As Vice President Joe Biden convenes a meeting of anti-gun groups today, some of them appear to be ginning up an ad campaign to demand greater regulation of firearms following last month's mass shooting of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.
Continue readingAfter the inaugural balls, where does the extra money go?
President Barack Obama's aggressive inaugural fundraising -- he's reversed the ban on corporate donors, lifted the lid on contributions and is soliciting up to $1 million for various VIP ticket packages -- raises an intriguing question: What's he planning to do with all the money? After all, the Presidential Inaugural Committee already has radically downsized the number of official balls.
The options are limitless. A number of recent presidential inaugural committess have acknowledged -- either wittingly or not -- ending up with a surplus of funds. There are no rules limiting how the money can be used. The 2013 Inaugural Committee ...
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 ...
Continue readingObama discloses less about inaugural donors
What a difference four years makes: President Barack Obama, who began his first term with a promise to change the way Washington works, barred corporate donations to his first inauguration, capped individual contributions at $50,000 and began disclosing his donors and bundlers more than a month before his swearing-in.
This time he waited until two weeks before the inauguration to release his first list of donors. The Presidential Inaugural Committee posted the names on its website but without the amount of each donation nor the contributor's occupation and city. Nor was a separate list of bundlers posted.
Moreover ...
Continue readingHouse rules package has new ethics clauses, strange wrinkles
Fresh off taking the oath of office earlier today, the new members of the House of Representatives are about to vote to adopt a set of rules and orders this afternoon. There are a few ethics-related changes that are significant. There are also some unusual new wrinkles.
One welcome change for watchdog groups, including the Sunlight Foundation, is the continuation of the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, which has to be reauthorized by each Congress. The terms of four board members -- Yvonne Burke, Jay Eagen, Karan English and Allison Hayward -- expired at the end of the last Congress but ...
Continue readingLobbyists save big businesses from fiscal cliff tax hikes
Congress may have averted the fiscal cliff, raising taxes on households making more than $450,000, ending the payroll tax holiday which will take a bite from workers' paychecks, and leaving the bigger issues of raising the debt ceiling, reforming entitlements and addressing federal spending to the next Congress. While the fiscal cliff deal results in a tax hike for all workers, some special interests preserved their favorite tax breaks the old fashioned way: lobbying and contributing to members of Congress.
Most of the goodies sprinkled through the American Taxpayer Relief Act have been on the wish lists of big ...
Continue readingIncoming FEC chair’s wish list for 2013
With the end of the year, the six federal election commissioners are preparing to play their annual game of musical chairs. That means a new chair of the commission for 2013. She has lots she wants to accomplish.
Continue readingFEC says yes to texting, no to Yamaha
At its last meeting of the year Thursday, the Federal Election Commission approved a new way to charge donors who want to give to political committees via text message. But it did not approve a proposed novel way for companies to bulk up their political action committees' receipts -- by soliciting independent dealers that sell their products.
The FEC gave the green light to an electronic payment processing company to process payments from political donors via text message. The company, Global Transaction Services Group, would charge the mobile customer's credit card. The FEC approved a slightly different form of charging ...
Continue readingInfluence profile: NRA spokesman Asa Hutchinson
Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman who will be the face of the National Rifle Association's response to last week's schoolhouse massacre, received more than $30,000 in contributions from the gun lobby during more than a decade of running for state and federal office, data downloaded from Sunlight's Influence Explorer shows.
The largest single donation, $4,950, came in February, 1997, just after Hutchinson entered the House. He served three terms before resigning in 2001 to become director of the Drug Enforcement Agency under then-President George W. Bush. Later, Hutchinson became a top-ranking official in the ...
Continue readingGroups ask feds to investigate mystery corporate campaign donations
Election watchdog groups are asking the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission to investigate a mysterious series of large campaign donation first reported by Sunlight.
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