Gavin is an Iowa native, and covered the 2008 first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses for the Ames Tribune. He has also contributed to the Agence France-Presse, Daily Beast, Iowa Independent, Manhattan Media, and Village Voice.
It takes more than secret donors to run a dark-money group—it takes chutzpah. For a perfect example of that, consider the letter that the American Future Fund sent to the Federal Election Commission in April, alerting the body that "AFF wishes to speak out on issues of national policy significance with minimal government intrusion into its affairs."
In its missive, the conservative 501(c)(4) "social welfare" group asked the FEC to issue formal advice on eight ads that it was planning to make. Specifically, AFF wanted to know if the proposed ads would trigger FEC disclosure requirements. If groups like AFF make ads that mention candidates by name but don't expressly tell you to vote for or against them, they have to file spending reports with the FEC. (They do not have to reveal their donors—though a federal court case could change that. More on that below.)
AFF, though, didn't "want to subject itself to the burden" of reporting its ad spending to the FEC. If it could convince the FEC that its ads were true issue ads and had nothing to do with any specific candidate, it would be in the clear.
"Your defense of Crossroads' legal position last night on Fox News was both mystifying and revealing."
—Robert Bauer, the Obama campaign's chief legal counsel, in his second snarky letter to Karl Rove this week. He's demanding that Rove disclose the donors to his dark-money nonprofit Crossroads GPS, which claims to be a "social welfare" group. (Read about the first letter here.)
attack ad of the week
Earlier this month, President Obama told reporters at a White House press conference that "the private sector is doing fine." By that, he meant that the private sector has fared better as of late than the flailing public sector. But the comment makes for a great attack-ad sound bite and could become a headache for Obama. The Romney campaign was the first to pounce on the gaffe with an ad last week. Earlier this week, the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future came out with with its own ad; it was followed by this ad by the Koch brothers-affiliated Americans for Prosperity:
Fake attack ad of the week
Courtesy of the Mother Jones DC news team, a cautionary look at what could happen if dark money invaded the land of Westeros. Watch the Crossbows GPS spot below. (Warning: the videos contain mild spoilers from season two of Game of Thrones.)
STAT of the week
$94.8 million: The amount of money spent by dark-money "social welfare" groups like Crossroads GPS in the 2010 election, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity. That's 45 percent more than super-PACs spent during the same cycle.
• Thanks to outside spending groups, Barack Obama "may be the first incumbent president to be out-raised by his opponent." AP
• Mitt Romney plans to mingle with deep-pocketed donors at "Republicanpalooza" this weekend. New York Times
• Will Karl Rove's donor disclosure dodges lead to Crossroad GPS' downfall? Huffington Post
• The US Chamber of Commerce works with Republicans to block a donor disclosure bill. iWatch News
• Stephen Colbert's super-PAC barely raised any money last month, but it's inspired copycats like My Cat Xavier for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. Politico
As election season heats up, I asked my Mother Jones colleagues to suggest their picks for the best recent long-form reportage on one of our favorite topics—the stories behind the money in American politics. For more MoJo staffers' long-form favorites, visit our longreads.com page. Take a look at some of our own reporters' longreads here, and be sure to follow @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter for the latest.
State for Sale | Jane Mayer | The New Yorker | October 2011
Just how much political influence can one wealthy individual wield? A whole lot, according to Mayer's profile of conservative North Carolina philanthropist and self-proclaimed defender of democracy Art Pope.
I met with Pope recently in a suburban office building that serves as the Raleigh headquarters of Variety Wholesalers. In a spare conference room overlooking a parking lot, he told me that he is indeed misunderstood. "If the left wing wants a whipping boy, a bogeyman, they throw out my name," he said. "Some things I hear about Art Pope—you know, I don't like this guy Art Pope that they're talking about. I don’t know him. If what they say were true, I wouldn’t like a lot of things about me. But they're just not true."
Before the 2008 election, Gwynne got the reclusive Texan who was America's (then) top political donor to open up a bit.
In spite of such a massive political presence, Perry is as mysterious as some of the groups he funds. He never talks to the press, rarely appears in public, and remains an inscrutable figure even to people to whom he has given hundreds of thousands of dollars. He might have maintained this relatively low profile indefinitely, except that in 2004 he was the largest funder of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the controversial 527 that many people credit with derailing John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Almost overnight, Perry became a poster boy for the notion that a cabal of wealthy donors, shady consultants, and unaccountable 527’s was taking over American politics.
In this epic tale, Kroll details the four-decade battle over campaign finance starting with Watergate money laundering and culminating in the current super-PAC free-for-all.
"We're back to the Nixon era," says Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, "the era of undisclosed money, of big cash amounts and huge interests that are small in number dominating American politics." This is the story of how we got here.
