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.

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Good Government Group: No Corporate Cash for Obama's Inauguration

—By Andy Kroll

| Thu Nov. 29, 2012 8:50 AM PST

A screenshot of CNN's coverage of President Obama's first 2009 inauguration.

President Obama's second-term inauguration ceremony will take place on January 21, 2013, which is also the third anniversary of the Supreme Court's historic Citizens United decision. Citizens United freed corporations and unions to spend money from their treasuries directly on politics, and opened the door for the creation of super-PACs.

With that anniversary in mind, Public Citizen, the good-government group founded by Ralph Nader, is pressuring Obama to reject corporate donations to his inauguration ceremony. Public Citizen president Robert Weissman writes in a November 29 letter to Obama that the public would likely be left in the dark about which corporations gave money and states that there is a "very real risk of corruption" from letting corporations underwrite the ceremony. Weissman's letter comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration is mulling whether to take corporate money for the inauguration. Obama banned corporate donations for his 2009 inauguration, and instead raised $50 million from hundreds of individual donors.

"The corporate donors to the inauguration will expect—and receive—something in return," Weissman writes. "The concern is less that they get a tax break in exchange for their million-dollar donation than that they get better access—their calls returned faster, their proposals reviewed in a more favorable light."

If the inauguration needs to rely on private donors and not just public funding this time around, Weissman says, that outside money should come in the form of small-dollar donations from individuals.

If inauguration planners do break with the precedent set by the corporate-free 2009 inauguration, it wouldn't be the first time Democrats backtracked on this kind of issue. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), chair of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters a year before her party's 2012 national convention that planners would not accept corporate money to put on the convention. But strapped for cash, convention planners ended up taking millions from corporations anyway, breaking their pledge.

Read Weissman's letter to Obama urging a ban on corporate inauguration money:

Public Citizen letter to President Obama on corporate inauguration donations

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Top Republicans Threaten to Ditch Grover Norquist's Anti-Tax Pledge

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Nov. 26, 2012 10:24 AM PST

Grover Norquist.

Grover Norquist's anti-tax-increase pledge is beginning to show cracks.

Over the long holiday weekend, four top Republicans in Congress said they would not be bound by their signing of the conservative activist's pledge not to raise taxes on their constituents in any way, shape, or form. These lawmakers have broken with Norquist at a crucial moment: On Monday, members of Congress restart their effort to hammer out an agreement to avoid going off the so-called "fiscal cliff" on December 31.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), ranking member on the Senate select committee on intelligence, dismissed Norquist's pledge during a Thanksgiving Day interview with a Macon, Georgia, television station. "I care more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge," Chambliss said. "If we do it his way then we'll continue in debt, and I just have a disagreement with him about that."

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who chairs the House homeland security committee, said he agreed with Chambliss. Standing by an anti-tax pledge he signed decades ago, King argued on NBC’s Meet the Press, "is just bad economic policy. "A pledge you signed 20 years ago, 18 years ago, is for that Congress," King said. "For instance, if I were in Congress in 1941, I would have signed a declaration of war against Japan. I’m not going to attack Japan today. The world has changed, and the economic situation is different."

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) said on ABC's This Week on Sunday that he agreed with Norquist on not raising tax rates, but believed—unlike Norquist—that other ways of raising tax revenue are fair game. "I think Grover is wrong when it comes to we can't cap deductions and buy down debt," Graham said. "What do you do with the money? I want to buy down debt and cut rates to create jobs, but I will violate the pledge, long story short, for the good of the country, only if Democrats will do entitlement reform."

And Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told CBS' Charlie Rose on Monday that he was "not obligated on the pledge."

Norquist, for his part, has fired back by saying that lawmakers are bound to their constituents, not him, on their promises to oppose tax increases in any form. As for King, Norquist told CNN's Soledad O'Brien on Monday that King "knows full well that the pledge that he signed, and others have, is for while you're in Congress. It's not for a two year period."

This is hardly the first time Republicans have made noises about wiggling out of Norquist's pledge. But could this time be different? Members of Congress are now staring down the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and a potpourri of automatic spending cuts that could total more than $800 billion in 2013. That includes a $55 billion cut to defense spending and $55 billion more shaved off of domestic programs.

Republicans don't want these scheduled cuts to become a reality. The defense cuts and the expiration of the Bush-era tax breaks could be enough to nudge Republicans into ditching Norquist's pledge. If they do, it's Norquist, whose political currency depends on the pledge and its adherents, who stands to lose the most.

Discredited Conservative Behind "Unskewed Polling" Says Voter Fraud Won Swing States for Obama

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Nov. 21, 2012 11:37 AM PST

From BarackOFraudo.com.

Dean Chambers launched the website UnskewedPolls.com in the final months of the election to counter what he saw as a Democratic bias in most presidential polls. Chambers' site was a hit among Fox-watching, reality-denying conservatives. He predicted Romney would win 275 electoral college votes and Obama would win 263.

Chambers was, as he later admitted, horribly, embarrassingly wrong. But the embarrassment continues.

This week, Chambers launched a new site, BarackOFraudo.com. As the URL suggests, Chambers does not believe Obama won the 2012 election fair and square. Instead, Chamber contends that Obama won the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida "by voter fraud." (That's the map posted above.)

