The battle over ‘dark money’ is back by jonward11
Lost in the debate over the House Democrats first major bill was a provision that is easy to overlook but would have a huge impact on the role of money in politics.
This state of paralysis has persisted for some time, but when Democrats retook the House of Representatives in last fall’s elections, they put the issue among their handful of top priorities to change. For example, in 2014, the FEC deadlocked along partisan lines on a proposed investigation into the conservative group American Action Network, which has been among the biggest dark money groups, after a watchdog group brought a complaint alleging the organization spent 66 percent of its roughly $27 million in budget on political advertising from 2009 to 2011.
“Clearly, public financing at least for presidential elections is an idea whose time has come,” McConnell wrote. One of the new Republican commissioners was Don McGahn, who later became White House counsel to President Trump. Ravel speculated that McGahn and the other Republican commissioners blocked enforcement at the behest of McConnell, who had become the Republican leader in the Senate just a year earlier.
Ravel found in a 2017 report that deadlocked cases had risen in 2016 to 37 percent, up from just four percent in 2006, and that financial penalties had dropped from $5.5 million in 2006 to just $595,425 in 2016. The Congressional Research Service found a 24 percent rate of gridlocked votes in 2014, up from 13 percent in 2008-2009.
“Apparently the Democrats define ‘democracy’ as giving Washington a clearer view of whom to intimidate and leaving citizens more vulnerable to public harassment over private views,” McConnell wrote in his Post op-ed. “Under this bill, you’d keep your right to free association as long as your private associations were broadcast to everyone.”
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