Andy Kroll

Reporter

Andy Kroll is Mother Jones' Dark Money reporter. He is based in the DC bureau. His work has also appeared at the Wall Street Journal, the Detroit News, Salon, and TomDispatch.com, where he's an associate editor. He can be reached at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. He tweets at @AndrewKroll.

Get my RSS | Follow @andrewkroll

On Election Night 2012, Obama Began Plotting Democrats' 2014 Takeover of Congress

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Mar. 4, 2013 9:06 AM PST

President Obama with House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

In the past 80 years, only one president, Bill Clinton, has led his party to gain seats in the House of Representatives in the midterm election of his second term. President Obama wants to be the second. And he's flexing as much political muscle as he can to put the Democrats back in control of the House of Representatives after the 2014 elections so that he can enact his ambitious agenda on gun control, immigration, and climate change.

According to the Washington Post, Obama's mission to win back the majority for House Democrats began on the very night he was reelected, early last November. After delivering his victory speech, in which he spoke of "the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward," Obama called up House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and told them of his plans to help win back the House in 2014. "The president understands that to get anything done, he needs a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives," Israel told the Post. "To have a legacy in 2016, he will need a House majority in 2014, and that work has to start now."

The Democrats need to win 17 House seats in 2014 to win back the majority. To achieve that, Obama plans to raise big money—he'll attend eight DCCC fundraisers this year, as opposed to the two attended in 2009 in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections. Obama's former campaign infrastructure, now flying under the banner of Organizing for Action and operating as a nonprofit, will also join the 2014 fight. Israel, the DCCC chairman, has met with Jim Messina, the head of OFA who also ran Obama's reelection campaign, to discuss 2014 plans.

Here's more from the Post on Obama's overtly political approach to enacting his second-term agenda:

In some ways, Obama is flipping the traditional script for second-term presidents.

Most have about two years to secure a domestic agenda before lame-duck status sets in. But Obama is laying out an argument for a new Congress that, if successful, could give him his last two years in office to cement his legacy.

The GOP resistance to his agenda is helping give Obama the political framework for the midterm congressional campaign—if not short-term legislative victories.

"I think six months from now, if Republican recalcitrance continues, it will become by definition a 2014 strategy," said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist. "At some point over the next three to six months, when most of these issues will get resolved or they won't, then the Republicans will face a 2014 problem."

Some Obama allies say the president views OFA as a way of marshaling—and extending beyond the traditional two years of a second term—his political power. The organization went largely dormant after his 2008 victory, mobilized only during late-inning pushes to secure health-care and Wall Street legislation.

Obama, though, has a mountain to climb to reach the 65 percent approval rating enjoyed by Clinton in the run-up to the 1998 midterm elections. Gallup pegs Obama's approval rating at 51 percent. And it's only going to get harder for the president, with more dysfunction, brinksmanship, and acrimony between him and House Republicans as we hurtle toward Election Day 2014. Of course GOPers recognize that, the moment Obama secured his own political future, he began plotting their defeat. But, practically, that means any chance of a "grand bargain" or a compromise on a big piece of legislation is fading fast.

The 2014 elections are well underway. We're in for 20 ugly months of partisan warfare here in Washington.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Coal Giant's $10 Million Loan to Democrats Is Now a $10 Million Donation

—By Andy Kroll

| Fri Mar. 1, 2013 8:49 AM PST

The Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, Va. Harry E. Walker/ZUMA Press

Last summer, with organizers struggling to raise enough money for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, party planners turned to Duke Energy, headquartered in Charlotte, for help. Duke, the nation's largest utility company, stepped up with a $10 million line of credit for the convention. Organizers insisted Duke would be repaid after the convention.

Or…not.

A Duke Energy official told the Charlotte Observer on Thursday that Democratic officials would not repay the $10 million they owe the company. Instead, Duke Energy will write off the loan as a business expense. Shareholders are expected to absorb $6 million of the cost of the loan.

In effect, Duke Energy's "loan" has turned out to be a $10 million contribution to the Democratic convention. Duke CEO Jim Rogers hinted at this possibility in an interview with the Observer last month, when it was becoming clear the Democrats might not repay the company. "At the end of the day, we'll do our best to get our money back," he said. "But if we don't, it's just a contribution we're making I think for the greater good of our community."

