On September 25, 2015, four former U.S. Census Bureau directors filed an amici brief in Evenwel v. Abbott, emphasizing that a proposal to replace Census total population data for Texas redistricting purposes with one of two voter-based measures would be woefully imprecise in assuring compliance with the constitutionally mandated one-person, one-vote principle.  The Campaign Legal Center is part of the legal team representing the former Census Bureau directors.

The case challenges the State of Texas’ use of U.S. Census total population numbers for redistricting the state’s 31 state Senate seats as is commonly done in most states.  Appellants seek to have the court compel the State of Texas to utilize the number of voting age citizens or the number of registered voters to reapportion and redistrict legislative seats.  The former Census Bureau directors stressed that adequate data to support the proposed changes simply does not exist and urged the Supreme Court to affirm the lower court’s rejection of the challenge. 

“The state of Texas does very little right when it comes to redistricting but at least it currently begins the process with population data from the Constitutionally mandated Census,  but appellants are asking the Court to dictate the use instead of imprecise statistics in the process,” said J. Gerald Hebert, Campaign Legal Center Executive Director.  “Who better to speak to the insufficient and inadequate nature of the data appellants propose to use than four former Census directors.  We hope the Court will uphold the lower court ruling and not compound the problems that already riddle the redistricting process in most states, and especially Texas.”

The Legal Center and Southern Coalition for Social Justice were aided in the filing of the amici brief by Paul M. Smith, Jessica Ring Amunson, and Mark Gaber of Jenner & Block.

To read the brief, click here. 

On September 25, 2015, the Voting Rights Institute, a joint project of the Campaign Legal Center and American Constitution Society (ACS), and Georgetown University Law Center will conduct a voting rights training session at its new permanent home at Georgetown Law in Washington, DC.  The ongoing Institute training sessions are helping to help meet the critical need for a new generation of voting rights lawyers, experts, and community activists. At the session, practitioners and law students will learn the ‘ins and outs’ of protecting the right to vote through the enforcement of voting rights laws.  A particular focus of the training will be cases brought to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and voting cases currently pending in the U.S. Supreme Court.  The training program will feature a panel of instructors with decades of experience in the field of voting rights.

“The Supreme Court’s decision in the Shelby County case has left the burden of protecting voting rights to individuals and those few groups who may be able to assist them,” said J. Gerald Hebert, Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center.  “Such a burden, with its attendant costs and need for expertise, is overwhelming and has opened the door to unchecked and rampant discrimination.   The only solution, short of reversing this decision, is to arm lawyers and citizens with the tools to challenge discriminatory practices and to support them through the inevitable litigation that follows.” 

Experts in the field will provide background on the Voting Rights Act and relevant federal court cases to participants and will then focus on their experiences in voting rights cases.  Campaign Legal Center Executive Director, J. Gerald Hebert, will serve as lead instructor and will be joined by several veteran voting rights litigators and advocates.

In addition to Mr. Hebert, the Institute’s faculty will include: Paul M. Smith (Partner, Jenner & Block), Anita Earls (Executive Director, Southern Coalition for Social Justice), Julie Fernandes, (Open Society Foundations), Chad Dunn (Brazil & Dunn) and Jessica Ring Amunson (Partner, Jenner & Block).

The official announcement of the Voting Rights Institute’s new home at Georgetown Law will be made at an event at the National Press Club on October 2.

“We wanted to establish a Voting Rights Institute devoted to one of the most important issues of our time, voting rights for all Americans,” Hebert said of the new home of the Voting Rights Institute.  “Georgetown University Law Center was the perfect location for the Institute because it possesses a well-deserved reputation for academic excellence and is a place where we can focus nonpartisan analysis and constructive engagement on the right to vote, while training the next generation of lawyers and leaders.”

Financial support for the Voting Rights Institute has been received from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund (rbf.org), Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund.  

For more details on, or to RSVP for, the Washington, DC training, click here.

Reform groups today wrote to President Obama strongly urging him to reject all riders in appropriations bills, including four damaging campaign finance riders, and to insist that clean FY 2016 appropriations legislation is sent to him for his signature.

The reform groups include: Campaign Legal Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Common Cause, Democracy 21, Demos, Issue One, League of Women Voters, Public Citizen and U.S. PIRG.

In the event that Congress does not pass clean appropriations legislation, reform groups strongly urged President Obama “to take all steps necessary to prevent the four damaging campaign finance riders from being enacted into law, including the use of your veto power if it is required.”

