There's a certain conventional wisdom that President Obama wants stronger campaign finance laws, and to protect our democracy from the corrupting effects of money in politics.

It's a story that you should no longer believe.

The arc of the Obama presidency may be long, but so far, it has bent away from transparency for influence and campaign finance, and toward big funders.

There's the obvious examples, like promising (and failing) to put healthcare negotiations on C-SPAN, only to negotiate a secret agreement with a segment of the industry the reform effort sought to regulate.

But there's a longer pattern here too. Obama came to power as the outsider who would return merit to public policy, and raise up regular citizens' voices in the process, at the expense of the moneyed interests whose power had displaced regular people. (My career was kick-started, in part, by helping to inspire an amendment to a 2006 Senate bill sponsored by Obama and Salazar, an idea emerging from a series of blog posts on Daily Kos.)

Obama was the standard bearer for post-Citizens United reform, sparring with Republican Senate opposition to ultimately fall a vote short of passing the DISCLOSE Act. 2010 was the high point for Obama's campaign finance rhetoric, where weekly speeches and Rose Garden addresses sought to affirm the dangers of dark money, and the need to understand whose money is buying Washington.

How far we've come.

Since then, Obama embraced superPACs and c4s, the vehicles of newly deregulated influence-buying, suggesting that they were a necessary evil, and suggesting that the only alternative would be unilateral disarmament. A reluctant participant in a rigged game. The rationale didn't ring true even then -- the weak disclosure for these groups was justified by appeals to the same broken laws Obama spent 2010 railing against.

Then came the inauguration.

Obama reversed his policy of limiting donors for the inauguration celebration, and failed to post donation amounts online. (George W Bush had amounts and ranges online for his inauguration donors). He sold access to the inauguration, and to the Presidency, to corporate donors, wheedling their way into the privileged positions that move their policy agendas forward. Obama did this for a series of parties, with no public interest justification whatsoever, and didn't disclose donor amounts. The transparency President couldn't publish donor amounts on the internet -- of corporate donors. Private citizens can make hundreds of GIFs of a comical Rubio water swilling incident within 3 minutes, but the President of the United States can't post corporate donation amounts online.

Transparency President no more.

And now we've got the new c4. It's hard to overstate how bad this new policy is for campaign finance. Today's LA Times (via Democracy 21) explains that Obama's new c4 has been set up to sell direct access to the President, for huge sums of cash, which will be disclosed online, quarterly, without specific dollar figures. The President who told us that secret money in politics undermines democracy has now created a huge funnel for donations, with accompanying disclosure that would have been considered cutting edge in 1992. Quarterly disclosure in ranges is the kind of disclosure you create when you don't want to be seen. This should be a policy innovation Obama is remembered for -- a return to soft money and unlimited donations outside the confines of campaign finance law, with instant access to the White House for the most well-heeled donors, all, incredibly, in the name of empowering the grassroots. It's more egregious, direct, (and potentially corrupting) than the similar efforts of recent Presidents who came before him, an evolutionary step forward for money in politics that is more legal, more normalized, and more powerful than it was before.

Maybe Obama has stopped talking about Citizens United because he's learned to use it to his advantage. Maybe his campaign finance rhetoric was fake all along, donning the visage of a reformer. It doesn't matter.

Obama is taking on money in politics by getting more money into his politics.

Obama has done valuable things for transparency. There are innovations that create value for everyone, and many good people in the White House have created valuable things that continue. But we should be clear about Obama's position on transparency when it comes to his political power.

It's time to stop worrying about how Obama can help fix campaign finance, and instead worry about how we fix what he's created.

 

 

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon devoted a special slow jam to President Obama and super PACs with Brian Williams joining the musical stylings of the Legendary Roots Crew. The topic is nothing new to Sunlight, but we always appreciate a new format to publicize the issue and love to see more late night shows addressing the shadowy dealings of campaign finance. Follow Sunlight's Super PAC Tracker for updated filings and in the meantime, check out last night's segment:

Byron Tau makes a great point in Politico: Obama's reversal on super PACs returns "to a system where corporate donors, unions and other wealthy individuals are able to pay big money for access to policymakers, lawmakers and key administration aides."

