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

MAP: Does Your State Let You Carry a Gun on Campus?

Five states now do, and seven others may soon follow—including Texas, where a shooting just shook up a community college.

—By Gavin Aronsen, Jaeah Lee, and Andy Kroll

| Wed Jan. 23, 2013 6:56 AM PST

On Tuesday, a dispute between two people at Lone Star College in Houston ended in a gun fight. Three people were wounded (including suspects in the shooting), and a fourth person was reportedly hospitalized with an unspecified "medical emergency" in connection with the incident. It was the sixth shooting on or near a US college campus this month.

Texas generally has lax gun laws, but prohibits carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus. The GOP-controlled Texas Legislature may soon change that, however. Last week, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, a Republican, introduced new "campus carry" legislation that would allow firearms to be carried at public colleges with a valid permit. Texas would join five states* that, to varying degrees, now allow weapons to be carried on campuses. And lawmakers in at least seven other states are aiming to follow suit.

Does your state allow concealed guns on college campuses? Hover over an individual state for further details. (Also see lists below the map.)

States with laws allowing guns on college campuses: Colorado, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin.

States in which lawmakers have recently introduced legislation to allow guns on campuses: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Wyoming.

For more, check out MoJo's yearlong investigation into gun laws and mass shootings in the United States.

Correction: California was included in this category in the initial version of the story; the state bans concealed guns on college campuses but makes exceptions for individuals with valid licenses who are granted specific permission by school authorities.

Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures; Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Why An Unknown Senator Named CeCe Is a Breakthrough in the Campaign Money Wars

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Jan. 23, 2013 4:01 AM PST

Cecilia Tkaczyk.

You probably haven't heard of Cecilia Tkaczyk—CeCe to her friends. But the nation's leading activists fighting to get big money out of politics want you to hear her story. After months in court, Tkacyzk squeaked out the second-narrowest win in the history of New York's state Senate, a win progressives are hailing as a potential turning point in the fight to clean up Albany's noxious politics. And if they can pass reform in New York, the front line of the campaign finance wars, activists believe they can pressure other states to do the same.

Liberals love Tkaczyk because she made the public financing of elections a central issue, if not the issue, in her campaign. The underdog in a race against GOP state Assemblyman George Amedore, Tkaczyk proposed replacing New York State's lax campaign finance system with a voluntary program that matches small-dollar donations with taxpayer money. The idea: nudge candidates to court lots of less wealthy individual donors instead of wooing a handful of rich ones. Throughout the campaign, Tkaczyk pressed Amedore on the campaign cash issue, and in the final weeks of the campaign, Amedore turned around and attacked her specifically over public financing, ripping it as too costly and unnecessary.

Strange, right? Two candidates locking horns over...campaign finance? Yet in the Amedore-Tkaczyk race, the dry, unsexy issue of money in politics was front and center.

After the ballots had been counted, and a few dozen votes separated Amedore and Tkacyzk, the election headed to the courts. The two sides fought over which ballots to count and which to exclude, Amedore briefly took a 37-vote lead, but then, more than two months after the election, the court's decision to count a few more ballots tipped the race to Tkacyzk. According to the current count, she won by 19 votes. Campaign reformers point to her victory as proof, albeit on a small scale, that corruption and the influence of money in politics resonates with voters, and that an anti-big-money candidate can win by running on this specific issue. "Her victory shows that voters will support candidates who champion real campaign finance reform, including citizen-funded elections," says Jonathan Soros, who runs Friends of Democracy, which he calls an anti-super-PAC super-PAC.

Yes, Tkaczyk had lots of help. Progressive groups such as Citizen Action of New York and the Working Families Party phone-banked and knocked on doors. Soros' super-PAC spent $265,000 on polling, TV ads, and phone calls to elect Tkaczyk, focusing on the campaign finance issue. And Protect Our Democracy, another pro-reform super-PAC started by investor Sean Eldridge, the husband of Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, spent thousands more to back Tkaczyk while highlighting the campaign money issue. If all that spending sounds a tad ironic to you—outside groups spending big to support an anti-big-money candidate—that's because it is.

