Today, the Campaign Legal Center urged the House Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) to review the actions taken by Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX) in offering an amendment that would benefit his own business during House consideration of the transportation reauthorization legislation.  In a letter to Ethics Committee Chair Charles Dent (R-PA) and Ranking Member Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and OCE Co-Chairs David Skaggs and Judy Biggert, CLC urged a review of Rep. Williams’ conduct and further urged the Committee to recommend changes to clarify House rules concerning recusal and conflicts of interest by Members.

According to media reports, Rep. Williams, who owns an automobile dealership in Weatherford, Texas, offered an amendment exempting such dealerships from a provision requiring businesses renting automobiles to pull recalled vehicles from their fleets.  It is unclear from the media reports whether Rep. Williams cleared his actions with the Ethics Committee as outlined by the House Ethics Manual.

“Members creating carve-outs that directly benefit their own business interests severely undermines the public’s belief that Members of Congress are acting in the public interest,” said Meredith McGehee, Campaign Legal Center Policy Director.  “The specific actions of Rep. Williams must be reviewed for compliance with current rules, but even if he did clear his amendment with the Ethics Committee, his actions are a prime example of why the current rules are both too weak and in need of further clarification.”

The letter urged the Ethics Committee and OCE to recommend changes to clarify House rules for recusal by Members in a variety of circumstances.  The rules as currently written are weak and undermine public confidence in the actions taken by their elected Representatives.

To read the letter, click here.   

The Campaign Legal Center is pleased to announce a series of staff promotions and new hires as part of a management restructuring of the organization in response to continuing growth and the conclusion of a strategic planning review.  Lawrence Noble has become General Counsel and Paul S. Ryan and Tara Malloy are now Deputy Executive Directors of the organization.  All three have been lawyers for CLC for several years, but will now formally be part of the Senior Management team.  

“These changes to our management structure will make us still more effective as we face the challenges ahead in our field,” said Legal Center President Trevor Potter.  “Since the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Citizens United and related decisions as well as a continuing failure of the FEC to do its job due to increased deadlocked votes, our work has expanded rapidly.  We have seen federal, state and local campaign finance laws challenged from coast to coast in the courts and have assisted in defending many of these.  Our reorganization and the influx of new and talented staff will allow us to face these challenges and articulate desirable new reforms even more effectively.”

“We are very fortunate to have the veteran attorneys on staff to allow us to undertake this reorganization and to do so seamlessly as we also welcome talented new lawyers and staffers to the Campaign Legal Center,” said Campaign Legal Center Executive Director J. Gerald Hebert.  “The challenges ahead in the fields of voting rights and campaign finance are significant but we are confident that our growth and reorganization positions us to meet these mounting challenges.”

New CLC staff include:

Harry Baumgarten is the inaugural Partner Legal Fellow at the Voting Rights Institute, a new initiative launched by the American Constitution Society, Campaign Legal Center, and Georgetown University Law Center to combat the discriminatory voting laws passed in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder.  It seeks to train lawyers, expert witnesses, and law students from across the country on best practices for litigating voting rights suits, provide resources to those working to advance voting rights, and litigate cases to advance the franchise.

Mr. Baumgarten assists with voting rights litigation, advises states on proposed changes to their voting laws, represents CLC and the VRI at voting rights coalition meetings, and administers the soon-to-be-launched VRI website.  He received his JD/MPP from Georgetown University and his BA from the George Washington University.  Previously he helped design a system for the public financing of political campaigns, served as a law clerk to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and documented voting rights abuses as a law clerk for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Danielle Lang joins the organization as a Legal Fellow and is litigating a wide range of voting rights matters before state and federal courts. 

Previously, Ms. Lang clerked for Judge Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as a Skadden Fellow in the Employment Rights Project of Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles, where she represented low-wage immigrant workers in wage and hour matters.  She is a graduate of Yale Law School and New York University and is admitted to practice law in the State of California and the State of New York. 

Nate Blevins joins the Campaign Legal Center as a Research Fellow performing a wide range of research and writing focusing on campaign finance and voting rights.