The decision by Democratic organizers not to repay the loan smacks of hypocrisy. In the run-up to the convention, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the chair of the Democratic National Committee, vowed that convention organizers would not accept corporate money. "We will make this the first convention in history that does not accept any funds from lobbyists, corporations, or political action committees," she said. Yet even before the Duke loan became a straight-up donation, various convention committees revealed that they had accepted corporate money. One committee took in at least $5 million in corporate money to rent Charlotte's Time Warner Cable Arena and a million more in in-kind contributions from AT&T, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Costco.

Asked about this hypocrisy, Democratic officials have responded by noting that their anti-corporate-cash pledge was self-imposed. Legally, they could use corporate money to fund their convention. Which, in the end, is precisely what they did.

4 Meetings With Obama? That'll Cost You Half a Million

—By Andy Kroll

| Tue Feb. 26, 2013 10:36 AM PST

Common Cause, the good-government group founded in 1970, has a loud-and-clear message for President Obama: He should tell his former campaign aides to shut down Organizing for Action, the nonprofit group created to promote Obama's second-term legislative agenda.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, Organizing for Action hopes to raise $50 million, and its leaders—including former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina—are courting wealthy givers to fill the group's war chest. An elite group of donors giving or raising $500,000 or more is expected to cough up at least half of OFA's budget. Those top-tier donors, whose names OFA says it will voluntarily disclose quarterly (which goes beyond what most nonprofits disclose), will earn a spot on OFA's "national advisory board" and, more importantly, get to meet with Obama four times a year, according to the Times.

Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, said in a statement blasted out to reporters on Tuesday that Obama should push to have OFA shut down and should "disavow any plan" to meet with OFA's bankrollers. "With its reported promise of quarterly presidential meetings for donors and 'bundlers' who raise $500,000, Organizing for Action apparently intends to extend and deepen the pay-to-play Washington culture that Barack Obama came to prominence pledging to end," Edgar said. "Access to the president should never be for sale."

Organizing for Action is a reincarnation of Obama's reelection campaign, the most technologically sophisticated in history. OFA will have access to the databases and massive supporter network—2 million volunteers, 17 million email subscribers, and 22 million Twitter followers—built up by Team Obama in the run-up to last year's presidential election. Although it is now running ads hitting lawmakers on the issue of gun control, OFA says it will not get involved in elections, focusing solely on building support for Obama's legislative priorities, which include immigration reform, gun control, and revamping the tax code. OFA is allowed to coordinate its efforts with the Obama White House, which it wouldn't have been able to do as a super-PAC.

But by organizing as a nonprofit, and agreeing to accept unlimited funds from corporations, unions, and individuals, OFA has been pilloried by Republicans and Democrats. They see OFA as a direct contradiction to Obama's opposition to big-money politics and his pledge to clean up Washington's cash-driven political culture. "It's the right vehicle from a legal perspective, but it is breathtakingly hypocritical," Charles Spies, a Republican lawyer who ran the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, told me last month.

Common Cause's Edgar doesn't begrudge the president for wanting outside help in his second term, but he says it should not come from an access-peddling outfit like OFA. "President Obama's backers should go back to the drawing board. The president may feel that he needs help from an advocacy organization outside the White House and the Democratic Party, but any group he creates should be fundamentally different from what we now see in Organizing for Action."

The Supreme Court Won't Hear "Citizens United on Steroids" Case

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Feb. 25, 2013 9:18 AM PST

The United States Supreme Court.

That whooshing sound you just heard was campaign finance reformers breathing a deep sigh of relief. On Monday morning, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit named Danielczyk v. United States, a challenge to one of the oldest laws in campaign politics: the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates.

The case stems from donations that two Virginia businessmen, William Danielczyk and Eugene Biagi, made to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. Danielczyk and Biagi gave to Clinton's campaign under the impression that they would be reimbursed by the private equity firm that employed them. Instead Danielczyk and Biagi were prosecuted by the Department of Justice for violating the century-old ban on corporate contributions. They responded by fighting to dismiss the charges. Their attorneys argued that the Supreme Court's logic in the Citizens United case—that independent expenditures do not corrupt or create the appearance of corruption—applied to donations directly to candidates. Thus the ban on corporate donations, they argued, was unconstitutional. In 2011, a federal district court agreed with Danielczyk's lawyers and dismissed the charges, but the case was later reversed on appeal.