But Soros and Eldridge say they want to build a coalition of pro-campaign-reform candidates in New York State, and they argue that it takes money to do so. They focused on New York State Senate races because Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly signaled his support for public financing—but he needs the legislature to send him a bill. Tkaczyk's win adds another pro-reform Democrat to the state Senate. Now, in a divided state Senate, the hard work begins. "It's now up to Ms. Tkaczyk," the Albany Times-Union wrote in an recent editorial, "and all those politicians from Gov. Andrew Cuomo on down who say they stand for campaign reform to live up to their promises to do it."

Post-Election, The Obama Machine Goes to the Dark (Money) Side

—By Andy Kroll

| Fri Jan. 18, 2013 9:37 AM PST

Jim Messina managed Obama's 2012 campaign and will now lead Organizing for Action, a post-election nonprofit backing Obama's second-term agenda.

Barack Obama's 2012 campaign was the most technologically advanced political operation in American history, a techie's wet dream. The campaign, led by Jim Messina, amassed and distilled vast quantities of voter data, built apps and networks to mobilize voters and enlist volunteers, and practically perfected the science of email fundraising. Post-election, Messina and his lieutenants weren't about to let their data files, email lists, algorithms, and grassroots machine simply gather dust. Instead, they will soon launch Organizing for Action, a standalone advocacy group created to bolster Obama as he pursues his second-term agenda. Messina wrote in an email to donors and staffers that the new group "will be a supporter-driven organization, as we've always been, staying true to our core principles: 'respect, empower, include.'"

But there's a rub: Organizing for Action will be formed under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, and will not be required to disclose its donors. (The Los Angeles Times first reported this.) For context, Karl Rove's dark-money juggernaut, Crossroads GPS, is a 501(c)(4), as is the Koch-backed national conservative group Americans for Prosperity. The decision to make Organizing for Action a dark-money nonprofit makes sense strategy-wise: as a nonprofit the new group can meet and coordinate with members of the Obama White House, which it couldn't do as a super-PAC. But the decision flies in the face of Obama and the Democrats' supposed commitment to transparency.

Obama has pledged to make his administration the most transparent in history. His reelection campaign also took steps to be open to the public, including the admirable move of disclosing all its super-fundraisers, or "bundlers," each quarter, which it didn't have to do. (Mitt Romney's campaign did not name its bundlers.) But going the dark-money route leaves Organizing for America vulnerable to criticism. "It's the right vehicle from a legal perspective, but it is breathtakingly hypocritical," says Charles Spies, a Republican lawyer who ran the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future.

The new group will be used to mobilize Obama supporters around the key issues of Obama's second term in office. Those issues include battles over raising the debt ceiling, gun control, and immigration reform. Alums of Obama's 2008 campaign launched a similar post-election effort called Organizing for America, but it had little impact, especially on the defining policy fight of Obama's first term, health-care reform.

Organizing for Action, the post-2012 project, will accept individual and corporate contributions, according to the Associated Press, but not money from lobbyists or political action committees. (That said, Team Obama has found ways to sidestep earlier restrictions on interacting with lobbyists.) The new group, which will be separate from the Democratic National Committee, claims it will voluntarily disclose its donors even though it is not legally required to do so.

That's well and good—if it follows through with the disclosure pledge. But even then, Organizing for Action will be far less transparent than a super-PAC. Super-PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, but they must disclose all donations and all spending in a timely way. The type of nonprofit Organizing for Action wants to become is not required to disclose its spending in a timely way—it will detail its spending in IRS filings made available many months after the fact. And it's unclear how often the group will release the names of its donors. Monthly? Quarterly? Annually?

Organizing for Action could, if it wanted, go above and beyond what the law requires by disclosing its donors and spending in real time. For now, it remains to be seen whether the new group will live up to the president's transparency promises.

You Need to See These 5 Shocking Facts About Money in the 2012 Elections

—By Andy Kroll

| Thu Jan. 17, 2013 12:17 PM PST

Sheldon Adelson.

Not since the years before the Watergate scandal has a small cadre of mega-donors influenced our elections as much as wealthy givers such as casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, and Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner did in 2012. These men and a few dozen others pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into super-PACs and shadowy nonprofits and raised tens of millions more for presidential and Congressional campaigns.

