E.J. Dionne WashPost Column: A lame and spineless duck?; The Hill: Midterms may have just tested the waters of campaign finance ruling

The lame-duck session of Congress that kicks off this week will test whether Democrats have spines made of Play-Doh and whether President Obama has decided to pretend that capitulation is conciliation.

Congress faces an enormous amount of unfinished business, largely because of successful GOP obstruction tactics during the regular session. Republican senators who declare themselves moderate helped block action on important bills, objecting to provisions they didn’t like or to Democratic procedural maneuvers.

Thus did Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts give themselves permission to fall in line behind their party’s leadership even as they continued to claim true independence.

Okay, let’s test that. One of the bills blocked was the Disclose Act, designed to end the scandal of secret money in election campaigns. If this year’s contests prove anything, it’s that voters should have the right to know which millionaires, corporations and special interests are flooding the airwaves with attack ads on behalf of candidates who can blithely deny any connection to the slander and any knowledge of who might be trying to buy influence.

Shortly after the election, Michael Isikoff and Rich Gardella of NBC News reported that one of the big Republican secret-money groups, Crossroads GPS, got "a substantial portion" of its money "from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls." These contributors "have been bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats – and endorsed by the Obama administration – to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners."

It shouldn’t take investigative reporting after the fact for voters to learn such things. Snowe, Collins and Brown say they are for disclosure, as does Mark Kirk, the new Republican senator from Illinois. Senate Democratic leaders should give them a chance to prove it by bringing up the bill.

Another casualty in the regular session was legislation to end the military’s foolish "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy. Again, Collins is a key player. We now have a court decision declaring the policy invalid and the military is reportedly ready to declare that ending discrimination against gays would not harm the armed forces. It’s often said that the elected branches, not the courts, should make decisions of this sort. Fine. Let the Senate get it done.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won a bruising reelection campaign partly because of strong support from Latino voters. He should keep his promise to bring up the Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who arrived here as children if they attend college or join the military.

There are a slew of judicial nominations and several executive branch appointments pending. Abuse of the confirmation process is another longtime scandal. The Senate shouldn’t leave town without getting these appointees through.

An extension of unemployment insurance is set to expire at the end of this month, with the unemployment rate at 9.6 percent. Will Congress go home with little thought to what the lives of these Americans will be like during the coming holidays?

Which brings up the biggest scandal of all: Imagine a Congress that their party still controls passing an extension of the Bush tax cuts for millionaires but leaving the unemployed in the cold. If this happens, laugh out loud the next time a Democrat claims to be on the side of working people.

Yet administration officials seemed eager to engage in premature capitulation – even if senior adviser David Axelrod tried to back off that approach on Sunday – without a word about the jobless benefits or replacing the tax cuts for the wealthy with measures more geared toward creating jobs, as Sen. Mark Warner has suggested. Couldn’t they at least have gone to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s compromise that would limit the tax cuts to those earning under $1 million? And some Democratic senators just don’t want to be bothered with a long lame-duck session. They want to take care of the wealthy and not do much more.

By caving on tax cuts, the president would turn his recent speeches into empty talk, lending his hand to those who would drive the car back into that ditch he loved to talk about. And if Democrats don’t turn the lame-duck session into a moment of action, they will end a Congress of great achievement not with a bang but with a craven whimper.

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The Hill
Midterms may have just tested the waters of campaign finance ruling
By Shane D’Aprile
November 13, 2010

Third-party money that poured into the midterm election cycle may have just been a preview of the fallout from the Supreme Court decision that struck down campaign finance limits.

The ultimate impact of the Citizens United decision hasn’t been fully realized, observers say, despite the record amounts of outside money spent in the 2010 election, and spending is predicted to be even more extreme in the 2012 elections.

Most observers say the midterms laid the groundwork for the way corporations and outside groups will operate in the new campaign finance environment, but the die is hardly cast.

"A number of us thought this would ultimately take a couple of cycles to really play itself out, and I think that’s still the case," said Robert Lenhard, a Democratic finance lawyer and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. "But what you did see this year were some people beginning to test the waters."