Prior to joining the Campaign Legal Center, Mr. Blevins worked as an assistant to Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and as a researcher and consultant in education policy. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Yale University in 2012.

Timothy Duong joins the Campaign Legal Center as a Program Assistant supporting staff in advancing numerous projects.  Mr. Duong is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Sociology.

Today, the Campaign Legal Center and Issue One released a jointly produced report which details a suite of specific solutions to reduce the power of money in politics and restore faith in public institutions. The report and accompanying website, “Blueprints for Democracy,” provide a comprehensive overview of how reform has been implemented across the country and best practices for legislators and advocates enacting change in their local communities. Coming on the heels of recent ballot initiative victories in Seattle and Maine, ‘Blueprints’ is a timely breakdown of both the support for and feasibility of true money-in-politics reform.

“The current system is so rigged that our government is in a state of perpetual paralysis. This is a governing crisis that must be addressed,” said Issue One Executive Director Nick Penniman. “So ‘Blueprints’ highlights states and municipalities to demonstrate that there are viable models for reform that can pass muster with Main Street Americans and the current Supreme Court.”

As the cost of the 2016 election cycle continues to skyrocket, public opinion of the current campaign finance system has plummeted. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 84 percent of Americans, including super majorities of Democrats and Republicans, think money has too much influence over politics; the same poll found 85 percent in favor of fundamentally changing or completely rebuilding the way we finance campaigns. Additionally, every major presidential candidate has addressed the outsized dominance of money in politics. While nearly all presidential candidates have bemoaned aspects of the current system, voters want more specifics about how our leaders will truly fix our broken political system.

Last Tuesday, voters from both parties in Maine, Seattle and San Francisco joined the people of Tallahassee, Wisconsin and elsewhere by passing ballot initiatives that reorient their local democracies back towards Main Street. These results show that the hunger Americans have to fix this governing crisis is exceptionally strong.

“Building bipartisan consensus is critical, because without the support of the many Republican legislators and governors across the country, chances for meaningful reform are slim,” said Trevor Potter, president of Campaign Legal Center. Potter, who was appointed to the Federal Election Commission by George H.W. Bush and later served as general counsel to the 2008 McCain Campaign said, “That’s why we’ve identified these constitutionally-sound, tried and true solutions that Americans of all political stripes strongly support.”

These solutions include:

• small-donor empowerment so everyone can participate in our elections;
• disclosure and transparency so everyone knows who tries to influence their vote;
• lobbying and ethics reform so everyone plays by the same common-sense rules and
• stronger enforcement so everyone is held accountable for abiding by the law.

“We hope ‘Blueprints for Democracy’ lights up the minds of citizens and legislators all over the country and helps them understand all of the great progress that can be made now, as Washington falters. We must create a bipartisan groundswell of action that Congress can’t possibly ignore,” continued Penniman.

The report includes rigorous legal and historical analysis, the latest public opinion polling, case studies, insights from issue experts and infographics. It was authored by Lawrence Noble, former general counsel to the Federal Election Commission and current general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

“Whether you’re a politician, an advocate or an average American, ‘Blueprints for Democracy’ is an important resource for understanding how to make government work for everyone,” Potter added.

The full report, and additional resources, can be found at BlueprintsForDemocracy.org. In the coming months and years, the Blueprints for Democracy website will catalog the latest developments as states and municipalities enact more reforms.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that defends and protects our democracy in the areas of campaign finance, voting rights, political communication and government ethics.

Issue One is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics and putting Americans of all stripes back in control of our democracy. We are generating a bigger, bolder movement for reform by recruiting new constituencies to the fight and elevating money in politics as the core civic issue of our time.

Today, the Campaign Legal Center filed an amicus brief urging the Texas Supreme Court to uphold a lower court decision affirming numerous provisions of Texas campaign finance laws in Texas Democratic Party v. King Street Patriots.  The Campaign Legal Center filed amicus briefs in both the district court and the Court of Appeals defending the constitutionality of Texas’s law.

