Today, the Campaign Legal Center, joined by Common Cause, Democracy 21 and Public Citizen urged the Committee on House Administration to adopt new rules making clear that expenditures from Members’ Representation Allowances (MRAs) are subject to review and approval by the Committee.  Lax oversight of Members’ expenses has led to a series of scandals, the most recent leading to the resignation of Rep. Aaron Schock.  The letter also urged the Committee to allow MRA budgets to be periodically audited for compliance with the Members’ Congressional Handbook and House ethics rules.

“The current process of relying on Member discretion simply does not work," said Meredith McGehee, Campaign Legal Center Policy Director.  “Time and again it has led to scandals that have reflected badly on the Congress and eroded public confidence in the institution. At the end of the day, these Members are ill-served having their travel and expense requests rubber stamped. Having set rules and actual oversight of the spending of taxpayer dollars would be invaluable service to the institution.”

Earlier this month, the Committee adopted new regulations governing permissible reimbursements for automobile mileage, private aircraft use, and office decoration and instructing the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) of the House of Representatives to submit a proposal to create a “searchable, sortable” online database of Members of Congress’s expense reports.  The Committee also directs the CAO to develop proposals by November 21 to improve “the internal processes, procedures, and training for compliance with the Voucher Documentation Standards.”

The groups commended the Committee for taking these actions and urged a closer review of the provisions concerning MRAs.  The letter stated that “it is our understanding that the Committee on House Administration has taken the position that they provide “guidance” to Member offices on the use of the MRA, but the Committee and its staff are not empowered, under current rules, to formally approve or reject specific expenditures.”

“It is our understanding” the letter continued, “that the House Finance Office (the office to which vouchers are submitted) takes the same position. This approach of deferring to Members played a role in creating the House Bank scandal of the 1990s when Members were permitted to overdraw their accounts without penalty.  Further, the House Ethics Committee frequently is too accommodating to Members’ wishes, focusing more on helping Members to fit what they want to do within—and  around—the  rules than promoting and encouraging high ethical standards.  The Ethics Committee’s timidity played a significant role in the creating the need for the Office of Congressional Ethics.  Saying “yes” to Members is also embedded in the DNA of the CAO and the House Finance Office.  The CAO should be empowered to review Members’ expenditures, raise questions, and refer a proposed disapproval to the House Administration Committee for final disapproval.”  

The letter concluded by noting the importance of the creation of a searchable, sortable database containing information on how taxpayer money is being spent by Representatives.

To read the letter, click here.

Today, the Campaign Legal Center joined the Sunlight Foundation and Common Cause in urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to take immediate action to enforce the public file and sponsorship identification requirements of Sections 315 and 317 of the Communications Act.  Enforcing the broadcaster mandate would require stations to disclose the funders behind political ads run by Super PACs and ‘dark money’ groups. Section 315 outlines the requirements for what is included in a broadcast television station’s publicly available political file regarding advertisements run by candidates as well as advertisements “relating to any political matter of national importance.”  Section 317 requires broadcasters to disclose to their listeners or viewers the “true identity of the person or persons, or corporation, committee, association or other unincorporated group, or other entity” paying for the ad.

The groups are represented by the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University Law Center.   

“With the 2016 elections looming, viewers need meaningful information to make up their own minds regarding the messages they are hearing from candidates and outside groups,” said Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center.  “These statues have been on the books for decades, and are entirely congruent with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and subsequent cases that upheld robust disclosure requirements.  However, the FCC’s failure to update the implementing regulations combined with the agency’s weak enforcement mean the FCC’s disclosure regime is woefully inadequate and ill-serves the American people by leaving them completely in the dark with regards to hundreds of millions of dollars in political ads being broadcast over the public airwaves.”

As of 2014, all broadcasters are required to post the political files required under Section 315 of the Communications Act on the FCC website.  As for the “sponsorship identification” rules in Section 317, the FCC has not updated the implementing regulations to ensure that those individuals and interest groups funding political ads, especially those paid for by dark-money groups, are in fact being disclosed.

As the Supreme Court in Citizens United stated, disclosure is “justified based on a governmental interest in ‘providing the electorate with information’ about the sources of election-related spending.”   The decision went on to note “that there was evidence in the record that independent groups were running election-related advertisements ‘while hiding behind dubious and misleading names.’”