The letter from reform groups stated:

It is also essential to ensure that no other campaign finance riders are added to appropriations legislation and enacted into law. This is all the more necessary given the enormous damage done last year to the campaign finance laws in the Cromnibus Appropriations bill.

A campaign finance rider secretly added to that legislation at the last minute, and with no opportunity for public consideration, gutted the limits on individual contributions to a national party.  When the Cromnibus bill was signed into law, the legislation increased these contribution limits to $777,600 per donor, per year.

It is essential to prevent this year’s appropriation process from being used to further undermine the nation’s campaign finance laws.

According to the letter, “the four damaging campaign finance riders that have already been added to House and Senate appropriations bills” would:

• Prevent the White House from issuing an Executive Order requiring disclosure of campaign finance activities by government contractors;
• Prevent the IRS from issuing new regulations to stop nonprofit groups from misusing the tax laws to spend secret contributions in federal elections;
• Prevent the SEC from issuing regulations to require public corporations to disclose their campaign-finance activities to their shareholders; and
• Repeal longstanding limits on the amounts that parties can spend in coordination with their candidates.

The letter stated:           

Secret money in our elections provides widespread opportunities for government corruption and prevents holding public officials and influence-buying donors accountable for corrupt practices.

The letter from reform groups continued:

Given what happened last year, furthermore, our organizations are very concerned that an effort may be made to use the appropriations process this year to increase candidate limits.

The current individual contribution limit of $5,400 for a primary and general election (combined) already greatly exceeds the amount almost all citizens in the country can afford to contribute to a candidate. Any increase in the current candidate contribution limit would serve to increase the influence of only the wealthiest people in the country.

Individual candidate contribution limits were enacted to prevent the corrupting nexus between officeholders and influence-seeking donors. There is no legitimate justification for increasing these limits.

The letter concluded:

Our organizations strongly urge you to use the powers of your office to ensure that no   damage is done in this Congress to the campaign finance laws and to other reform efforts.

We strongly urge you to use all available means, including a veto if necessary, to block the four pending campaign finance riders and to block any other effort to undermine the campaign finance laws from being enacted.

To read the full letter, click here.

In a letter sent today to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, reform groups called on the IRS to end the misuse use of nonprofit groups to launder secret contributions into federal elections.

The reform groups included the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Demand Progress, Democracy 21, League of Women Voters, People For the American Way, Public Citizen, and Sunlight Foundation.

According to the letter, IRS regulations governing the eligibility of groups for tax status as section 501(c)(4) “social welfare” fail to comply with the tax laws.

The letter stated that the IRS, for years, has informally acceded to an interpretation of the regulation, without any written explanation or justification, that allows section 501(c)(4) groups to spend up to 49 percent of their expenditures on political intervention, or campaign activities. IRS Commissioner Koskinen also reportedly took this position in recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

According to the letter, however, this position “is not legally sustainable because the existing IRS regulations contradict the nation’s tax laws and court decisions interpreting these laws”:

The fact is the IRS for many years has misinterpreted and failed to properly enforce the eligibility standards for obtaining section 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code.

The letter stated that in order for IRS regulations to comply with the tax laws and applicable court decisions, the agency must “limit the campaign-related expenditures by a “social welfare” group to an “insubstantial” amount:

The requirement to limit a section 501(c)(4) organization to an “insubstantial” amount of campaign activities means, in our view, that an organization can engage in only a limited amount of campaign-related expenditures, such as no more than 5 or 10 percent of total annual expenditures.

According to the letter:

Under the language of the statute and the applicable court decisions, there is simply no way, consistent with the law, to interpret the “insubstantial” test to allow a social welfare organization to spend up to 49 percent of its expenditures on non-social welfare activities, like campaign activities.

The letter stated:

This is contrary to the framework set up by Congress to govern non-profit organizations and contrary to court decisions interpreting that framework.

The tax laws require the IRS to change the regulation.

The letter stated:

The need for you and the IRS to move expeditiously to interpret the tax laws properly is all the more important in light of the great damage that the IRS’s misinterpretation of the tax laws has done to the integrity of our political system and the interests of the American people.

The failure of the IRS to properly interpret the eligibility requirements for section 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in secret contributions being laundered into federal elections.

Secret money in American politics is the most dangerous kind of influence-buying money. It provides widespread opportunities for government corruption that remains unknown to the American people and for which neither public officials nor those seeking to influence them can be held accountable.