Now, a new report titled "Billion-Dollar Democracy" by the Demos think tank and the US Public Interest Research Group, both left-of-center groups, distills all the fundraising and spending on last year's elections and spits out an array of eye-popping factoids about where all the money came from (or most of it, at least) and how it was spent. It is vital information as reporters, activists, and others try to make sense of an election season full of firsts—the first full cycle since the 2010 Citizens United decision, the first $1 billion campaign (Obama), and the first presidential race in which both major candidates rejected public financing.

I've plucked out five must-see highlights from the report, with graphics courtesy of Demos and US PIRG:

32

It took just 32 of the biggest super-PAC donors to match the total giving—$313 million—by every single small-dollar donor to Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's campaigns combined. Donors who give less than $200 aren't disclosed, but it's at least 3.7 million people.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.

159 donors

A tiny sliver of the American population supplied most of the money super-PACs used during the 2012 campaign season. How tiny? Sixty percent of all super-PAC donations came from just 159 people.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.

31%

Of the $1.03 billion outside groups spent last election cycle, 31 percent was "dark money," meaning we don't know who gave the money or where it came from.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.

58%

Dark money fueled a huge chunk of those TV attack ads you noticed during commercial breaks for Parks and Recreation. Fifty-eight percent of outside groups' TV spending on the presidential race was funded by dark money.

Source: The Washington Post, “Mad Money.”

322,000 average Americans

It would take 322,000 middle-income Americans—say, the entire population of Anaheim, Calif., minus a few thousand folks—giving 0.37 percent of their net worth to match casino magnate Sheldon Adelson's $91.8 million, which was 0.37 percent of his net worth. Forbes estimates Adelson's fortune at $20.5 billion.

Source: Dēmos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foun- dation data.

Congressional Democrats Unveil New Bills to Battle Big-Money Donors

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Jan. 16, 2013 3:14 PM PST

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) recently introduced legislation to entice candidates to raise a greater percentage of money from small donors.

On Wednesday, Democrats in Congress took their first big step of the 113th Congress toward staunching the flow of money into US political campaigns. A group of House Democrats unveiled a trio of political money-themed bills, each proposing to establish new public campaign financing that would reward candidates for hauling in lots of small donations instead of fewer, larger ones, by matching small-dollar donations with public funds and tightening the rules governing super-PACs.

The 2012 presidential election marked the first time since the post-Watergate creation of public financing system that neither party's candidate accepted public money to fund his campaign. And little surprise why: Had they accepted public financing, Obama and Romney would've received a paltry $45.6 million for the primary season and $91.2 million each for the general election. Instead Obama raised roughly $1.2 billion overall and Romney raised more than $900 million.

In addition to revamping the public financing of federal elections to encourage more courting of small donors, the "Empowering Citizens Act," introduced by Reps. David Price (D-N.C.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), would beef up rules banning coordination between super-PACs and campaigns, which critics say aren't strong enough right now. Congressional Democrats point to super-PACs such as Restore Our Future, which spent $152 million solely to elect Romney, and Priorities USA Action, which spent $74 million to elect Obama, as evidence of the blurry lines between candidate-specific super-PACs and the candidates' campaign. For instance, Romney appeared at a fundraiser for Restore Our Future, and top Obama advisers such as David Plouffe and David Axelrod spoke at Priorities events. (Conservatives dismiss the notion that this constitutes coordination and say Democrats just want to restrict the speech of outside groups with whom they don't agree.)

Another of the new bills, the "Grassroots Democracy Act" offered by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), would create a small-donor matching system as well as a "People's Fund," which would send additional federal money to candidates in races flooded with outside money and, in Sarbanes' words, "the voices of grassroots candidates are being drowned out." The third bill, the "Fair Elections Now Act" introduced by Reps. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Me.), would provide a 5-to-1 match of donations of $100 or less from in-state donors in the primary and general elections.

In the weeks ahead, House Democrats say, they plan to hash out a compromise bill that incorporates what they believe are the best ideas of the three bills introduced on Wednesday. Of course, with Republicans in control of the House, any legislation aimed at reforming money in politics is dead-on-arrival. But with the ebb and flow of Congressional control, Democrats will inevitably find themselves back in charge of the House in two or four or six years, and when they do, Democrats and reform advocates say they want a tough, comprehensive campaign finance bill ready to grab off the shelf and put into play.