“The King Street Patriots are attempting to misapply recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions to unrelated provisions of Texas campaign finance law and we trust the Texas Supreme Court will recognize this absurdity and reject this challenge, as did the lower courts,” said Tara Malloy, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel.  “The decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon, cases that the King Street Patriots claim support their challenge, in fact have nothing to do with the laws that this group is challenging.  This lawsuit is just one of a long list of cases nationwide attempting to overturn state and local campaign finance laws in the wake of Citizens United.”   

This case began when the Texas Democratic Party filed an action against the King Street Patriots, alleging that the non-profit 501(c)(4) corporation made in-kind contributions to the state Republican Party in violation of Texas’s restriction on corporate political contributions, and failed to register as a “political committee” and comply with state disclosure laws.  The King Street Patriots, in response, filed a broad counterclaim challenging the constitutionality of numerous provisions of Texas campaign finance law.

The lower court dismissed the counterclaim in its entirety, and the Texas Court of Appeals affirmed.  The original Texas Democratic Party action seeking damages and declaratory and injunctive relief for the alleged campaign finance law violations has remained on a different track.

The Legal Center was aided in the filing of the amicus brief by Kelly G. Prather of the Greenwood Prather Law Firm in Houston.

To read the amicus brief filed today, click here.

To read the opinion of the Appeals Court, click here.

House Speaker Paul Ryan should suspend privately-funded foreign travel by House members and staff and launch a formal review of the rules governing it, the Campaign Legal Center and other advocacy organizations said today.

In a letter to the newly-installed Speaker, the groups said private trips “are not being appropriately scrutinized” by the House Ethics Committee and warned that the foreign governments and corporate interests sponsoring them may be gaining inappropriate access to lawmakers and staffers.

The groups called on Ryan to create a bipartisan task force, including the chairs and ranking members of the House Ethics and House Administration Committees and the two co-chairs of the Office of Congressional Ethics, the House’s independent ethics watchdog agency, to study the problem.

“The amount of privately-sponsored travel, once slashed by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA) to one-third its previous levels, is again rising to near the level of the Jack Abramoff travel junket era,” the groups asserted.

The letter, signed by the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters, Prof. James Thurber, the Project on Government Oversight and Public Citizen, cited a spate of recent media reports concerning questionable, privately-financed trips by lawmakers.

“The Office of Congressional Ethics recently issued a report laying out how the sources of funds and sponsorship of Members’ and staff travel to Azerbaijan were purposefully obfuscated and that obvious red flags of the deception, such as multiple groups claiming sole responsibility for sponsoring the trip and none of these groups had sufficient funds to pay for the trip, were ignored by the House Committee on Ethics,” the letter added.

Speaker Ryan’s task force should consider a possible rewrite of the current rules governing privately-financed travel and whether the House should use public funds for all official travel, the groups said. They also urged a review of House Ethics Committee procedures for investigating whether shell companies are providing resources to the purported sponsors of overseas trips.

To read the full letter, click here.

In a letter sent today to the Tax Division of the Justice Department, the Campaign Legal Center joined Democracy 21 in calling for an investigation of the Conservative Solutions Project (CSP), an organization claiming tax-exempt status as a social welfare organization under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code.

According to the letter, “The investigation should determine whether CSP is improperly conferring a “private benefit” on Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in violation of federal tax law by engaging in excessive campaign activity on Senator Rubio’s behalf that is not permitted for a section 501(c)(4) organization.”

According to Campaign Legal Center Executive Director J. Gerald Hebert:

The publicly available facts indicate that Conservative Solutions Project is little more than a single-candidate 501(c)(4), with no other mission than to advance the presidential aspirations of Marco Rubio and as such in clear violation of the tax code.  501(c)(4) “social welfare groups” by statute must “[promote] the common good and general welfare of the people of the community as a whole” rather than an individual candidate for political office.  In promoting the Rubio candidacy, to the apparent exclusion of all else, Conservative Solutions Project would seem to be in clear violation of the tax exempt status it claims but for which it has yet to even apply.

If these apparent violations are left unchallenged, they will quickly be emulated by candidates for Congress and soon by candidates for state and local office as well. The victims of this type of apparent lawbreaking will be the American people who will not only be cheated out of tax revenue, but more importantly robbed of any information about the special interests seeking to buy influence with public officials.

