Democracy North Carolina today awarded 22 state legislators its Sunshine Award for the superior quality of their campaign disclosure reports filed during the 2010 election cycle. The first reports for the 2012 election are due on Friday – it’s the beginning of a super-sized, record breaking cycle. The 22 winners were the only legislators who [...]
In contrast to incentives for small donors (per Wednesday’s Link of the Day), the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision encourages limitless donations by corporations (and unions) for so-called independent expenditures. Texas Gov. Rick Perry is the latest candidate to benefit from this subterfuge, with the creation of a super PAC called “Americans for Rick Perry” that [...]
When the US Supreme Court liberated purchased political speech from nearly all regulation in the Citizens United decision, it opened a Pandora’s Box loaded with all sorts of strange creatures: partisan c-4s, super PACs, corporate slush funds. The Federal Election Commission is struggling to apply its rules to new creatures served up by operatives across [...]
A hodgepodge of anti-voter bills resurfaced this afternoon in the House Committee on Elections as a single 44-page proposal, without warning or even a summary of its complex contents for committee members. Republican chair David Lewis wanted the bill voted on that afternoon. Rep. Deborah Ross (D-Wake County) called the process “legislative malfeasance,” and others [...]
The photo ID bill, known by opponents as the “Voter Suppression Act,” passed its final House vote by a party line vote of 68 to 48. The goal of Democracy North Carolina and other voting rights groups has been to keep the conservatives’ margin of victory small enough to send a message to Gov. Bev [...]
Big Tobacco has dropped from its ranking at the top of big contributors to federal candidates, but the industry is still spending millions to advance its political agenda in less visible ways. A new report from the Center for Responsive Politics tracks millions going into 527 committees and leadership PACs and notes that the Citizens [...]
Earlier this week, Democracy North Carolina released a report that sharply criticized a proposal jammed inside the state Senate budget to merge and shrink the three agencies that oversee elections, ethics, and lobbying. We’re pleased to report that the proposal, which many others also rebuked, is no longer a part of the Republican budget plan. The Senate [...]
IMPORTANT UPDATE: We are pleased to confirm that the newest version of the Senate budget DOES NOT include a provision to combine the State Board of Elections, State Ethics Commission and the lobbying regulation division of the Secretary of State’s office as described below. We are hopeful that this bad idea will be permanently shelved [...]
5/11/2011 - After Citizens United, big donors have poured money into a growing number of nonprofit Section 501(c)(4) organizations to finance political attack ads while remaining anonymous (e.g., Karl Rove’s Crossroads conduit). Now comes this irony: The anti-tax, anti-government donors may eventually get hit with a tax bill, courtesy of the IRS applying its gift [...]
Here are two insightful columns related to the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision in January 2010. One by Nick Nyhart and Tova Wang points out that the decision became a green light for a beefed-up assault on democratic values, particularly the right to self-organize, the right to vote, and the right to [...]