The President's announcement not only opened the door to cabinet members and top White House staff headlining fundraisers for unlimited checks, it announced with certainty that they would be doing so:

Senior campaign officials as well as some White House and Cabinet officials will attend and speak at Priorities USA fundraising events. While campaign officials may be appearing at events to amplify our message, these folks won't be soliciting contributions for Priorities USA.

That might take a bit of thought to fully digest. We often assume that the laws structuring the Executive Branch generally protect merit and official work from being polluted by inappropriate political activity. But this announcement changes the stakes significantly.

There's a huge difference between regular fundraisers and super PAC events. Obama announced that White House Officials and Cabinet officials will be appearing at events "to amplify our message." "Amplify our message" means raise money, and at these events, there is literally no limit to the money. Whether or not top officials are soliciting the checks or not is beside the point. Some of the most powerful officials in our government are selling their time to the highest bidder, and, as things stand now, the public isn't even able to know about their meetings.

Cabinet secretaries have, in many ways, far more power than individual Members of Congress. Laws often give them broad, unilateral discretion in carrying out the work of the country, making decisions that affect everyone's business in profound ways. Of course, that fact is not lost on moneyed interests, who are willing to pay dearly to move policies even the slightest bit in any direction.

Unlimited checks are now going to upset that balance. Top administration officials are going to advertise their attendance at super PAC (Priorities USA) events, to bring in as much money for them as possible. The Obama announcement wasn't about getting out a message, it was about raising money. And we shouldn't be naive about why top officials are attending fundraisers either -- their attention is for sale to the highest bidder.

And the public has no way of knowing whether or when top White House officials are attending these fundraisers. If the transportation secretary attends an event that people have given $200,000 each to attend, shouldn't we know that? Especially this administration, that prides itself on openness, should recognize that the public needs to know whether and how its top officials are involved in these unlimited-funds fundraisers.

The White House likes to pride itself on saying they released the visitor logs. But getting into the White House is free. If someone pays a million dollars for access to the Secretary of State, then we really need to know about it.

So what happens next? Will this announcement from the President be accepted as sufficient, especially when his likely rivals aren't even disclosing their bundlers?

If the President is going to let his cabinet be involved in raising huge sums of money from individual contributors, he should at least make that process transparent. The President should lean on Priorities USA, who should disclose top officials' attendance at fundraisers. He should also require White House officials and Cabinet Secretaries to disclose their attendance at fundraisers somewhere as part of their schedule, as the President himself does (see "campaign activity"). The Hatch Act may create some difficulties in finding the right mechanism for this disclosure, but we need a better answer than total secrecy.

Because under the system we have now, the country's most powerful officials have an incentive to precede every official action with a meeting of the most well-heeled donors who are likely to be affected. If cabinet officials attend unlimited fundraisers, every act of their work becomes a potential hook for juicing donors. The very least we can do is make it possible for the public to understand how top officials are involved with these fundraisers.

Without public disclosure of cabinet and White House officials' involvement in unlimited fundraisers, who gets to define acceptable cabinet-level involvement in fundraising? At its best, cabinet officers all get a new distraction to their duties, at its worst, the executive branch itself becomes an extension of the Presidential dark money machine.

House Democrats unveiled The DISCLOSE 2012 Act (HR 4010, not up on THOMAS yet) today, a crucial step toward transparency to address the corrupting influence unlimited, secret corporate and union money is having on our elections and our elected officials.

Shortly before the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, the Sunlight Foundation drafted the Stop Undisclosed Payments in Elections from Ruining Public Accountability Act (the SUPERPAC Act), a streamlined disclosure and disclaimer only bill. We are pleased that on first blush, DISCLOSE 2012 meets the goals of our draft bill.