The IRS has been cowed into inaction by a series of congressional hearings intended to intimidate the agency and keep it from enforcing tax laws as they apply to political active nonprofits like Conservative Solutions Project.  However, the laws passed by Congress remain the laws of the land and as the nation’s law enforcement agency, it falls to the Department of Justice to enforce those laws when agencies do not or will not.  The Tax Division of the Justice Department should promptly open an investigation into the millions of dollars spent to advance the candidacy of Marco Rubio to determine if tax laws have been broken and take appropriate action against the group.

According to the letter from the watchdog groups;

CSP was formed by a former aide to Senator Rubio and is spending large sums of money on television advertisements that are being aired in support of Rubio’s presidential campaign.  This campaign activity by a social welfare organization  violates the statutory requirement that a section 501(c)(4) organization be devoted “exclusively” to social welfare purposes—which do not include intervention in campaigns—and  also violates the requirement that a social welfare group serve general community purposes, and not provide a private benefit to any individual or political group.

The letter stated:

CSP was “formed by allies of Senator Marco Rubio.”[1]  It “shares a name and some staff” with the individual candidate Super PAC supporting Rubio’s presidential campaign, the Conservative Solutions PAC.[2]  The CSP nonprofit and the Super PAC also share a spokesman.[3]  CSP was established by Warren Tompkins, who is now on its board and who is also the head of the Rubio Super PAC, which shares fundraising consultants with CSP.[4]  Tompkins is a Republican consultant who was once a business partner with Rubio’s campaign manager.[5]  CSP is now run by Pat Shortridge, who was an adviser on Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign

CSP has been airing television advertisements supporting Rubio’s presidential campaign. The group’s commercials “all focus on Mr. Rubio.” As one report states about CSP’s television ad campaign:

Every single one of the group’s thousands of television ads, in fact, has featured Rubio, and nobody else—perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the group coordinates with a pro-Rubio super PAC and that its leader co-founded a political consulting firm with the manager of Rubio’s presidential campaign.

According to the letter:

According to The New York Times:

Of all the television advertisements aired in support of the Florida Senator so far this year—$5.5 million worth—none have been paid for by Mr. Rubio’s own campaign.  Even the “super PAC” supporting him has not yet spent a dime on ads.

Instead, the money has flowed through a political nonprofit group called the Conservative Solutions Project, formed by a former Rubio aide and now overseen in part by a Republican strategist who is close to Mr. Rubio’s campaign manager.

According to AP:

Every pro-Rubio television commercial so far in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina has been paid for not by [Rubio’s] campaign or even by a super PAC that identifies its donors, but instead by a nonprofit called Conservative Solutions Project.  It’s also sending Rubio-boosting mail to voters in those same states.

According to the letter:

Section 501(c)(4) provides tax-exempt status to “[c]ivic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.”  26 U.S.C. §§ 501(a) and 501(c)(4).  IRS regulations make clear that, in order to be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(4), an organization must be “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” and that an “organization is operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare if it is primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community.”

The requirement that a section 501(c)(4) organization be primarily engaged in promoting “the common good and general welfare of the people of the community” and not, by contrast, primarily engaged in promoting the good of a private individual or organization is a clear requirement with regard to section 501(c)(4) status—often referred to as the “private benefit” doctrine.

The letter further stated:

In American Campaign Academy v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 92 T.C. No. 66, 92 T.C. 1053, 1063 (1989), the Tax Court considered application of the “private benefit” doctrine to an organization that the IRS had concluded operated to “benefit Republican Party entities and candidates more than incidentally” and therefore operated to “serve the private interests of Republican Party entities rather than public interests exclusively[,]” in violation of the “private benefit” doctrine.

According to the letter:

As a practical matter, CSP is operating as an arm of the Rubio presidential campaign.  As such, it is providing a “private benefit” for a partisan campaign purpose, and is accordingly in violation of its asserted status as a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization.