“These sections of the Communications Act are crucial to protecting voters’ right to know by whom they are being persuaded,” added McGehee.  “Viewers have more information about what ingredients are in their favorite soft drink, than they do about those trying to influence their vote.”  

To read the letter, click here.

The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 sent a letter today to the FEC Commissioners urging them to reject a proposal to be offered at the agency’s October 29 meeting by Commissioner Lee Goodman to provide “regulatory relief for political parties.”

According to the letter:

The most alarming suggestion in this proposal is to exempt from the definition of “coordinated” spending any public communication that refers to a candidate unless the communication contains express advocacy or republished campaign materials.  Agenda Doc. at 1.  While this proposal is made in the limited context of spending that would tally against the party coordinated spending limits, it is an approach to the concept of “coordination” that is invalid and discredited ….
 

As the Supreme Court has said, “the line between express advocacy and other types of election-influencing expression is, for Congress’ purposes, functionally meaningless.” McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93, 217 (2003). By using a “functionally meaningless” standard to draw the line between coordinated spending and independent spending (even if, in the first instance, just for parties), the Commission would be opening the door to the general evisceration of the coordination standard of the law.
 

In today’s letter, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center strongly objected to the Commission making any decision to initiate a rulemaking on these matters now, in light of other, far more pressing, rulemaking obligations the Commission has failed to fulfill. 

According to Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel Paul S. Ryan,

If there is anything the FEC does not need to do it is to undermine one of the few regulations the agency is actually enforcing.  There is a long list of regulations the agency should fix first in order to stem the unprecedented circumvention of the laws passed by Congress and which the agency is charged with enforcing.  Commissioner Goodman’s proposal is yet another indication of the degree to which the agency has lost its bearings and how far it has strayed from its mission.

According to the letter from the watchdog groups:

The Commission has been derelict in failing to revise its rules for disclosure of electioneering communications and independent expenditures, a failure that has resulted in the lack of disclosure of the source of hundreds of millions of dollars that is being spent to influence federal elections.  This is a major and growing problem, for which the Commission’s inability to muster a majority to even begin a rulemaking is a national scandal.

The letter further stated:

So too, the Commission’s failure to even begin a rulemaking on the agency’s inadequate and overwhelmed coordination rules is an equal dereliction of duty.  While some Commissioners may believe that the many blatant and direct dealings between candidates, their aides, their agents, their former aides, their Super PACs and their Super PAC donors do not technically trigger the existing, flawed coordination rules, few people in this country take seriously the claim that the individual candidate Super PACs established by virtually every presidential candidate are really independent of the candidates who established them

Although this is now the second presidential cycle in which this problem has been utterly apparent—and which results in the spectacle of presidential candidates raising and benefiting from multi-million dollar contributions—the Commission has yet to undertake a rulemaking to investigate the problem or to consider a solution.  Again, the Commission’s passivity in the face of an obvious crisis at the heart of its jurisdictional responsibility is a national scandal.

To read the full letter, click here.

The Campaign Legal Center joined Democracy 21 in filing comments today in support of a Public Citizen rulemaking petition seeking revisions of the FEC’s flawed disclosure and coordination regulations.

The comments noted that the two organizations also filed comments last January, in a similar rulemaking proceeding, also seeking new disclosure and coordination rules.  The comments filed today noted that over the past eleven months, the Commission has done nothing to advance the other rulemaking.   

According to the comments filed today by the watchdog groups:

We are under no illusion that the current rulemaking petitions will yield a different result.  There is no reason to believe that any Republican Commissioner would provide a fourth vote to initiate a rulemaking, either to improve the agency’s patently inadequate disclosure rules or, certainly, to examine (much less, improve) the Commission’s plainly overwhelmed coordination regulations.  The Republican Commissioners have resisted such efforts for years, preferring instead to sit on an inert agency that has lost all purpose, all credibility, and indeed, all relevance.

We wish we thought that the current Notice of Availability was the start of a serious inquiry that poses serious questions about whether the agency should engage in a serious rulemaking.  But that would require believing that the three Republican Commissioners are suddenly going to take seriously the law and their responsibilities as Commissioners.  And there is no serious reason to believe that.