The bill will create robust reporting requirements for Super PACs, corporations, unions and nonprofit organizations that decide to make campaign expenditures. It will also require reporting of transfers by those groups to others making such expenditures, to prevent the money laundering that makes it easy to hide huge campaign contributions.

DISCLOSE 2012 will also require ads to contain disclaimers by the top officials of such groups, similar to the stand by your ad mandates required of candidates. In addition, shareholders and members of outside groups will be informed of campaign spending, and lobbyists will be required to report their spending on independent expenditures and electioneering communications.

When the Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case, it hung its hat on the theory that systems were in place to ensure unlimited corporate and union spending would be disclosed on the Internet. The Court was, at best, naïve. Because the Court created a whole new kind of spending, there was no disclosure system in place. (And the moribund Federal Election Commission would never be able to create such a system through a rulemaking process.) DISCLOSE 2012 creates that system of transparency and as such should receive wide support from members on both sides of the aisle.

Early primary spending has demonstrated that previously unheard of expenditures will become commonplace and overwhelm the 2012 elections. At a minimum, voters have a right to know whether the Super PAC that paid for an ad they just watched is tied to a candidate, or was funded by corporation or union with very special interests. Candidates will know who is footing the bill for ads that support their candidacy, even if such ads are technically not “coordinated” with their campaigns. With DISLOSE 2012, the voters will know too.

Here is a statement from Ellen Miller on the bill, and see below for a redlined comparison of the version of the DISCLOSE Act that fell to Republican obstruction in the Senate in 2010.

We've taken the just-introduced 2012 version of the DISCLOSE Act and compared it to its 2010 predecessor (which didn't get cloture in the Senate.) This comparison is much rougher version that I would have liked to generate, but we had to scrape the 2012 version from a PDF and try to clean it up. That scraping and cleaning effort is far from perfect, so it may be difficult to read in parts.

Even with the mess, it's interesting to see what stayed the same and what changed. Once you get past the first 15 pages or so, all of which were struck out, it become apparent how the legislation has significantly changed. The black text is the original version; everything in red is what was added or deleted.

Redline of 2010 and 2012 DISCLOSE Act

Last night's announcement came as no surprise -- that the President would formally align himself with super PAC run by former White House staffers.  The corrupting influence of money in politics, according to the President's public persona, is a threat wielded by rank-and-file lobbyists and insider trading. It's been about a year since the post Citizens United President Obama, who railed against the threat of dark money in the face of campaign finance regulation.

Messina's announcement did make one helpful clarification -- that the President still supports having a better disclosure law for outside spending. If that's true, he sure has a funny way of showing it. A State of the Union that doesn't even acknowledge that the floodgates have been opened, and continues to paint lobbyists as the problem (while continuing to accept bundled checks from their bosses.)

Now we know why disclosure and reform were absent -- they've been jettisoned, relegated to an awkward reassuring line in the announcement that the biggest checks are now welcome, despite the President's persistent warnings throughout 2010 that we should make no mistake in remembering how unlimited, often secret donations affect public service. Descriptive rhetoric was apparently insufficient, and thanks to Republican obstruction in the Senate (and absolute apathy towards the issue on their own) we'll get to live through the dark money arms race, rather than imagining it.

The announcement suggests that the President negotiated with the super PAC, and that his involvement is predicated on disclosure that meets the standard set by the law. That's a pretty low standard, since it's the law, and since it's the same law that Obama says he's committed to (silently) changing.

We will do so only in the knowledge and with the expectation that all of its donations will be fully disclosed as required by law to the Federal Election Commission.

"As required by law" may as well be written "quarterly, unreliably, and in a way that still permits anonymity". The technically legal presented as rigorously ethical. "We'll follow the law I railed against as ineffective" might be a better paraphrase.

The partisan lines around campaign finance disclosure are about to get rearranged, and it's unlikely that they'll become a more productive force for reliable disclosure, especially if Obama continues to use disclosure as a rhetorical shield (through the visitor logs) and especially if the partisan logic of unilateral disarmament continues to obscure the thousand other choices about transparency and accountability that are involved in creating a Presidential dark money machine.

