As many as 600 individuals appear to have exceeded the $117,000 that they were legally allowed to give directly to federal candidates, political parties and political committees in the last election cycle, records examined by the Sunlight Foundation suggest. But our most troubling finding may how difficult it is determine with legal certainty exactly how many campaign scofflaws there are, or how much over the limit they gave. Like our former Sunlight colleagues, Paul Blumenthal and Aaron Bycoffe of the Huffington Post, we have been curious about the number of donors who appear to have exceeded campaign spending limits, in an era when the Supreme Court has made it possible for wealthy individuals to give in unlimited amounts via super PACs. In addition to those who violated the overall limit for giving to federal campaigns, we identified as many as 1,478 individuals who may have given more than the legal limit of $70,800 to parties and committees and 507 who appear to have given more than the $46,200 legal aggregate limit to individual candidates.
Continue readingWhat Ezra Klein gets wrong about big vs. small money in politics
Over at Bloomberg View, columnist Ezra Klein yesterday decided to throw some cold water on the small donor solution favored by many campaign finance reformers. His argument: complain as you like about the power of big corporate donors. Small donors might be worse. They are highly partisan! Klein gets his spark of insight from a remark by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). On Monday, the senator offered a fundraising confessional at a Yale University conference on money, politics and inequality. “When I send out a fundraising e-mail talking about how bad Republicans are, I raise three times as much as when I send out an e-mail talking about how good I am,” Murphy said. “People are motivated to give based on their fear of the other side rather than on their belief in their side.” (I was also at this conference, as a panelist). From this observation, Klein then slips into a two-sizes-fits-all approach to campaign funding: There is big money, and there is small money.
Continue readingHow to make sense of immigration lobbying
The real immigration fight is now about to begin.
As the Senate Judiciary Committee begins working on the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, we still think the best field guide to the fight about to erupt over the 844-page bill remains our March 25 analysis, entitled “Untangling the webs of immigration lobbying" Here is the network analysis we produced back then (click for the interactive version):
Figure 1. Immigration Lobbying in Congress
Click here for our interactive network guide to the most active interests, what issues they care about, and how intensely they are lobbying
Why asset disclosures matter for politicians
It’s now been two weeks since the Congress quietly gutted the STOCK Act by severely limiting the legislation’s reach, exempting... View Article
Continue readingDo members of Congress headline fundraisers in exchange for floor votes?
We at the Sunlight Foundation spend a lot of time looking over the political fundraising invitations that keep pouring into our Political Party Time website. So we were very excited to read a paper by Yale Political Science Professor Eleanor Neff Powell, who used our Party Time data to investigate an often underappreciated aspect of the political fundraising circle: headlining for others. By carefully analyzing the corpus of fundraising invitations that we’ve compiled over the years, Powell was able to uncover evidence of an economy of favors in the Washington fundraising circuit. Members of Congress who headline events for other members get something in return – votes for their legislation. Or, as Powell puts it:
Controlling for the ideological similarity of their past voting records, a Democratic Congressman is 5.5% more likely to vote for a bill for each fundraising event the bill’s sponsor has headlined for them in the past (Republican Congressmen are 2.5% more likely). These results show a strong relationship between fundraising assistance and subsequent legislative voting behavior and suggest potentially serious consequences for representationContinue reading
Citizen engagement matters for transparency initiatives. What makes it happen?
As we begin to think about how to evaluate the impact of technology-driven transparency policies, we are keenly aware of the need to be honest and open about the challenges of implementation. This post is an attempt to practice the transparency we believe in by discussing one of the most formidable challenges facing organizations engaged in this work: Getting people to care. Our jumping off point here is a recent post from the engine room about 11 new initiatives that recently received an award from the Transparency International People Engagement Programme. As laid out by the engine room’s Susannah Vila, the challenges facing all of them sound remarkably similar.
Continue readingA win for open data: CFPB’s consumer complaint database
Here’s another win for open data. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau releases data on which banks have the most consumer complaints. Even before the data becomes public officially, banks start improving response times and responding more favorably to customer complaints. That’s the story that’s emerging from the CFPB’s bold decision to make bank consumer complaint data public. This is exactly what open data is supposed to do. It equalizes the balance of power. In this case, it has empowered consumers, and brought accountability to big banks.
Continue readingWhy four Dems opposed extending background checks
Back in February, we at Sunlight made some predictions about the Democrats who would be most likely to defect on a gun vote, based on three factors: being up for a vote in 2014, having a high number of gun businesses in the state, and having a low Obama vote share. Here's what we wrote at the time about four Democrats we predicted would be most likely to oppose gun reform.
- Max Baucus: Montana has 120 gun businesses per 100,000 people, highest in the country (according to ATF statistics). Only 41.8% of Montana voters supported Obama in 2012. (Tester, who just won re-election faces similar pressures)
- Mark Begich: Alaska has 104 gun businesses per 100,000 people. Only 41.3% of Alaskans voted for Obama in 2012.
- Tim Johnson: South Dakota has 66 gun businesses per 100,000 people. Only 39.9% of South Dakotans supported Obama in 2012.
- Mark Pryor: Arkansas has 45 gun businesses per 100,00 people. Only 36.9% of Arkansans voted for Obama in 2012.
Untangling the webs of tax lobbying
It’s tax day today, and while Americans all over the country are scrambling to pay what they owe, in Washington there is a different kind of hustle taking place. About 6,500 lobbyists are busily working to make sure that their more than 2,000 client organizations can pay a little less in taxes. Some want a new tax credit passed. In this year that threatened comprehensive tax reform, many are focused on protecting existing loopholes, credits, and exemptions.
To understand the vast and busy world of Washington tax lobbying, a new Sunlight Foundation analysis and visualization has mapped out the networks of tax lobbying from the 112th Congress (2011-2012), which should also be a pretty good guide to what lobbying in the 113th Congress will look like. Our interactive component lets you follow the industries and issues that you care most about.
Graphic by Alexander Furnas and Amy Cesal. Click to explore the network interactively.
The visualization draws on the complete record of tax lobbying in the 112th Congress. For those keeping score at home, that covers:
- $773 million in reported lobbying spending
- 1,454 bills
- 2,221 organizations
Ten ways special interests want to change the U.S. tax code
Sunlight’s new tax lobbying analysis gives the big picture on what tax lobbying looks like, visualizing what happens when 2,221 organizations in 336 sectors spend an estimated combined $773 million to hire 6,503 different lobbyists to advocate on 1,454 bills in a single two-year Congress. Here, we take a closer look at some of the specific proposed changes to the tax code. The ten bills highlighted here offer a window into the ways in which narrow interests work with lawmakers from both parties to tweak the tax code in narrow ways. Though none of these proposals have been enacted into law (yet), they offer a sampling of the many ways that particular interests work to benefit a particular industry, company, or set of professionals, or to incentivize a particular behavior.
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