According to Paul S. Ryan, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel, “The current disclosure and coordination regulations are deeply flawed but this has been the case for a number of years and the FEC’s Republican Commissioners have been perfectly content to leave them that way resulting in widespread abuses.  Sadly there is little reason to believe that those Commissioners will make even a token effort this time around to fix these grossly inadequate rules and reign in the abuses but we nonetheless encourage them to do so.” 

To read the comments click here.

Today, the Campaign Legal Center, joined by Democracy 21, strongly urged the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to reject the request from Senate Majority PAC and House Majority PAC to follow the lead of a number of GOP Super PACs in breaking a variety of laws through coordinated activities with candidates.  The watchdog groups filed comments on the Advisory Opinion Request 2015-09, where the Super PACs outlined a number of proposed interactions with candidates that the requestors admit are illegal but state they will undertake themselves in the event of an FEC deadlock on the request. 

“These Super PACs are seeking FEC permission to break the law, as other candidates and committees have done, knowing full well that the Commission will deadlock on the questions, and announcing that they will break the law if they do not get a yes or no answer from the FEC,” said Paul S. Ryan, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel.  “Requestors are mistaken, however, in implying that an FEC deadlock amounts to approval of their proposed lawbreaking.  The laws passed by Congress are the laws of the land despite the complete breakdown of campaign finance law enforcement at the FEC and we will not hesitate to urge the Department of Justice to criminally investigate what would be knowing and willful violations of the law if these groups proceed with their plans.”

The twelve questions submitted by the Super PACs involve pre-candidacy activities, the conduct triggering federal candidacy and post-candidacy activities.  Many of these proposed activities have already been undertaken by current candidates and Super PACs and have drawn numerous complaints with the FEC and the Department of Justice from the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21 and other groups.    

The comments filed today emphasize that the Advisory Opinion Request is not valid because it outlines only theoretical acts by unnamed future candidates and Super PACs while FEC regulations require requestors of advisory opinions to set forth a “specific transaction or activity” that they, themselves, plan to undertake. 

To read the comments filed today by the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 click here.

Today, the Campaign Legal Center and the Georgia NAACP filed an amici brief in Wright v. Sumter County Board of Elections and Registration in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, urging the court to overturn a trial court decision that ignored U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Plaintiff Mathis Kearse Wright Jr. alleged two changes to the Sumter County Board of Education electoral violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because they diluted black voting power in the Georgia County’s school board elections.  The first change involved the creation of two at-large districts, which favored the election of white-preferred candidates over black-preferred candidates by diluting black voting strength.  The second change concerns the boundaries of the county’s five single-member districts, which packed black voters into only two districts.  The changes are expected to lead to a 5-2 majority of white-preferred candidates on the county board in a county that is 48% black in voting age population. 

“The lower court ignored the guidance of the U.S. Supreme Court, which warns that under the broad protections of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, statistical evidence of vote dilution cannot be analyzed with a ‘rigid, formalistic approach,’” said J. Gerald Hebert, Campaign Legal Center Executive Director.  “The decision below, which rejected the Voting Rights Act challenge, failed to examine the totality of circumstances and is contrary to long-standing Supreme Court cases.  If the lower court ruling stands, the black community will be left significantly underrepresented on the seven-member school board."    

The Legal Center and the Georgia NAACP are represented in the filing of the amici brief by the Institute for Public Representation's Voting Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.

To read the brief, click here.

Tomorrow, the Voting Rights Institute, a joint project of the Campaign Legal Center, the American Constitution Society (ACS) and Georgetown University Law Center, will conduct its latest voting rights training session in Nashville, Tennessee.  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, being held at the Nashville offices of Bone McAllester Norton, 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, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, and currently pending voting rights cases in the United States Supreme Court.  The training program will feature a panel of instructors with decades of experience in the field of voting rights.

“A key provision of the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court in its infamous Shelby County decision and, as a result, states and municipalities across the country have rushed to pass new laws designed to restrict who is able to vote on Election Day,” said J. Gerald Hebert, Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center.  “Since 2013, the Voting Rights Institute has been working to train the attorneys needed to defend the right to vote wherever it is under attack.  The need for a new generation of voting rights lawyers has not been so great since President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, but it has become very clear that, unless and until Congress restores the Voting Rights Act’s special provisions, the battle to protect every American’s right to vote must once again be waged in the courts.”

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 panel will include: Anita Earls (Executive Director, Southern Coalition for Social Justice), Dale Ho (Director, Voting Rights Project, ACLU), and Steven J. Mulroy (Associate Dean & Professor, University of Memphis School of Law).