When Danielczyk reached the Supreme Court, supporters of tougher campaign finance laws feared that the court might go even further than Citizens United by demolishing the ban on direct corporate donations, one of the last remaining pillars of campaign finance law in US. They had reason to worry: Last week, the high court agreed to the hear the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, another troublesome case in the eyes of the reformers. McCutcheon challenges the overall cap on what donors can give to candidates, parties, and political action committees, currently set at $46,200 to federal candidates and $70,800 to parties and PACs over a two-year election cycle. That limit is nearly 40 years old, dating back to the post-Watergate era, and if it falls, the reformers fear that future challenges to, say, the limit on donating to a candidate (now at $2,600 a year) could fall, too.

The Supreme Court could, sometime down the road, reconsider the corporate donation ban. But for now, the reformers have received a small bit of good news at an otherwise bleak point in the political money wars.

Extreme Makeover: Koch Brothers Edition

—By Andy Kroll

| Thu Feb. 21, 2013 9:37 AM PST

Charles (left) and David Koch.

Charles and David Koch—yes, those Koch brothers—are two of the most influential figures in American politics in the last 30 years. The future of their political/policy juggernaut has implications for us all. Which is why you should read Ken Vogel's latest story on the Kochs at Politico, a peek behind the curtain at the big shake-up underway in Kochland.

The Kochs fared poorly in 2012. Their flagship organization, Americans for Prosperity, spent $140 million last year, tens of millions of which went toward ousting President Obama and flipping control of the US Senate back to the GOP. We know how that turned out. AFP did solidify Republican gains at the state level—in Arkansas, AFP helped Republicans take full control of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction—but for the most part, the Kochs and their allies were left empty-handed in 2012.

And so, as Vogel reports, the Kochs are studying what went wrong and shaking things up to avoid future flops. Out went Tracy Henke, AFP's chief operating officer, as well as more than 100 AFP field organizers. The president of Generation Opportunity, a Koch-backed group targeting young voters, also left post-election. More importantly, the Kochs are choking off the cash flow to certain groups that didn't live up to the hype.

A big question looking over the Koch "reboot," Vogel points out, is what happens to the Kochs' mighty donor network, which reportedly steered some $400 million to GOP and conservative causes during the 2012 cycle:

Maybe the biggest question looming over Koch World, though, is whether it can still count on the support of the dozens of wealthy supporters in its network, who—as much as the brothers' own personal fortunes (estimated at $31 billion each) from their family owned industrial conglomerate Koch Industries—give the Kochs their political muscle.

The 2013 installments of the secretive twice-a-year Koch seminars at which donors often pledge seven-figure contributions have been delayed to allow for completion of the audit, which is being conducted by independent contractors and overseen by Koch operative Marc Short. The results will be presented at a seminar in April—a change from the typical late January or early February winter seminar in Southern California. The summer conference has also been pushed back but is still being planned, POLITICO has learned.

If donors are either not satisfied that Koch World has learned the lessons of 2012 or are anxious that their anonymity is at risk from heightened scrutiny of the Kochs' operation, they might be reluctant to give at the unprecedented level that they did in 2012, when the Kochs aimed to steer as much as $400 million into conservative causes.

"Nobody expected that people were going to continue to give at the level that they were giving leading up to that election and that cycle," said Jeremy Jensen, one of the dozens of field organizers laid off by Americans for Prosperity this year.

"I don't think they're going anywhere," Jensen added of the Kochs and AFP. "No, I think it will only come back bigger. I believe [2012] was a trial run for what things will look like in the future for some really big money plans."

Vogel's article also raises the question of what happens to AFP, the powerful advocacy group started by David Koch. In my own reporting, I've heard about all the grumbling among conservative donors about what AFP did—or didn't do—in 2012. Charles Koch apparently shares their concern: He was overheard at a holiday party questioning AFP's work in the last election cycle.

Could AFP be in for a major overhaul? Could it be broken up into a bunch of state-specific groups? No one knows at this point. But Vogel's story is the best glimpse we have at the inner workings of Kochland. It's worth the read.