Reforms groups sent a letter today enclosed below to President Barack Obama, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid urging them to block any last minute efforts to kill the presidential tax check off system in the Omnibus spending bill.

The reform groups include Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, CREW, Demand Progress, Democracy 21, Every Voice, League of Women Voters, Issue One, People For the American Way, Public Citizen and U.S. PIRG.

The full letter follows below.

Dear President Barack Obama, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi & Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid,

It is our understanding that last minute efforts may be pursued in the Omnibus bill to restore public financing for the presidential nominating conventions in return for taking away the funds currently in the presidential tax checkoff system.

House Republicans have tried to kill the presidential tax checkoff system in the past and take away its funds. These efforts have been opposed by President Obama and blocked by congressional Democrats.

We strongly urge you to block this last minute effort which would put the final nail in the coffin of the presidential public financing system rather than leave in place the opportunity to repair the system. This would also undermine the essential efforts being pursued to create a small donor, public matching funds system for congressional races.

The Super PAC financing of the 2016 presidential election clearly demonstrates the need to fix the presidential public financing the system, not destroy it. A repaired presidential funding system would engage millions of ordinary Americans in financing our presidential election rather than having presidential financing dominated by the Super Rich.

We strongly urge you to block any effort to kill the presidential tax checkoff system or to take away the money currently in the presidential tax checkoff fund.

Campaign Legal Center

Common Cause

CREW

Demand Progress

Democracy 21

Every Voice

League of Women Voters

Issue One

People For the American Way

Public Citizen

U.S. PIRG

Today, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) received notification that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has fined pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future (ROF) $50,000 for illegally spending millions of dollars airing an advertisement in 2012 that was originally produced and aired by the 2008 Romney presidential campaign.  ROF treasurer Charles S. Spies signed a conciliation agreement on behalf of ROF, agreeing to pay a civil penalty of $50,000.

“This was a blatant violation of the law.  It’s unacceptable that the FEC took nearly four years to resolve the matter with a fine that amounts to a light slap on the wrist for millions of dollars in illegal spending,” said Campaign Legal Center Deputy Executive Director Paul S. Ryan.  “On the bright side, the FEC has now confirmed the obvious: it’s illegal for Super PAC’s to recycle candidate campaign ads.”

Under FEC regulations, financing the republication of campaign materials prepared by a candidate or candidate committee constitutes a “contribution for the purposes of contribution limitations” of the person or group making the expenditure.  Super PACs like ROF are prohibited from contributing to candidates.  Consequently, every dollar ROF spent airing this ad constitutes an illegal contribution.

Beginning in February 2012, ROF made major ad buys to air the 2008 Romney campaign ad—initially in advance of primaries in Arizona and Michigan and continuing through the November 2012 general election.  CLC filed a complaint with the FEC on February 27, 2012, after ROF’s initial ad buy in Arizona and Michigan, alleging illegal in-kind contributions by Restore Our Future, Inc. to presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

According to the Wall Street Journal, ROF spent $4.3 million to air the ad in nine battleground states in May—the Super PAC’s first general election ad buy.  Other press accounts indicate millions more were spent by ROF to air the ad.  According to the book The 2012 Presidential Campaign: A Communication Perspective, this ad (“Saved”) was the Super PAC’s “most-aired political spot.”

To read the conciliation agreement between the FEC and ROF, click here.

To read the complaint filed by the Legal Center on February 27, 2012, click here. 

Today, the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and the Sunlight Foundation filed complaints at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against 18 television stations in 7 markets across 4 states that incorrectly identified Independence USA PAC as the “true sponsor” of political advertisements, when in fact the true funder of the PAC is Michael Bloomberg.  On November 19, 2015, the groups warned the stations by letter that they were in violation of the Communications Act and FCC regulations and should identify Bloomberg as the sponsor on all future broadcasts of Independence USA ads.  Since none of the stations agreed to change their sponsorship identification after receiving the letters, the groups are filing complaints against each of them.  The complainants are represented by the Institute for Public Representation of Georgetown University Law Center.

“Broadcasters across the nation receive a massive windfall from election advertising.  They should be held accountable when they allow political advertisers to hide the true identities of the deep-pocketed funders behind them,” said Meredith McGehee, Campaign Legal Center Policy Director. “These stations were warned that they were in clear violation of the law but have continued to cash the checks and run the ads for Independence USA PAC without identifying Michael Bloomberg as the group’s sole funder.  The identity of those paying to air television ads seeking to influence election outcomes is vital information to voters.  The law of the land requires that those sponsors be clearly identified.”

The Communications Act and the FCC’s sponsorship identification rules require broadcasters to go beyond simply naming the entity that paid for an ad and to disclose the “true identity” of the sponsor of the ad. In the case of Independence USA PAC, the Super PAC acts essentially as a personal advertising arm for Mr. Bloomberg, yet the stations failed to fully and fairly inform the public about who was attempting to influence them despite being given easily-accessible, publicly-available information, including Federal Election Commission filings regarding Mr. Bloomberg’s financing of the ads.  Under the Communications Act, broadcasters are required to “exercise reasonable diligence” to obtain the information needed for proper sponsorship identification.

See below for the list of stations and links to complaints filed.

St. Louis

KMOV (CBS)

Kansas City

KCTV (CBS)

KMBC-TV (ABC)

KSHB-TV (NBC)

Miami

WSVN (Fox)

WTVJ (NBC)

Orlando-Daytona Beach

WESH (NBC)

WKMG-TV (CBS)

WOFL (Fox)

Detroit

WDIV-TV (NBC)

WJBK (Fox)

WXYZ-TV (ABC)

Milwaukee

WTMJ-TV (NBC)

WDJT-TV (CBS)

WISN-TV (ABC)

Madison

WMTV (NBC)

WKOW (ABC)

WISC-TV (CBS)

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.