Are Liberals Fund-Raising Hypocrites?
Let’s imagine that Republicans swept the 2012 elections and were now in control not merely of the House but of the presidency and the Senate, too.
Now let’s take it one step further and say that by using the filibuster the Democratic minority in the Senate had successfully blocked President Romney’s appointments to federal district and appellate court judgeships.
What if, faced with this Democratic intransigence, the conservative Federalist Society helped devise a strategy to revamp Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster so that judicial nominees could be confirmed by a simple majority instead of the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster?
The elimination of the filibuster has allowed President Romney to appoint three judges to the critically important United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, establishing a decisive 7 to 4 conservative majority on that bench. What’s more, two of the the three judges newly appointed by President Romney are members of the Federalist Society and the new conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit is now positioned to rule Obamacare unconstitutional.
The Koch brothers — recall we are still in an alt-hypothetical universe — reward the Federalist Society by directing 100 loyal billionaires to contribute to the group.
Would these developments provoke liberal outrage?
They certainly would.
But it’s not only the right that uses secretive organizations to keep rich donors anonymous while it seeks to influence elections and policy. Liberals do the same, and the press in large part gives them a pass.
As you no doubt realized while you were reading, the hypothetical described above did not take place, but something approximating it did. Instead of Republican offenders, the players were President Obama, a Democratic Senate, the progressive American Constitution Society, and the Democracy Alliance, a network of very wealthy liberal donors.
Here’s what the Democratic Party and its allies actually did. The American Constitution Society — the left counterpart to the Federalist Society — helped lay the intellectual groundwork for Senate Democrats to put an end to filibusters of judicial nominees.
The elimination of judicial filibusters in November 2013 allowed Democrats to approve, by simple majority, three of Obama’s appointees to the United States Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, giving liberals a 7-4 majority.
Because of the administrative law and national security cases it hears, the D.C. Circuit is considered the second most important court in the nation.
The significance of the confirmation of three new Democratic appointees to the court became apparent in July, when a three-judge panel of the court ruled 2-1 in Halbig v. Burwell that residents of the 36 states that use the federal health care exchange were ineligible for subsidized insurance under Obamacare. The panel’s decision appeared to be a potentially crippling blow to the Affordable Care Act. The two judges in the majority on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents, the dissenter by a Democrat.
On Sept. 4, however, the full Circuit Court of Appeals decided to set aside the three-judge panel decision and rehear the case en banc – that is, with all 11 judges, a majority of whom are now Democratic appointees.
Has there been an outcry about Democratic court packing? Only in a right-wing online publication, the Washington Free Beacon, “Democracy Alliance Bankrolled Court-Packing Scheme,” and on the conservative website Breitbart.com, “Exclusive - Leftist Money, Harry Reid Trying to Hijack ‘Sanctity of the Independent Federal Judiciary.’ ”
But the story does not end there. Conservatives claim that the Democracy Alliance is at the core of a liberal conspiracy.
Mark Holden, general counsel at Koch Industries, contends that the Democracy Alliance orchestrates the activities of a permanent “left infrastructure” with ties to 172 organizations, each determined to attack the Koch brothers’ agenda of free enterprise and democratic capitalism.
In a speech he gave to a closed meeting of conservative donors in Dana Point, Calif., on June 16, “The Opposition: Understanding Their Strategy and Infrastructure,” Holden, speaking about liberal organizations, argued that
Of course, they don’t have to worry about the media like we do. The media will lie for them. They basically own them in many ways.
The Koch organization network is well known for its secretiveness. Holden suggested that “their [Democracy Alliance] bottom line is not that different than ours, but in some ways they’re much better at it.”
A tape and transcript of Holden’s speech were released by the left-leaning website Lady Libertine which, by its own account, seeks “to unite the disenfranchised and resurrect the American Dream.” Holden confirmed its veracity in an email to The Huffington Post.
Despite Holden’s argument that the liberal and conservative “dark money” networks are equivalent, there are substantial differences between them.
The Democracy Alliance is an organization of roughly 100 very rich men and women who agree to contribute at least $200,000 annually to a list of roughly 20 liberal think tanks and advocacy groups, according to documents obtained by Politico. The Alliance itself makes no contributions. Nor does it pay for television ads or engage in other direct campaign activity.
In effect, the Alliance helps guide an estimated $30 million a year. It does not disclose its members or the groups that are recipients of its members’ contributions, although a substantial amount of information has been gleaned by enterprising reporters.