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.  

Background

The Voting Rights Institute at Georgetown Law offers opportunities for students, recent graduates and fellows to engage in voting rights work, including active litigation, and will train the next generation of attorneys and expert witnesses in the field of voting rights.  The VRI will also maintain a website with information about voting rights cases and matters available to the general public, and a legal resources library for voting rights litigators and expert witnesses.  The VRI will also promote increased local and national focus on voting rights through events, publications and the development of web-based tools; and provide opportunities and platforms for research and data analysis of voting rights issues.

Voting Rights Institute training sessions held across the country since 2013 have instructed practitioners, law students and activists on the ‘ins and outs’ of protecting the right to vote through the enforcement of voting rights laws.  Cases brought to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution have been a particular focus of the trainings.  Each session has featured a panel of instructors with decades of experience in the field of voting rights.

The first students in the Voting Rights Institute are currently enrolled in Georgetown Law’s Institute of Public Representation (IPR) and are working on several cases identified by the Campaign Legal Center and the American Constitution Society.  The Institute has hired a clinical fellow to supervise students working on these cases and to manage legal matters within the Institute with a particular focus on voting rights issues.  A legal fellow will also assist in developing training materials for voting rights lawyers and leaders, overseeing use of the Voting Rights Institute website, and identifying appropriate voting rights cases for the clinic. To date, over 400 attendees representing a diverse group of attorneys, law students and voting rights activists and advocates have taken part in these activities. 

Today, the Campaign Legal Center, Public Citizen and Common Cause expressed strong support for a proposed revision of House regulations governing permissible reimbursements for automobile mileage, private aircraft use and office decoration.  The groups are urging the full House Administration Committee to vote in favor of the revisions to the rules which were introduced in the wake of a number of reimbursement scandals in Congress.   

The proposed Committee Resolution 114, which is expected to be voted on by the full Committee on Wednesday, addresses misuse of taxpayer dollars through the rules governing the Members' Representational Allowance (MRA).  The proposal would prohibit Members from using taxpayer dollars to pay for private or charter aircraft from the Washington DC area to any location without prior written approval from the House Administration Committee.  Also, any use of private or charter aircraft valued at more than $7,500 would require prior written approval by the Committee.  The new regulation also does not permit mileage reimbursements for the use of vehicles “owned or leased by the principal campaign of a Member, a political-action committee, or a political party.”  The proposal would also make the provisions available online in a searchable, sortable format rather than pdfs.

The highest profile scandal involved former Representative Aaron Schock (R-IL) who initially attracted attention for a “Downton Abbey” inspired re-decoration of his Washington office.  Subsequent investigations revealed a pattern of misuse of reimbursements of taxpayer funds for automobiles and chartered aircraft by Schock.

“It is vital that Members be publicly accountable for their use of taxpayer funds to prevent abuses and for the House to have rules to ensure compliance,” said Meredith McGehee, Policy Director of the Campaign Legal Center.  “Scandals like those surrounding former Representative Schock undermine public confidence in our democratic institutions and feed an unhealthy cynicism about out system.  Putting the reports on congressional spending online in a ‘searchable, sortable format’ (instead of pdf’s) is overdue and a win for increased government transparency.  The House and Senate still need to address the inadequate rules and loopholes governing privately financed travel, but this proposal appears to be a good faith effort on reimbursements.”

“Hopefully, the Schock scandal is a rarity in Congress, but it does highlight what can go wrong when there is insufficient transparency,” said Public Citizen Government Affairs Lobbyist Craig Holman.  “These proposals offer very useful improvements in the management of Members’ Representational Allowances, especially by making the disclosures ‘searchable, sortable and downloadable’ on-line for easy access by the public. It could have mandated greater detail of travel itineraries, but at least the proposal would eliminate the general category of ‘travel subsistence’ and replace it with some specificity.  The proposed improvements are indeed welcome.”

“These new House rules take significant steps forward in transparency and accountability,” said Common Cause president Miles Rapoport. “Common Cause applauds the bipartisan leadership of Representatives Rodney Davis and Zoe Lofgren for addressing these important reforms.”

The groups commended the task force, headed by Representatives Rodney Davis (R-IL) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), that developed the proposal, and urged the House Administration Committee to move this measure through the Committee expeditiously.