 

In case you missed it, last night some-time South Carolina Presidential candidate and super PAC founder Stephen Colbert gave a great rundown of the new campaign finance landscape in our elections. Colbert and his team of very sharp writers have smartly illustrated just how out of control our campaign finance system is. In short, it’s crazy: A handful of billionaires pouring incredible amounts of cash is fundamentally changing what our democracy looks like. Colbert’s team doing a great job making sure this news gets outside the Beltway. Watch the video here:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
America's Biggest Super PAC Donors
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

As you’ll see above, Colbert makes the point that these billionaires are doing this out in the open. There’s a little bit of truthiness to that. Yes, super PACs disclose their donors, but there’s plenty we don’t know. That’s because the FEC has done absolutely no work to regulate this new influx of cash. And neither Congress nor the FEC has had the guts to require the real-time, online reporting that would give the public an actual sense of who’s trying to influence their votes. After all, we only just got the super PAC disclosures from last year (!) on Tuesday, and many of the crucial primary elections are already over -- the Republican field is down to just a few left standing. It might have been helpful for voters in those early primary states to know just who was trying to influence them before they cast their votes. And although it’s great that we can name the top 22 donors, there may still be other billionaires who are funneling their money to super PACs through 501c4s, nonprofits which don’t have to tell anyone who their funders are.

Sunlight’s been working on this issue for a while, so we’ve got plenty of info if you’re interested. (Who doesn’t love a little campaign finance disclosure to spice up your Friday?) Our one stop shop for everything you ever wanted to know about super PACs but were afraid to ask is here: http://sunlightfoundation.com/superpacs/. We’ll be continuously updating that page, so make sure to bookmark it and come back.

We also have draft legislation that we think can solve many of the disclosure problems around super PACs, the SUPERPAC Act. We’re writing it out in the open (the way we wish Congress would write legislation) and we welcome your feedback to make it stronger. You can comment on any particular section or on the whole thing. Check it out: http://publicmarkup.org/bill/superpac-act/

The SUPERPAC Act hasn’t been introduced, yet, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt for you to get in touch with your representatives and let them know they should be on the side of transparency, which they could do simply by introducing and/or cosponsoring this legislation.

You can also read more about it, like -- Lisa’s blog post that Colbert showed on-screen and Lee’s analysis of the 22 donors that gave 48% of the presidential super PAC money (with fun charts!).

Our reporting group has also been spending some late nights going through the documents released Tuesday -- and they’re the ones who are tracking the spending so we can give you detailed data.

Want to help shine a light on super PACs in your area? We’ve also got the super PAC sleuth project -- you can check to see if there’s a super PAC in your area, take a picture, and upload it -- and if you want to dig in even further, you can join our Little Sis group, too.

It’s not enough to hope that the 22 billionaires that we know about pick someone we like for our next president (or representative, or senator -- super PACs aren’t limited to presidential contests). It’s up to us to demand transparency and make sure that everyone knows just who is trying to influence our elections.

The Advisory Committee on Transparency is hosting an event, "Will Super PACs Determine the 2012 Election? Should they be more transparent?" on Monday, January 23rd at 2:15 p.m. in Rayburn 2203.

Super PACs have fundamentally changed the relationship between money and politics, and all too often are misunderstood. These new vehicles for political advocacy have upended traditional political alliances, infused tremendous amounts of undisclosed (or partially disclosed) money into the political system, and kicked off controversies over what our 21st century democracy should look like.

We are pleased to present the preeminent experts who will discuss what the public knows -- and should know -- about Super PACs, including the reporter who coined the term “Super PAC” and leading advocates on both sides of the transparency question. We will explore the legal limits of what can be disclosed about Super PACs, and the policy questions around what the public has a right to know.

