Photograph by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), standing onstage with his wife Susan and daughter Alex, concedes the Pennsylvania Senate race to Republican Pat Toomey November 3, 2010 at the Radnor Hotel in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

Just six months have passed since the last election and 18 months remain until the next one in November 2014. Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak already is planning for the election after that.

Sestak, a former House member who lost a Senate race in 2010, will prepare for a rematch against Republican incumbent Pat Toomey in a 2016 Senate election still 42 months away, Sestak said in a video today.

“The Senate needs a leader accountable only to we the people, not any other interest,” Sestak said in the three-minute video, which uses Independence Hall in Philadelphia as a backdrop.

“Together we can have an honest discussion about the issues and the challenges we face. We will hold our leaders and ourselves accountable to have a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” Sestak said as he announced what his website calls an “exploratory committee.”

Sestak raised $460,250 in the first three months of 2013, according to a report he filed last month with the Federal Election Commission. He may use those funds for a Senate campaign.

Toomey beat Sestak in 2010, a good Republican year, by 51 percent to 49 percent after Sestak beat party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary.

Toomey is a former president of the Club for Growth, a group that promotes free trade and supports slashing government spending and taxes, though he’s attracted attention recently as a co-sponsor of an amendment that would have expanded the background check system for firearm purchasers. Toomey was one of four Republicans who supported the amendment, which failed to win the requisite 60 votes last month.

Original post is Sestak Eyes Pennsylvania Comeback — in 2016 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

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 Scott Eisen/Bloomberg

Students celebrate after U.S. President Barack Obama was projected the winner of the presidential election inside the Kennedy Forum at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Nov. 6, 2012.

Candidates, parties, political action committees and other outside groups spent more than $7 billion on the 2012 election, according to a final tally by the Federal Election Commission.  That’s the most ever spent on U.S. elections, and surpasses the $5.3 billion spent in 2008.

The presidential candidates spent $1.4 billion while congressional candidates spent $1.8 billion. Political action committees, fueled by the rise of super-PACs that could take in unlimited donations, spent another $2.2 billion.

President Barack Obama and his allies and Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his allies each spent more than $1 billion on the race.

Original post is FEC: 2012 Campaign Cost $7 Billion by Political Capital.

Photograph by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, holds his weekly on camera news conference in the Capitol on Thursday, April 11, 2013.

As the House speaker, John Boehner is in a position to raise plenty of campaign funds for his party.

The Ohio Republican took in $2.4 million in the first three months of this year, his campaign committee reported to the Federal Election Commission today.

That’s more than most candidates for Congress raise in an entire two-year campaign cycle.

Boehner raised $394,000 from political action committees of companies including American Airlines Inc., Boeing Co., Northrop Grumman Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp., Federal Express Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

Boehner’s campaign committee spent more than $1.5 million, including about $693,000 sent to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans.

Boehner raised $22 million and spent $21.2 million in the 2012 election, FEC data show.

Original post is Boehner Raises $2.4 Million First Qtr by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Karl Rove

Once again the Federal Election Commission has asked the Republican non-profit group Crossroads GPS to disclose its donors.

And once again the big-spending organization linked to Karl Rove has rebuffed the request.

The latest back-and-forth began yesterday, when the FEC sent Crossroads GPS a formal Request For Additional Information (RFAI) asking about its fourth-quarter 2012 report showing more than $50 million in independent expenditures aiding Republican candidates — but no donations.

Donors giving more than $200 “to further the independent expenditures” must be itemized on the documents, FEC campaign finance analyst Christopher Whyrick wrote to Crossroads GPS. “Please amend your report to provide the missing information.”

Echoing its responses to similar FEC requests in 2011 and 2012, Crossroads GPS says it doesn’t have to disclose donations because they weren’t solicited or received specifically to “further” the independent expenditures.

The Republican group’s latest response was swift and direct.

“Your continued RFAIs on this subject are unnecessary,” Crossroads GPS treasurer Caleb Crosby wrote to the FEC today. “However, if you are required by Commission guidelines or procedures to continue to send them, we will continue to respond with the exact same explanation.”

Original post is Crossroads GPS to FEC: No Means No by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

A man jogs past the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

President Barack Obama’s budget request calls for Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically with the Federal Election Commission.

Senators have exempted themselves from the electronic filing requirements that have applied to other federal candidates beginning in 2001.