There’s no doubt that some of the early worries candidates and campaigns had about the decision’s impact played out this past fall — outside spending pouring into races late in the game, leaving many incumbents with little time or cash to counter the message. Democrats unsuccessfully ran with accusations that outside groups with anonymous donors were perhaps injecting foreign influence into the elections.

Republican-friendly outside groups coordinated a good deal of their spending, allowing them to vastly expand the playing field in House contests while Democrats were left scrambling to protect their incumbents as left-leaning groups stayed largely on the sidelines.

Corporate interests mostly funneled their money through other third-party groups, as opposed to setting up their own independent expenditure arms to spend, as some feared they would.

The Citizens United decision struck down direct spending prohibitions on corporations and unions, permitting them to spend unlimited amounts to advocate for specific candidates.

It paved the way for outside groups like Crossroads GPS and the American Action Network — two conservative-backed organizations that raised and spent millions to aid Republican candidates as the party took back the majority in the House and picked up six seats in the Senate.

In addition, business and labor interests poured millions into independent expenditure ads. The U.S. Chamber reportedly invested $75 million into the election, mostly on behalf of Republican candidates. On the union side, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees alone spent an estimated $88 million on ads and other electioneering on behalf of Democratic candidates.

Campaign watchdog groups say those numbers could be doubled next cycle.

"[The decision] had a disastrous impact on the 2010 elections and this is just the beginning," said campaign finance watchdog Fred Wertheimer, who heads Democracy 21. "You could easily have secret money doubled in 2012."

Reform advocates and others on the left point out that conservative-backed outside groups, many of whom did not have to disclose their donors, vastly outspent liberal ones in 2010. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, conservative organizations spent $188 million to the $92 million spent by left-leaning groups.

This past cycle’s Senate races were largely the center of all the outside spending. A total of $73.2 million was spent in just five key contests — Colorado, Nevada, Washington state, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Conservatives argue the 2010 election was hardly bought by corporate interests, noting the heavy union spending and a political environment that made it much easier to organize and raise money from energized conservatives.

Despite conservative groups outspending liberal ones in all five of those key Senate contests, Democrats went 3-2, winning in Colorado, Nevada and Washington state.

Former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith has been a staunch critic of what he has called President Obama’s "misleading" critiques of the court’s decision and he said its impact on the midterms turned out to be just what he and many other conservative voices predicted: "Not all that big."

"Overall, I actually think it’s had a very healthy effect," said Smith, pointing to the sizable amount of issue advertising that outside groups bankrolled in 2010. "This was a very issue-oriented election and I fail to see how that does any harm to the public debate."

The spending did have some affect on the state level.

Both Smith and Lenhard noted the firestorm retail giant Target created with its six-figure donation to a group backing Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer (R). Gay rights groups immediately criticized the donation, highlighting Emmer’s support for an amendment banning gay marriage.

While it serves as a cautionary tale for corporations balancing their political interests with protecting their corporate brand, Wertheimer doesn’t think it’ll stop companies from figuring out how to dive in head first next cycle.

Wertheimer and other finance watchdogs are pushing Congress to take up the Disclose Act during next month’s lame duck session. Without enacting some reform measures to "mitigate the damage," Wertheimer said he expects the landscape to become exponentially worse in two years, with Democrats forming their own network of 501 c groups to do battle with organizations like Crossroads GPS and American Action Network.

"We don’t know if they can respond with the same amounts of money or whether they’ll be 527’s or c4’s, but I don’t think there’s any question they’ll be there," he said.

Those on the left, who were tamped down by Obama during the 2008 cycle, are already beginning to plan competing structures. According to the Washington Post, Media Matters founder David Brock is planning a new 527 to raise and spend millions for Democrats during the 2012 cycle.

For candidates and parties to keep up with the flood of outside spending that is sure to increase in 2012’s presidential year, they need to stop handicapping themselves or risk non-party structures completely running the show in 2012, said Smith.

"They need to quit trying to limit spending," Smith said of lawmakers in both parties. He said removing the limits on party coordination would be a good starting point if candidates want to make it easier to operate in an environment with loads of outside spending.