Keeping Tabs on Special-Purpose Party Accounts (Campaign Legal Center and OpenSecrets v. FEC)

At a Glance

OpenSecrets and Campaign Legal Center filed suit against the FEC after it failed to respond to their Petition to promulgate new disclosure rules for “special-purpose” accounts maintained by national political party committees. CLC and OpenSecrets sued to force the FEC to do its job and ensure full transparency of the funds flowing into and out of these supercharged party accounts.

Status
Active
Updated
Issues
Campaign Finance
About This Case/Action

In December 2014, Congress amended the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) to allow national political party committees to create three new kinds of “separate, segregated” accounts for specific purposes — one for maintaining party headquarters, one for funding legal proceedings, and one for organizing presidential nominating conventions — and to accept contributions for these accounts of up to three times the party’s general contribution limit (which is currently set at $41,300 per year). Moreover, each national party now operates up to seven special-purpose accounts, three for the national committees and two for their congressional and senatorial committees, with each account subject to a separate, three-times-higher contribution limit. That means an individual can contribute more than $1.7 million to a single party in the 2023-24 election cycle by giving $247,800 to all seven of its special-purpose accounts.

The 2014 FECA amendments, sometimes referred to as the “Cromnibus” amendments because they were tucked into an omnibus government funding package, did not detail permissible uses of the new special-purpose accounts or contain specific reporting requirements for them. As a result, it was imperative for the FEC to issue new disclosure rules to ensure funds flowing into and out of the new party accounts would be reported accurately and in full. Instead, the FEC did nothing.

Thanks to the FEC’s inaction, political party committees have adopted a hodge-podge of deficient and inconsistent reporting practices that make it virtually impossible to track the funds flowing through their supercharged special-purpose accounts.

To rectify these transparency problems, CLC and OpenSecrets filed a rulemaking petition with the FEC in August 2019. The Petition requested that the FEC promulgate rules requiring national party committees to delineate the individual and aggregate transactions involving their special-purpose accounts, and proposed several specific regulatory changes that would help achieve such transparency. CLC and OpenSecrets submitted additional comments to the FEC in October 2019 and June 2020, reiterating the importance of the Petition and providing additional information about the transparency issues it described.

Multiple election cycles have now come and gone since Congress’ authorization of these special-purpose accounts, and still the FEC has yet to respond to the Petition or even begin a desperately-needed rulemaking process. Therefore, CLC and OpenSecrets filed a lawsuit in 2023, challenging the FEC’s unreasonable, four-year delay in responding to their Petition under the Administrative Procedure Act.

What’s At Stake?

Federal campaign finance laws protect every American’s right to participate in the political process by requiring transparency about who is funding parties, campaigns, and other political spending, so voters can properly weigh different speakers and messages and cast an informed vote. But FECA’s comprehensive transparency requirements are meaningless if the FEC doesn’t provide rules to ensure their proper implementation and enforcement.

Through its inaction, the FEC is permitting national party committees to effectively conceal statutorily required details about the funds contributed to, and expended from, their supercharged special-purpose accounts — and thereby depriving the public of the complete and accurate campaign finance information to which it has a right.

Instead of a functioning FEC that protects the trust of voters, American voters are left with a dysfunctional system that encourages a lack of transparency and allows corruption to thrive while wealthy donors wield outsized power over the political system. In the absence of FEC action, groups like CLC are stepping up to ensure that parties and other political actors are accountable to the public.

VICTORY: Federal Court Strikes Down Racially Discriminatory Galveston County, Texas Voting Maps that Denied Black and Latino Voters a Voice

Date
Body

In a victory for the voters of Galveston County, Texas, a federal judge ruled today that Galveston County’s 2021 redistricting plan violates Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA) and denies Black and Latino voters the equal opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. 

The decision characterizes Galveston County’s voting plan – enacted after the first redistricting cycle in which Galveston County was not subject to federal preclearance under the federal VRA – as “mean-spirited” and “egregious.”

In 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the UCLA Voting Rights Project and Neil Baron joined the ongoing redistricting fight, which began in 2013, to represent Galveston County voters against racial discrimination by Galveston County in its voting maps.

“Today’s historic decision underscores a simple fact: Galveston County’s Black and Latino residents deserve a voice in government.” said Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting at Campaign Legal Center (CLC). “After decades of discrimination, this most recent voting map was just the latest blatant attempt to silence Galveston County’s Black and Latino voters. The court’s decision is a momentous step in addressing that injustice and ensuring that Galveston County’s Black and Latino residents can elect a representative who will best serve their communities.”

The case, Petteway v. Galveston County, Texas, was one of the first racial vote dilution cases to go to trial after the U.S. Supreme Court validated Section 2 of the VRA in June’s Allen v. Milligan decision.

