Wall Street Romp — Obama’s Courthouse Stomp by Political Capital.

Photograph by Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly via Getty Images

The Federal Election Commission chairwoman, Democrat Ellen Weintraub (L), and the vice chairman, Republican Donald McGahn (R), shown here in 2008 in different roles.

The Federal Election Commission chairwoman for 2013 will be Democrat Ellen Weintraub, and the vice chairman will be Donald McGahn, a Republican.

These are the two leaders of the two FEC blocs that have prevented the commission from taking any meaningful action for years in enforcing campaign finance laws; the FEC hasn’t even been able to muster enough votes to begin responding to the Supreme Court’s call for more disclosure in its Citizens United decision.

One notable Weintraub-McGahn confrontation came in January 2011, a year after the Supreme Court’s decision.

Weintraub pushed for the commission to begin considering a rule to provide for increased disclosure. McGahn pushed back against it, saying holding hearings on such a rule would “shift the burden to private people to know to comment and try to articulate why this is a bad idea.”

Weintraub said McGahn reminded her of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” where Tevye objected to one of his daughters choosing her own groom. “Arranging a match for yourself?” Tevye asks. “What are you? Everything? The bridegroom, matchmaker, and guests in one? I suppose you’ll perform the ceremony, too? ”

In Weintraub’s telling, McGahn “wants to take off his commissioner hat, run around the table, sit down at the witness table and provide evidence and testify on behalf of the corporate community out there about how burdensome even proposing a regulation would be. Then he gets to run around the back of the table again and say, `Guess what, I just persuaded myself.”’

It could be an interesting 12 months.

Then again, it’s possible neither will be around that long. Both commissioners’ terms have expired, and President Barack Obama has yet to choose their successors. Proponents of overhauling campaign finance laws are pushing him to nominate individuals who will push for disclosure and more regulations.

Original post is FEC `On the Roof:’ Balking Blocs by Political Capital.

The twist? The group, Represent.us, first plans to get 1 million signatures endorsing the proposals, and then plans to wage campaigns against incumbents in 2014 who don’t sign onto the legislation.

“Our hope is Congress will heed the call to action,” said Josh Silver, campaign director, on a conference call with reporters today. “But if they don’t, we have plans for that too. The campaign will actively work to unseat members from both major parties.”

The legislation, the American Anti-Corruption Act, would prevent lawmakers from accepting donations from lobbyists and special interests whose issues are before their committees or subcommittees; limit donations to super-PACs; require former lawmakers to wait five years before becoming lobbyists; mandate full disclosure of all donations to any group spending at least $10,000 on political ads; and offering $100 tax rebates to small-dollar donors.

Original post is Lawmakers Against Campaign Finance Reform May Have New Foe by Political Capital.

Photograph by Steve Kuchera/Duluth News Tribune/AP Photo

Rep. Chip Cravaack, left, R-North Branch, listens as Democratic challenger Rick Nolan makes a point during a candidates’ debate in the Duluth Playhouse on Oct. 9, 2012, in Duluth, Minn.

Outside groups are spending as much as the national party committees in the closest U.S. House races, and together they’ve outspent the candidates in almost half of those contests, according to a report released today.

Super-PACs and non-profit groups spent $24.8 million, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee together spent $24.9 million through September in the 25 contests the nonpartisan Cook Political Report identified on Oct. 5 as the closest in the nation. That’s according to findings from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

The House candidates have accounted for about 60 percent of the spending in the 25 districts, compared to about 40 percent for the party committees and outside groups. In 11 of the 25 districts, the non-candidate spending has exceeded the candidate spending.

They include the northeastern Minnesota district sought by Republican incumbent Chip Cravaack and Democratic former Representative Rick Nolan, who have been outspent by more than two to one by the party committees and outside groups including the pro-Cravaack American Action Network and the pro-Nolan AFSCME and House Majority PAC.

The findings underscore how super-PACs and non-profit groups operate as shadow political parties and help shape the outcome of races. The groups can’t coordinate their spending with candidates, though they can plot strategy with each other.

The outside spending totals reflect expenditures that have been reported to the Federal Election Commission, the Brennan report said. Spending on so-called issue ads that non-profit groups ran early in the campaign didn’t have to be reported to the FEC.

Original post is Outside Groups Rival Parties in Spending in Closest House Races by Political Capital.

Photograph by Frank Polich/Getty Images

President Barack Obama's re-election headquarters in Chicago.

There’s someone out there who probably wishes election season would last forever: the Obama campaign’s landlord.

BentleyForbes Group LLC, which owns a pair of office towers on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, is in danger of defaulting on its loan, Bloomberg’s Brian Louis reported yesterday. One of those buildings, One Prudential Plaza, is home to Obama 2012.

President Barack Obama’s campaign has paid Bentley more than $1 million since the start of 2011, Federal Election Commission records show. Come Nov. 7, the campaign surely won’t need all 50,000 square feet of its re-election headquarters space — if it needs any space at all.

November is shaping up to be a bad month at One Prudential Plaza.

The building owner also faces the departure of its top tenant, a law firm that has occupied 21 percent of the rentable space in the 41-story tower. Baker & McKenzie LLP plans to leave when its lease expires at the end of next month, Louis writes.

Original post is Obama’s Chicago HQ in Danger of Default by Political Capital.