It is simply wrong and unfair to the American people for the IRS to fail to address this problem when the problem is being caused by the IRS’s legally erroneous interpretation of the tax laws.

The letter concluded:

The IRS has an obligation not only to ensure that the tax laws are properly interpreted and enforced, but also to avoid improperly condoning activities that misuse the tax laws and, in doing so, undermine the integrity and transparency of the nation’s elections.

If the IRS does not end the current practices, the agency will continue to provide license for hundreds of millions of additional dollars in secret contributions to be laundered into federal elections, in contravention of the tax laws.

Our organizations strongly urge you and the IRS to use the ongoing rulemaking process to conform the IRS regulations to the statute and to applicable court decisions that require social welfare organizations to spend no more than an “insubstantial” amount on campaign activities.

We also strongly urge you to make clear that the requirement for section 501(c)(4) organizations to engage in no more than an “insubstantial” amount of non-social welfare expenditures means that a social welfare organization can only spend a small percentage of its total annual expenditures on campaign activities, such as no more than 5 or 10 percent, in order to be eligible for section 501(c)(4) tax status.

To read the letter, click here. 

Yesterday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals turned back a challenge brought by the state Republican parties of New York and Tennessee to an important rule adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to prevent pay-to-play practices in state investing in New York Republican State Committee v. SEC.  The Campaign Legal Center, joined by Democracy 21, filed an amici brief in the case in January of this year, urging the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to reject the challenge to the SEC rule. 

The SEC rule bars investment firms from managing state assets, like pension funds, for two years after a firm or its associates make more than de minimis contributions to officeholders or candidates who have or would have power to award investment contracts. The Court of Appeals found that the state parties' challenge to this rule was time-barred, noting that the Investment Advisers Act required the challenge to be brought within 60 days of the rule’s promulgation in 2010.

“We are glad to see that the Court of Appeals left this key measure to combat pay-to-play corruption standing,” said Tara Malloy, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel. “The SEC adopted this rule only after federal and state investigations uncovered extensive evidence of fraud in the award of state investment contracts—from Connecticut to Florida to New Mexico.  One such scheme involved former New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who was ultimately convicted of steering $250 million in pension funds to an investment firm in exchange for gifts and more than $500,000 in contributions.  The SEC rule directly combats these types of abuses.”

To read the amici brief filed by the Legal Center with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, click here.

To read the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal’s opinion dismissing the petition, click here.

A diverse coalition of civic organizations and academics sent a letter today to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ethics and to the House leadership calling on the committee to respect established rules of procedure in handling a complaint regarding member and staff travel to Azerbaijan.

Following an extensive investigation by the U.S. Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) into the propriety of a privately sponsored trip for ten House members and staff to Azerbaijan, the House Ethics Committee closed the investigation – finding that no members or staff violated ethics rules – and refused to release the findings of the OCE investigation as prescribed under the ethics process. It is imperative that OCE findings be publicly released so that the public can discern whether the actions of the Ethics Committee are justified.

The letter is signed by the Campaign Legal Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Common Cause, Demand Progress, Democracy 21, the National Legal & Policy Center and Public Citizen as well as scholars Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein and James Thurber.

“We are concerned about the Committee’s unprecedented decision not to release the OCE’s findings in circumstances where the Members under investigation remain within the Ethics Committee jurisdiction,” the letter says. “This decision is especially concerning because the Committee itself played a decisive role in approving the Members’ travel to Azerbaijan.”

The case involves a 2013 trip by ten lawmakers and more than 30 congressional aides to Azerbaijan that may have been funded by the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, laundered through a network of nonprofit organizations. The cost of the trip ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars and included expensive and prohibited gifts for members and staff.

The OCE initiated an investigation into the trip. Late into the investigation, the chairman and ranking member of the House Ethics Committee ordered the OCE to end its investigation without making it clear that the Ethics Committee itself would pursue the investigation. The OCE declined to end the investigation and sent its final report and findings to the committee as required under the rules. On July 31, the committee found no evidence of violations by the members and staff under investigation, and has since failed and refused to release the OCE findings to the public.

The letter concludes: “It is unknown whether the OCE’s findings shed any light on the role of the Committee in approving these trips. … It appears on the basis of the information contained in the Committee’s Report that the Committee did not comply with the applicable law and rules pertaining to its request that the OCE ‘cease and refer’ the Azerbaijan matter.”

To read the full letter, click here.