They may not be the biggest givers of this campaign cycle but they could be the shadiest: So far in this campaign cycle,12 trusts have given super PACs a total of $3.2 million.
Though that amounts to a sliver of the $314 million flowing to super PACs, it represents an extreme in one sense: Trusts are a highly opaque way to facilitate political spending. Trusts act as separate entities that manage assets on behalf of people, corporations, charities, and other entities. They can serve as tax shelters and generally, are more private than traditional charities and corporations because ...
Continue readingFollowing the Chamber of Commerce down the campaign finance rabbit hole
A New York Times report that New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is subpoenaing records of tax-exempt groups involved in politics underscores the difficulty of tracking campaign spending to its source following the 2010 Citizens United decision, a ruling that the Supreme Court reaffirmed this week.
According to the Times story, Schneiderman is seeking emails and bank records to determine the legality of financial transactions made between the National Chamber Foundation and one of its donors, the Starr Foundation, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The business trade association received $18 million from the Chamber Foundation in 2003 ...
Continue readingPlay ball! How MLB teams rank in political giving
It's opening day of Major League Baseball's 2012 season, so Sunlight has decided to take a look at which teams are the heaviest hitters when it comes to political giving.
Turns out the deepest pockets don't always correlate with most home runs.
The Baltimore Orioles finished dead last in the American League East last year with a dismal record of 63 wins and 93 losses, but giving by their politically active owner, Peter Angelos, has made the Charm City team the champions of campaign giving.
Angelos gave more in the 2002 election cycle--some $2.1 million--than he ...
Continue readingHealth care lobbying groups head to the Supreme Court
If war is politics by other means, so is litigation. While there will be plenty of rhetoric today about President Obama's health care law on the second anniversary of its signing -- including a new op-ed by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who was for the health care reform in Massachusetts before he was against it nationally -- the big battle begins Monday, when the Supreme Court opens an unusual three days of argument over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
In many respects, the mega-case -- a compilation of six separate cases that have been wending through ...
Continue readingTools for Transparency: Research and Report with DocumentCloud
Journalists often face a problem we at Sunlight run into — dealing with huge piles of government documents sadly trapped... View Article
Continue readingMagna Carta 2.0: a transparency research agenda
Last week I attended the first Global Conference on Transparency Research at Rutgers University-Newark, which brought together two hundred transparency... View Article
Continue readingWashington Watch Releases Earmark Request Entry Form
For the first time in 2009, members of Congress had to release their earmark requests to the public. As we've documented before, this information is scattered over 535 Web sites in all kinds of different formats. Jim Harper and Washington Watch have now released a tool that allows volunteers to capture that earmark information for posterity, centralize it in a single location, and allow for all kinds of additional analysis and investigation. And, if you participate, you can win a Kindle!
Find out more here.
The more members we get entered, the more meaningful research we can do about ...
Continue readingOpen notebook: Following stimulus contracts
Recovery.gov might not be useful yet for "following every penny" of stimulus spending, but with a telephone, Google, USASpending.gov and some luck it might not be that hard. Pretty much at random, I picked out a bunch of congressional press releases touting stimulus dollars going to local communities, and started making calls. Here's some notes on where one inquiry led me.
Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania's 3rd district (roughly the northwest corner of the state) put this press release on her Web site on March 24, announcing that, "The Mercer County Housing Authority is slated to ...
Continue readingAn Army of pharma trips?
The Center for Public Integrity has analyzed 22,000 Pentagon travel disclosures -- filed when an outside party pays for a trip taken by Department of Defense personnel. The finding that jumped out at both Anu and me:
The medical industry paid for more travel than any other single interest over $10 million for some 8,700 trips, or about 40 percent of all outside sponsored travel. Among the targets: military pharmacists, doctors, and others who administer the Pentagon's $6 billion-plus annual budget for prescription drugs
I would have expected Defense contractors to be number one. I hope CPI follows ...
Continue readingMurtha’s earmark recipients: How hands off (or on) is he?
Paul Singer reports in Roll Call on a tangled story that apparently involves the undisclosed hand of Rep. John Murtha but certainly involves his brother Kit (a retired lobbyist) and his former lobbying firm, five different companies doing business, directly or indirectly, with Defense (including one under federal indictment and one that allegedly wanted to outsource earmarked defense work to "China or someplace"), an earmark from the pre-disclosure era, some technical corrections added to the Tsunami relief bill that moved the funds for that earmark from one recipient to another (because the original recipient allegedly wanted to do the work ...
Continue reading
59063
