Today, the Campaign Legal Center called on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to move expeditiously to report out H.R. 4179, “The Fair and Clear Campaign Transparency Act.”  This legislation, introduced December 3^rd by Representative Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to issue regulations requiring television broadcasters’ political files to be made available in a machine-readable format.

“With the 2016 elections less than a year away, there are a record-breaking number of political advertisements running on the publicly-owned airwaves,” said Meredith McGehee, Policy Director of the Campaign Legal Center.  “While establishing an online FCC database for the statutorily required public files kept by television broadcasters was an important step forward, the FCC has not finished its work because it has not required stations to make the information included in the public inspection file available in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format.”

Currently, broadcasters are uploading in pdf format whatever paper documents would have been placed in the public file.  Every station keeps its records somewhat differently.  As a result, the current database is difficult to navigate and does not permit the aggregation of spending by a particular campaign or outside group.

When the FCC first required that public files be placed online, it found that “certain information in the public file would be of much greater benefit to the public if made available in a structured and database-friendly format that can be aggregated, manipulated, and more easily analyzed; this continues to be our ultimate goal.” The FCC’s own Information Needs of Communities Report observed that “[i]t matters greatly how [government data is] organized. It needs to be put out in standardized, machine-readable, structured formats that make it easy for programmers to create new applications.”

The letter urges the Committee to report out H.R. 4179 expeditiously and points out that the FCC can use the data to create a database that facilitates analysis, including, among other things, an easy-to-use graphic interface as well as an application programming interface (API) to permit searching and downloading of the documents and metadata en masse.

“Moving from pdfs to a database format may appear to simply be a technical matter.  It’s not.  Getting the information in a television station’s political file into database format is a key step in providing some of the disclosure the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld,” said McGehee.

To read the letter, click here. 

Today, the Campaign Legal Center released a short video explaining what is at stake in Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, a case challenging the constitutionality of Arizona’s 2012 redistricting plan under the one person, one vote doctrine. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Tuesday, December 8. The Campaign Legal Center filed an amici brief on behalf of former Justice Department attorneys in support of the Commission’s redistricting plan.

The Campaign Legal Center’s brief explains that minor deviations in district population, which the plaintiffs challenge in the Arizona plan, are commonplace and constitutional when they further legitimate state interests, as they did here. As the brief makes clear, the state commission was fully justified in drawing districts with minor population deviations that complied with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and ensured that the plan did not decrease the opportunity of minority voters to elect their candidates of choice.

The video released today features Campaign Legal Center fellow Danielle Lang, who emphasizes that the Supreme Court’s decision in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, does not render Arizona’s redistricting plan unconstitutional. “At the time of the redistricting, Section 5 compliance was clearly a rational and legitimate justification because it was legally required of Arizona,” explains Ms. Lang. 

The Campaign Legal Center stresses that if the challengers to the Arizona plan are successful, it would unnecessarily cause substantial disruption and upset political stability in states and municipalities nationwide. “Between 2010 and 2013, 1160 redistricting plans, state and local, were submitted to the Department of Justice for preclearance. If the Court adopts the rule that [the challengers] propose, which is incorrect, it would call into question all of these plans,” says Danielle Lang. “This should not be a hard case, but it’s undeniably an important case and could have ramifications across the country.”

To watch the Campaign Legal Center’s video, click here. To read the amici brief and appendix, click here and here, respectively.

On December 7, the Voting Rights Institute, a joint project of the Campaign Legal Center, the American Constitution Society (ACS) and Georgetown Law Center, will conduct a voting rights training session in Baltimore, Maryland.  The ongoing Institute training sessions are designed to address the critical need for a new generation of voting rights lawyers, experts, and community activists. At the next session, hosted at the Baltimore offices of Brown, Goldstein & Levy, practitioners and law students will learn the ‘ins and outs” of protecting the right to vote through litigation.  In particular, the training will focus on cases brought to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.  The training program will feature a panel of practitioners with decades of experience in the field of voting rights.

Experts in the field will first provide background on the Voting Rights Act and relevant federal court cases and then focus in on their lessons learned through their own experience.  Also, the panel will discuss the Evenwel v. Abbott and Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission cases, which will be argued in the Supreme Court the next day.  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.

“With two voting rights cases before the Supreme Court this term, the need  to train the next generation of voting rights litigators could not be more clear,” said J. Gerald Hebert, Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center.  “The disastrous Shelby County decision in 2013, gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, has led to a new wave of laws undermining the right to vote and, consequently, a flood of litigation.  Now is the time to replenish the ranks of voting rights lawyers with a new generation of litigators to face the challenges to the franchise that lay ahead.  The Voting Rights Institute is meeting that challenge head on with instructors who are litigating today’s challenges in the courts and training new attorneys to meet the challenges of tomorrow.”    

In addition to Mr. Hebert, the Institute’s faculty will include: Gilda Daniels (University of Baltimore School of Law), Julie Fernandes (Open Society Foundations) and Katherine Culliton-González (The Advancement Project).

To RSVP, please contact Zack Gima, Director of Strategic Engagement for the American Constitution Society, at [email protected] or at 202-393-6186, or click here.

Financial support for the Voting Rights Institute has been received from the 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 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 base analysis of voting rights issues.

Voting Rights Institute training sessions held across the country since 2013 have instructed practitioners and law students 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 advocates have taken part in these activities. 

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.