Following 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision, Galveston County became one of the first jurisdictions to enact discriminatory voting maps. Then, in the 2021 redistricting cycle–the first that took place since Shelby County gutted preclearance–Galveston County once again enacted voting maps that ignored Black and Latino voters entirely, despite those voters comprising nearly half of all people in the county. 

The new map specifically targeted the county commission district known as Precinct 3. Under the old map, the precinct encompassed the heart of Galveston County, including an area where the majority of voters were Black or Hispanic. The new map added the largely white northwest corner of the county to Precinct 3, a blatant attempt to drown out the voices of Black and Latino voters.

Today’s decision agreed, noting: “It is stunning how completely the county extinguished the Black and Latino communities’ voice on its commissioners court during 2021’s redistricting.”

Now, the county has until October 20, 2023 to propose a remedial plan; otherwise the Court will impose one before the November 11, 2023 qualifying period for the 2024 Commissioners Court elections.

More information about the case can be found here. 

 

Issues
Redistricting

Statement regarding new federal charges against Congressman George Santos

Date
Body

WASHINGTON, DC – Following a 23-count superseding indictment against Congressman George Santos of New York, Shanna Ports, Senior Legal Counsel for Campaign Finance at Campaign Legal Center, issued the following statement:   

“Voters have a right to know how the candidates competing for their vote are raising and spending money.  

As the new federal charges against Congressman George Santos make clear, his congressional campaign engaged in deceitful practices that denied voters in New York’s 3rd congressional district the information they needed in order to cast a fully informed vote. The Department of Justice must continue to use the legal tools at its disposal to keep the public informed of Representative Santos’s campaign’s misdeeds and ultimately ensure our electoral system is robust, transparent, and functional.”
 

On January 9, 2023, Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that recently elected Rep. George Santos, his 2022 campaign committee, Devolder-Santos for Congress, and treasurer Nancy Marks violated federal campaign finance laws. The following day, CLC referred the complaint to the Department of Justice.   

CLC’s complaint alleged, among other things, that Santos’s campaign falsely reported $705,000 in “personal loans” from Santos, and the information underlying Marks’s guilty plea appears to support that allegation: Prosecutors in Marks’s case have reportedly indicated that Marks and Santos conspired to fabricate $500,000 in loans made to the campaign in order to meet fundraising benchmarks. The superseding indictment against Rep. Santos includes new charges related to the loans.

Issues
Campaign Finance

Supreme Court Must Uphold Fair Maps for Black South Carolinians

Date
Body

Washington, D.C. – This morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of NAACP, a case appealing a unanimous federal court ruling that ordered the redrawing of South Carolina’s 1st congressional district for discriminating against Black voters.   

Ahead of today’s oral argument, Paul Smith, senior vice president at Campaign Legal Center, released the following statement:  

“There’s a reason a federal court already unanimously struck down South Carolina’s 1st congressional district: it’s a clear example of a racial gerrymander that made race the driving force in line-drawing decisions and harmed Black South Carolinians.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan decision validated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We hope the Supreme Court will once again side with voters and prevent self-interested politicians from weakening the Constitution’s ban on racial gerrymandering by using the cloak of partisan gerrymandering to discriminate against Black voters. Our democracy is meant to be of, by, and for the people, so all voters must have an equal opportunity to make their voices heard.” 

Background: 

In March, a federal district court panel struck down South Carolina’s 1st congressional district, finding that the state legislature had set an impermissible racial target for the district and removed thousands of Black voters from the district in order to meet it. The court held that the district was designed to “bleach” the Black voting community in the Charleston area.  

Campaign Legal Center has been involved in several lawsuits challenging racial gerrymandering in voting maps. In August 2023, Campaign Legal Center joined a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and other voting rights organizations urging the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court’s ruling and avoid weakening the protections against racial gerrymandering enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

Issues
Redistricting

Fighting Racial Gerrymandering in South Carolina (Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP)

At a Glance

CLC joined a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the right of Black voters in South Carolina to be free from racial gerrymandering.

Status
Active
Updated
Issues
Redistricting
About This Case/Action

After an eight-day trial featuring testimony from dozens of witnesses, three federal judges unanimously concluded that the South Carolina legislature racially gerrymandered Congressional District 1 (CD1) in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court found that the legislature set an impermissible racial target of 17% Black voters in CD 1, and then surgically removed tens of thousands of Black voters from of the district in order to meet it. This was designed, the court found, to “bleach[]” the Black voting community in the Charleston area. 

Soon after the court ordered the state to redraw CD 1, South Carolina appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is set for argument on October 11, 2023.

On August 18, CLC joined a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and other voting rights organizations urging the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court’s ruling. The brief asks that the Court reject South Carolina’s argument that its hands are clean because its motivation for moving thousands of Black voters out of CD 1 was partisan.

Supreme Court precedent has long made clear that states may not achieve partisan goals by discriminating against voters based on race. The brief requests the Court uphold this precedent and affirm the right of Black South Carolinians to be free from racial gerrymandering.

Subscribe to