The dawn of the super-PAC era caught a lot of people by surprise. Mencimer profiles James Bopp, the legal mastermind who made it possible.
Clad in a brown sweater and sitting awkwardly with a cane at his side, Bopp looked far more mortal than you might expect for "the man behind our secret elections," as Common Cause recently dubbed him (PDF). When I asked him about the allegation that he uses his small, nonprofit clients as cover for a big-business agenda, a frustrated look crossed his face. He'd happily represent corporate clients, he said, "if they'd hire me." The problem, he said, was that those clients want their lawyers in DC, not Indiana.
Money Unlimited | Jeffrey Toobin | The New Yorker | May 2012
Toobin documents how one of the defining decisions of the Roberts Supreme Court arose from a case of seemingly "modest importance."
In a different way, though, Citizens United is a distinctive product of the Roberts Court. The decision followed a lengthy and bitter behind-the-scenes struggle among the Justices that produced both secret unpublished opinions and a rare reargument of a case. The case, too, reflects the aggressive conservative judicial activism of the Roberts Court. It was once liberals who were associated with using the courts to overturn the work of the democratically elected branches of government, but the current Court has matched contempt for Congress with a disdain for many of the Court’s own precedents. When the Court announced its final ruling on Citizens United, on January 21, 2010, the vote was five to four and the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy. Above all, though, the result represented a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts. Even without writing the opinion, Roberts, more than anyone, shaped what the Court did. As American politics assumes its new form in the post-Citizens United era, the credit or the blame goes mostly to him.
With his signature prose, the author of Pity the Billionaireinvestigates the deep-pocketed players paying for the 2012 election.
It dawned on the world that we had reached a new level of campaign savagery during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses. For a brief moment, you will recall, Newt Gingrich, who had foresworn negative advertising and was behaving in an uncharacteristically congenial manner, took the lead in public-opinion polls. Almost immediately, Mitt Romney—which is to say, Mitt Romney's studiously non-aligned corporate doppelgänger, the Restore Our Future Super PAC—blitzed his slow-moving opponent with a storm of derisive TV commercials. The spots ran day and night, and utterly destroyed Gingrich’s standing in the polls.
Among people who follow campaign spending closely, this seems to have been a sort of Hiroshima moment: the vast power of a new weapon was finally unveiled. Candidates like Romney could appear to be models of civic virtue, without an unkind or even combative thought in their heads, while their wealthy patrons came together to heap ridicule on their rivals, in unprecedented quantities of advertising and degrees of viciousness. All of the hand-shaking and diner-visiting and carefully drawn position papers were swept into irrelevance.
Just over a week ago, the 4th Circuit of Appeals ruled that the government must determine the "major purpose" of groups like Karl Rove's dark-money outfit Crossroads GPS, which operates as a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" nonprofit*. By law, 501(c)(4)s can't make political activity their primary activity. They can, however, make attack ads and funnel money to super-PACs, which is why some super-PACs, like GPS' sister organization American Crossroads, use them as a way to avoid disclosing their donors.
Besides giving a boost to campaign-finance reformers, the ruling in Real Truth About Obama v. FEC has given the Obama campaign an opportunity to mess with Rove. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the campaign's chief counsel, Robert Bauer, filed a complaint with the FEC arguing that Crossroads GPS now has an obligation to disclose its anonymous donors without delay. GPS "seems to believe that it can run out the clock and spend massive sums of money in this election without accounting for a trace of its funding," he wrote. The circuit court ruling "makes clear that Crossroads is out of time."
Bauer also sent a snarky courtesy letter to Rove and Crossroads GPS president Steven Law, explaining that his FEC complaint was "laying out the case—obvious to all—that Crossroads is a political committee subject to federal reporting requirements."
The letter also mentioned Van Hollen v. FEC, acase that may soon require political 501(c)(4)s to disclose their donors if they run ads in the run-up to an election. Bauer explained that Crossroads GPS disclosing its donors now
need not involve any admission of liability for violating the law in the past. You may continue to hold to your position which is, no doubt, that until recent legal developments, Crossroads believed that it could take in anonymous donations for its electioneering activities. Now your position can be that because the law has become ever clearer, you must proceed to report. While this is thin cover for your failure to report to date, it is better than nothing.
Of course, Crossroads GPS isn't the only dark-money outfit out there. "The big question is whether Bauer sent a similar letter to Priorities USA—a group modeled after Crossroads GPS to support President Obama's policies," GPS spokesman Jonathan Collegio told the Huffington Post in response to the complaint. Priorities USA is the dark-money arm of Priorities USA Action, the primary pro-Obama super-PAC. It is unclear just how much money Priorities USA has raised so far. Crossroads reported raising $28 million in 2011.
Have a look at the letter to Rove and the complaint:
Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the court, not Bauer, said Crossroads GPS fit the FEC's definition of a political committee.