Senate candidates file their campaign finance reports on paper to the Senate public records office in Washington. It takes days for the documents to be posted on the Federal Election Commission’s website, and longer still for the donor lists to appear online. (One of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s FEC reports last summer ran more than 10,000 pages.)

“This measure will save at least $430,000 annually by reducing costs for manual data entry and will also promote transparency by expediting the process by which the reports are made available to the public,” according to a document from the Office of Management and Budget.

Original post is Obama’s Call for Online Senate Reports: Transparency with a Savings by Political Capital.

Photograph by Getty Images

President Barack Obama on the golf course in Palm City, Florida, Feb. 16, 2013. Photo by Getty Images.

More fun facts on the Floridian in Palm City, Florida, where President Barack Obama is having his guys’ golf getaway this President’s Day weekend.

Jim Crane, the avid golfer who owns the club and also the Houston Astros baseball team, has been an Obama campaign backer, according to donor records.

Houston, 59, chairman and chief executive officer of Crane Capital Group, and his wife, Franci, have donated $57,700 to Obama and the Democratic National Committee since 2007, when Obama announced his candidacy for president, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. Crane also hosted a campaign fundraiser for Obama last March at Minute Maid Park, the Astros’ home field.

Crane bought the club from Florida-based entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga, founder of Waste Management, Blockbuster Video and AutoNation, in 2010. Huizenga is also a longtime donor to Republican candidates and the party.

Among the club’s members at the time were talk radio host and Obama critic Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, on his show yesterday, noted the connection.

“I was a proud and honored member of the Floridian,” Limbaugh said. “Then Wayne sold it to a nice guy by the name of Jim Crane, who’s the owner of the Houston Astros.”

“The president’s got himself a good, old-fashioned guys golf weekend,” Limbaugh said, according to a transcript posted on his Web-site.

“You know, it’s shame,” he said. “We’ve got what’s for us a major cold front going through here tonight. Tomorrow, the temperature will barely hit 75, and then Sunday it will barely hit 60. It’s gonna be very, very chilly. Now, for the president that probably won’t be too chilly because he’s coming from a Northern clime. But for us, that’s fireplace and sweater weather.”

Original post is Obama’s Florida Golf Weekend — Limbaugh’s Sweater Weather by Political Capital.

Photograph by SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg

A United States Air Force Global Hawk drone, manufactured by Northrop Grumman Corp., is displayed during a media preview in Seongnam, South Korea, in this file photo.

For companies like Northrop Grumman Corp. and Comcast Corp., it’s never too early to make political action committee contributions to future elections.

Federal Election Commission reports show company PACs made donations in December to candidates next facing the voters two years away. In some cases, those contributions went to candidates not up for re-election until 2016, Bloomberg News reports.

“Raising money never stops,” said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based watchdog group. “That’s a huge part of the business of Congress.  Now, with super-PACs and outside spending groups, the pressure to raise money is just greater than ever.”

Many of the early donors, such as defense contractors Northrop and General Dynamics, will be directly affected by the automatic budget cuts — half from the Pentagon — scheduled to take effect next month unless Congress comes up with an alternative plan. Senate Democrats have proposed offsetting the cuts in part with higher taxes on wealthy Americans. House Republicans want to cut food stamps instead.

Read the full story here.

Original post is Corporate Political Committees Funding 2014 Campaigns by Political Capital.

Photograph by Peter Foley/Bloomberg

Images of President Barack Obama, left, and Republican Mitt Romney are seen on a monitor while a trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Nov. 7, 2012.

That’s about how much was spent on the 2012 election, according to an estimate from the Federal Election Commission.

Candidates spent about $3.2 billion, compared with $2 billion spent by the political parties and $2.1 billion by outside political committees, FEC chairwoman Ellen Weintraub said yesterday at a commission meeting and in a statement.

“The election of 2012 was record-breaking in the campaign finance world,” Weintraub said. Pending a review of final campaign finance reports due yesterday to the FEC, “it’s possible that this is the first election where outside groups outspent the major parties.”

“Certainly, there were races where outside groups outspent candidates, so that’s kind of an unusual situation that we find ourselves in,” Weintraub said.

The biggest expenditures for candidates, party organizations and outside groups include television advertising. Weintraub said the FEC estimate also includes overhead expenses such as salaries and rent.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: $7 Billion by Political Capital.