The projected total budgets of the endorsed organizations for 2014, according to the documents, are $189.2 million, of which the $30 million from Democracy Alliance partners would amount to nearly 15 percent.
The Alliance does not claim tax-exempt status.
In contrast, the Koch network is overwhelmingly made up of tax-exempt organizations claiming either 501(c)4 or 501(c)6 exempt status. Many of the Koch organizations spend money on political ads. The Center for Responsive Politics and the Washington Post estimated that in the 2011-12 election cycle, the Koch network of political, tax-exempt nonprofits raised at least $400 million.
Gara LaMarche, the president of Democracy Alliance, defended his members, who have been accused of hypocrisy. The charge, coming from both the left and right, LaMarche wrote, centers “on the assertion that progressive wealthy donors are spending a lot of money in elections when they also claim to be for getting money out of elections.”
LaMarche countered in an email that
there is a big difference between this and the Kochs and their ilk. Our donors are using the current political system to bring about laws and policies that would change that system in a way that gives their wealth less weight. Not to mention advocating policies that would often tax or regulate them more.
In contrast, political spending by the Kochs and their allies
is in effect a business expense — it coincides with and advances their bottom line financial interests. There’s a moral distinction here.
David Brock, the chairman of Media Matters, which is one of the groups endorsed by the Alliance, made a similar argument at a Democracy Alliance meeting in Santa Fe in June:
You’re not in this room today trying to figure out how to rig the game so you can be free to make money poisoning little kids. Subscribing to a false moral equivalence is giving the Kochs exactly what they want: keeping us quiet about what they’re doing to destroy the very fabric of our nation.
Brock and LaMarche’s argument is politically risky. Claiming the moral high ground to assert that you can do something that your morally crippled adversaries cannot is one of the more effective strategies to alienate people.
Liberals are not alone in the gravity of their claims. Officials of Koch Industries contend there have been “death threats against the Kochs and threats against our facilities.” They like to cite a 1958 Supreme Court decision, N.A.A.C.P. v. Alabama, in which the court unanimously backed the N.A.A.C.P.’s refusal to turn over its membership list to the Alabama Attorney General on the basis that release of the names would put the lives of N.A.A.C.P. members in danger.
The leadership of the Democracy Alliance is now queasy about its policies on anonymous donations. The Koch organizations remain adamant in their refusal to disclose donors.
In a series of emails and phone conversations, LaMarche said that he is pressing members of the Alliance to be more open. He would like, for example, to list the names of those willing to give up their privacy. He also said that he expects the Alliance to adopt a policy of releasing the names of the organizations to which it recommends its members make contributions.
“The more transparent we can be, the better. Progressive values are much more in line with transparency,” LaMarche said during our conversation.
Koch officials declined to answer my question, “Is transparency a good thing in democratic politics?”
Political spending by dark money groups that do not disclose donors is on track to break all previous records. By some calculations, such spending accounts for more than half the media outlay in current House and Senate races.
Robert Maguire, who set up the Politically Active Nonprofits Project at the Center for Responsive Politics, reported on Sept. 4 that “dark money organizations have already dropped $68 million on air time alone in Senate and House races, making up 56 percent of all the spending.”
Publications like Mother Jones are warning that the 2014 elections will be the start of a “Dark-Money Apocalypse.” If recent Supreme Court rulings stand and the Federal Election Commission continue to refuse to regulate political groups that do not disclose contributors, dark money spending will at some point in the not-too-distant future become the single most important source of election cash in the key battleground contests that determine which party controls the House and Senate. This is already the case for some Republican candidates in tight contests.
In the North Carolina Senate race, for example, Thom Tillis, the Republican challenger, has so far spent $3.23 million. Conservative dark money groups have invested twice that, $6.7 million, in his candidacy. Kay Hagen, the incumbent Democrat, has raised $7.96 million, and liberal dark money groups have spent $2.1 million.
The Center for Responsive Politics has demonstrated that in the top eight 2014 Senate races, dark money tilts decisively to the right: $28 million spent by conservative groups, $12.3 million by liberal organizations.
In the long run, the relatively modest (but growing) dependence of Democrats on dark money, mega-dollar contributors to “super PACs” and other funding mechanisms is corrupting, even as it comes alongside the party’s parallel success in building a powerful small donor base. On issues of taxes, regulation, spending and campaign finance, the Republican Party has established itself as the advocate of the wealthiest Americans. Insofar as the Democratic Party moves in the same direction, it will be unable to act as a counterbalance to the right.
While neither the left nor the right has clean hands, liberals have far more to lose, and much less to gain, from continued hypocrisy.
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