Mother Jones: Mitch McConnell Just Made It Virtually Impossible to Police Dark Money in 2016

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GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan defended the provision as "stopping the IRS from suppressing civic participation," but transparency activists aren't buying it. Trevor Potter, who is chairman of the Campaign Legal Center, said the amendment will make a bad situation worse.

"There is virtually universal agreement that the current rules are confusing and unclear, and have resulted in abuses both by dark-money groups and by IRS agents in the exemption approval process," Potter says. "Now, Congress has mandated that these same inadequate rules remain untouched for another year—the agency is not even allowed to continue working on drafting better ones."

Potter says the ban on the IRS making any new rules on controlling dark-money groups raises a sinister possibility—IRS officials may be powerless to stop money from outside the United States from flowing into the 2016 election. "An effect of this rider is that the door to secret foreign dollars in US elections remains wide open through secret contributions to these ostensibly 'nonpolitical' groups that run campaign ads without any disclosure of their donors," he says.

To read the full story at Mother Jones, click here.