Panelists:

• Eliza Newlin Carney: Staff Writer for CQ Roll Call covering the issues of lobbying and influence
• Allen Dickerson:Legal Director and Interim Executive Director of the Center for Competitive Politics
• Mimi Marziani: Counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law
• Paul Ryan: FEC Program Director and Associate Legal Counsel at the Campaign Legal Center
• Daniel Schuman: Policy Counsel at the Sunlight Foundation and Director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency

We hope you can join us. Please RSVP to http://snlg.ht/RSVPSuperPAC

The Advisory Committee on Transparency educates policymakers on transparency-related issues, problems, and solutions and shares ideas with members of the Congressional Transparency Caucus. It hosts events to discuss important and wide-ranging transparency policy issues with experts from a variety of backgrounds and develops educational publications and provides timely information to the public and members of Congress. Learn more at http://transparencycaucus.org.

Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, is in Washington today to register his new Super PAC with the FEC. As he has said on the show, it’s his intention to have the Colbert Super PAC raise unlimited funds to buy political ads.

But do we really need another shadowy organization out there influencing our politicians? We don’t think so, and we bet you agree with us. We believe that Colbert, and any other Super PAC, must disclose their donors. Our democracy depends on it.

If you love democracy, then you should join us as we demand the information we need to follow the money in politics.

Mr. Colbert, have you no sense of decency? Bears are not the number one threat to America. Undisclosed political spending is.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that outside groups that take unlimited political donations from any source, commonly known as Super PACs, can now spend unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns. The Federal Election Commission has yet to set up rules to track this flood of money into the political system, so we’ve made it easy for you to do it yourself. Click here to learn more.

Although we're rounding up our sleuth of transbearency bears to meet Colbert at the FEC and demand disclosure today, we've got more up our sleeves. Stay with us to learn what you can do to help.

Don’t let Big Colbert push around your vote this year. Join Sunlight, follow the money, and take a stand for transparency.

The 2010 elections might be over, but the job of finding out who spent what for which candidate is just beginning. Changes in election laws, from the Supreme Court in a pair of decisions, SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and a series of FEC and IRS rulings have led to a surge of outside groups spending unlimited money to influence elections. And 2010 was a just a warm-up: these organizations will most likely play a huge role attempting to influence votes in the 112th Congress, the 2012 Republican presidential primaries and the general election.

Finding out who’s behind these groups is a monumental task, but an absolutely essential one -- and anyone out there reading this post can contribute to that effort. Although the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is supposed to be tracking this flood of campaign spending, they have yet to adopt final rules to do so. Good thing we don’t have to wait for the FEC to get its act together. Here’s what we can do now:

We’ve compiled a list of what we call Super PACs -- those organizations that declared their intention to take unlimited donations from any source to fund political activities. We know where they are (check out this map!), but we need your help to expose who’s behind them.

In the coming days, we’ll be providing more information about how to join us as a “Super PAC Sleuth” to investigate and research these special interests in the shadows (and P.O. Boxes) all across the nation. This will be a multi-step project, but you can help us with the first part today by helping us show what these Super PACs actually look like:

Step 1: Pick a Super PAC near you Step 2: Take a picture of the Super PAC’s office Step 3: Upload the picture to your Flickr account Step 4: Enter the location of your photo on the Flickr map for the image. (Look to the upper right corner.) Step 5: Add your photo to our Super PAC Sleuths Group. Step 6: Disclosure! (Well, sort of: it’s a step in the right direction!)

Feel free to tag your submissions with “Super PAC” so that curious Flickr users can find your pictures, too. (You can see our early effort to map DC in the slideshow at the bottom of this post.)

Working together, we can really bring some disclosure to a process that is unjustly shielded from us. To join our awesome team of Super PAC sleuths sign up here, and we’ll send you an update later this week.

Already, the special interests are planning their next act. It’s only a few more weeks before the funds start pouring in for Election Day 2012, the presidential candidates start setting up exploratory committees, and the Super PACs start turning their attention to the legislative and electoral battles ahead. Don’t you want to know who’s trying to buy your vote and what their agenda really is?