Post-election, there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any of these states, and certainly nothing suggesting Obama's wins in those four states depended on voter fraud. So Slate's Dave Weigel asked Chambers for evidence backing up his serious accusations. What followed was a collision between fact-based reporting and fact-free magical thinking:

"I'm getting credible information of evidence in those states that there enough numbers that are questionable and could have swung the election," he says. "I'm only putting good credible information on there, like the actual vote counts, reports, and mainstream publications reporting voter fraud. There's a lot of chatter, though. There are articles people have sent me that don't hold up. Crazy stuff."

What's not crazy? "Things like the 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia where Romney received zero votes," says Chambers. "Even Larry Sabato said that should be looked into." (I've looked into this: 57 precincts gave McCain no votes in 2008. There's such a thing as a 99 percent Democratic precinct, and such a thing as a 99 percent Republican precinct.) Same story in Ohio. "Some of the precincts or divisions in cleveland were projected to be 99 percent Obama. That's a part of the state where it's known that a lot of ballot box scamming has been done in the past. There were isolated reports of people voting for Romney and having votes changed, though they didn't get much attention.

What about Virginia, then? "When votes were being counted on election night, 97 percent of the precincts were counted, and Romney was still leading 50-49," says Chambers. "When that remaining 3 percent were counted, a lead of 80,000 or so votes for Romney were turned into 120,000 for Obama." I pointed out that Virginia's stagger-stop-stagger count often works like that, with Democrats gaining in the end. "I was surprised it wasn't being projected for Romney when 97 percent was in," said Chambers. (The state was actually called earlier based on vote patterns.)

Fortunately, Chambers' failure to come with a country mile of predicting the presidential race means no one will take his voter fraud jeremiad seriously. Not even the Drudge Report, an avid endorser Chambers' Unskewed efforts, has stumped for his latest venture.

How Super-PACs Could Fuel the War Over the GOP's Future

Rebuilding a party takes money. The super-PACs have it.

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Nov. 21, 2012 4:13 AM PST

It's reckoning time for the Republican Party. The 2012 elections were not just a shellacking for the GOP; they were a reality check. Evolve or perish. To some Republicans, that means growing the party ranks by tamping down the demagoguery and embracing more moderate policies. To others, 2012's losses mean the party must double down on its conservative ideals to stand a chance of surviving.

The party has done this kind of soul-searching before. But what's different—and potentially more explosive—this time around is the new breed of big-money super-PACs poised to spend millions to push their party toward the political center. These super-PACs, which can independently raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash influencing policy and politics, were created to give political cover and courage to GOP candidates who might face a backlash for taking moderate positions on immigration reform, gay marriage, gun control, and other divisive issues. Before, a gun-control-backing Republican had to worry about the National Rifle Association spending big to defeat him; now big money is watching the backs of Republicans who don't march in lockstep with the rest of the GOP.

[Read the full article]

Jerry Falwell-Linked Lawyer: It's Romney's Fault Gay Marriage Won in 2012

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Nov. 19, 2012 1:35 PM PST

Mat Staver, an influential evangelical lawyer closely linked with the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University, has named an unlikely culprit for the passage of four pro-gay marriage measures this year: Mitt Romney.

Staver said Monday on the Christian radio program "Faith and Freedom" that Romney's refusal to talk about social issues led to voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington State approving ballot measures backing gay marriage. Romney should've campaigned in those four states, Staver insisted, and played up the importance of defining marriage as being between a man and a woman only.

But because Romney's message focused primarily on jobs and the economy, "he could not speak about life or marriage and so he didn't campaign in those states speaking about those issues and associating himself with marriage," Staver said, adding, "had he done so, his numbers would've gone up and I bet the marriage polls would've gone up."

Staver called Romney "mealy" and a "one-note" candidate, and disparaged him for lacking true social values. "If you'd had a candidate that had social values, you'd have higher voter turnout," he said. "If you had Romney, you had lower voter turnout. What ultimately happened in the general election is you had lower voter turnout."

Watch the clip of Staver's comments above, captured and edited by Right Wing Watch. Here's the transcript:

"If you'd had a candidate that had social values, you had a higher voter turnout. If you had Romney, you had lower voter turnout. What ultimately happened in the general election is you had lower voter turnout.

And look at Maryland, for example: 36.6 percent voted for Romney, but 48.1 percent voted for marriage as a union between one man, one woman. Minnesota: 45 percent voted for Romney, 47.4 percent voted for marriage. In Washington, 41.8 percent voted for Romney, 46.8 percent voted for marriage. Each one of those states, more people voted for marriage than Romney. They had a contradictory vote: They voted for marriage and they voted for Barack Obama in great measure. Those are contradictory votes.

Why? Because Romney was a one-note candidate. Jobs and the economy. You'd ask him a question on what's he going to do on immigration: jobs and the economy. Benghazi: jobs and the economy. How did he all of sudden switch it back to jobs and the economy when we're talking about foreign affairs? He could not speak about life or marriage and so he didn't campaign in those states speaking about those issues and associating himself with marriage. Had he done so, his numbers would've gone up and I bet the marriage polls would've gone up.

Every time we get these mealy candidates like Romney or McCain, we have this problem and then Republican pundits come up and say, 'Oh, we need to change our position on marriage and abortion.'"