The fact that “[e]very pro-Rubio television commercial so far in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina has been paid for” by CSP, and that “[e]very single one of [CSP’s] thousands of television ads, in fact, has featured Rubio, and nobody else,” shows the integral and exclusive role that CSP is playing in the Rubio presidential campaign.  In playing this role, CSP has spent millions of dollars on ads promoting the Rubio campaign in the key early primary states.

The fact also that CSP shares a name, and staff, and a founder with the Rubio Super PAC reinforces the tightly integrated role that CSP plays in the larger Rubio campaign operation.

There can be little doubt that CSP is providing an impermissible “private benefit” under applicable judicial and IRS precedent.

The letter stated:

This position is consistent with the series of recent IRS letter rulings applying the “private benefit” doctrine.  Just as the IRS found that “an organization which conducts its educational activities to benefit a political party and its candidates serves private interests,” Determination Letter 201128032, supra, so too CSP serves a private interest in spending millions of dollars to assist the presidential campaign of a single candidate.

The letter concluded:

There is an important reason that this matter has special urgency.  The impermissible use of social welfare organizations to conduct campaign activities has the purpose and effect of defeating the donor disclosure requirements of federal tax law that are applicable to “political organizations.”  26 U.S.C. §527.

Social welfare groups organized under section 501(c)(4) are not required by tax law to disclose their donors to the public.  By contrast, a “political organization” under section 527 of the tax code is required to disclose its donors.  By engaging in campaign activity (and in so doing, by conferring a “private benefit” on the candidate supported), but doing so under a claim of section 501(c)(4) status, a group such as CSP is frustrating the requirement of the tax code that there be public disclosure of donors who are funding efforts to influence elections.

CSP presents an especially clear-cut and egregious example of flaunting of the tax code.  By electing not to file an application for recognition of exemption, the group seeks to avoid any scrutiny of its activities until its first tax filing and thus to continue to serve as a conduit for undisclosed money through the 2016 election cycle.

The Tax Division has the authority to intervene to stop this abuse of the tax laws. Given the extraordinary public interest in combating CSP’s effort to deprive the public of timely disclosure about its efforts to influence the 2016 election, the Tax Division should act promptly to investigate and take appropriate action against CSP. 

To read the full letter, click here.

Today, the Campaign Legal Center filed an amici brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission on behalf of former Justice Department attorneys in support of the Commission and its redistricting plan. 

The brief emphasizes that the state commission was fully justified in drawing districts, with minor population deviations, that complied with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  The plan at issue was drawn by the Commission at a time when the state was required to preclear any voting changes with the Justice Department or the D.C. District Court, and ensure that the plan did not decrease the opportunity of minority voters to elect their candidates of choice.  The brief also stresses that the holding urged by those challenging the plan would unnecessarily cause substantial disruption and upset political stability in states and municipalities nationwide.

“When the Commission drew the map, the State of Arizona was required to preclear its redistricting plan.  That was the law of the land and the Commission was justified in drawing the plan to comply with Section 5.  Our brief also notes that notwithstanding the decision of the Court in Shelby striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Commission could still draw a map to avoid harming minority voting strength and such a decision would be  rational and legitimate,” said J. Gerald Hebert, Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center.  “If the Arizona redistricting plan is overturned on these grounds, more than 1,100 redistricting plans submitted to the Justice Department for preclearance in the post-2010 redistricting cycle would be open to potential constitutional challenge.  The Court in Shelby County held that preclearance is no longer required but it did not suggest that prior compliance with the Voting Rights Act was illegitimate or that a state is not allowed to comply with the Voting Rights Act in the future. ”

The constitutionality of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission was before the Supreme Court last term after state legislators challenged the state constitutional amendment passed by voters giving the Commission responsibility for the state’s congressional redistricting after a series of blatant political gerrymanders by the legislature.  The Legal Center filed a brief in support of the amendment and the Commission and the Supreme Court rejected the legislators’ challenge to the Commission’s existence.

Former U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fried, a CLC Board member, and Mark Posner, a former DOJ official, co-authored the brief.

 To read the brief and the appendix filed today in the challenge to the Commission’s redistricting plan, click here and here.