Today, Senator Tester announced that once again he has introduced the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, (not yet online) a... View Article
Continue readingObama visits GOP givers to make a point about sequestration
When President Barack Obama travels Tuesday to the historic Newport News Shipbuilding facility to make a point about the potential damage from the looming sequestration axe, he'll be making a political point in more ways than one.
In a sense, he's reminding Republican budget hawks that they could be biting a hand that feeds them. The employees and political action committee of Newport News Shipbuilding have given more generously to Republican politicians than to Democrats over the years, the company's profile on Sunlight's Influence Explorer shows.
A search for contributions to the president's campaigns by ...
Continue readingTop government contractors spend less than a penny on politics for every dollar at stake in sequester
With the sequestration deadline rapidly approaching, one set of companies has more at stake than any other, at least in terms of sheer dollars: big government contractors. By our count, the ten biggest government contractors would stand to lose roughly $13.6 billion in contracts if the across-the-board 9.4 percent cuts to discretionary defense spending cuts were applied equally across their 2012 contract award amounts. Compare that to the $115 million they spent on lobbying and campaigns, and that investment in politics starts to look like a bargain. And if that political investment helps to avoid the proposed cuts and keep these companies' contracting revenues stable, that would amount to a 125-to-1 return for these 10 companies, on average.
Supreme Court to review limits on campaign contributions
A case that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear next fall challenges campaign spending limits that have been in place since the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon.
Continue readingObama Versus Campaign Finance Laws
There’s a certain conventional wisdom that President Obama wants stronger campaign finance laws, and to protect our democracy from the... View Article
Continue readingWhat big donors would like to hear in the State of the Union
Though we can't predict the rhetorical tropes--not the thematic structure or the memorable lines or phrases that will fall flat--a look at the world of influence might tell us some of the issues President Barack Obama will touch on in his fourth State of the Union address. If a part of politics is rewarding your friends while giving your opponents good government, then the 2012 contest--which featured history's first billion-dollar presidential campaign (Obama's), first billion-dollar-plus outside spending campaign, plus oodles of special interest cash flowing to congressional candidates--leaves a lot of ground to cover.
Sunlight combed through ...
Continue readingWhy gun control faces an uphill battle in the Senate
As the Senate prepares to take up the first major gun control debate since last December's shooting massacre in Connecticut, a Sunlight Foundation analysis of the political pressures on 26 key senators paints a pessimistic picture for passage. Absent a major pressure campaign to push senators to support gun control legislation, the political calculus points against the Senate passing any reform.
The infographic below details the various pressures senators face on a gun control vote. We've collapsed the factors into a single Gun Reform Index, where 10 is most likely to support gun reform and 0 is least likely. The index ranks each senator relative to other key senators within their own party. More details and explanation follow the graphic.
(graphic by Amy Cesal and Alexander Furnas)
What Enron’s political e-mails tell us about corporate lobbying
During its investigation into wrongdoing into Enron, The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made public almost 500,000 internal company e-mails. These e-mails provide a unique look into the workings of the company, including how the company conducted its political operations. A few years ago, my friend and Georgetown Political Science Professor Daniel J. Hopkins approached me about analyzing what was in these e-mails. The results of our research are now published in the latest issue of Legislative Studies Quarterly, and a copy of our paper, “The Inside View: Using the Enron E-mail Archive to Understand Corporate Political Attention” can be downloaded here. To sum up our findings briefly, the e-mails show Enron’s political operations as very engaged in the narrow details of policy , keeping close tabs on daily developments and devoting considerable resources to agency rulemaking. Meanwhile, we found only sporadic discussion of campaign finance.
Continue readingInside spending: super PACs, dark money groups dominated by political insiders
By suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit, the Government prevents their voices and viewpoints from reaching the public and advising voters on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests.
-- from the majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
When the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in the Citizen United case three years ago this week, the majority's expressed intent was to allow corporations--both for-profits like Exxon-Mobil and nonprofits like the Sierra Club--to add their voices to the public debate. In practice, an analysis by Sunlight finds, it has created ...
Continue readingHappy Birthday Richard Nixon — RIP campaign finance reform?
Tonight, at Washington's stately Mayflower Hotel, just a few blocks from Sunlight's offices, family and former aides to the late President Richard Nixon will gather to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth in Yorba Linda, Calif. Who knew that it would also be an occasion for campaign finance reform nostalgia?
It was actually Nixon who, in 1971, signed into law the Federal Election Campaign Act, limiting the amount of money that could be donated to congressional and presidential campaigns and requiring that those donations be reported. And ...
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