It is said that money talks, and indeed, individuals with great wealth want to influence this year’s election to serve their own purposes: Enter the Super PAC. Super Political Action Committees (super PACs) are a new paradigm in campaign finance that has arisen out of the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court case in 2010. The effect of the Court’s decision is that individuals, or individuals grouped togethe...
...again in its reversal of the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling on Montana’s campaign finance laws this past year, the Court has greatly enhanced the influence corporations and unions have on the political process. “Super PACs” with unlimited budgets have arisen, which, though supposedly independent, almost always directly support individual political campaigns, often through undisclosed donors. These organizations seem to defy the very idea...
...fer anyone else but a freshman Tea Party representative who may or may not have likened the Democratic Party to the Nazi propaganda machine, according to the Washington Post. Stephen Colbert offers College students “Super Fun Pack” For those college students who wanted to start a super PAC, a fundraising entity that can take unlimited money from donors, they need to look no further than the website of comedian Stephen Colbert’s PAC. Americans For...
9 p.m. EST Wednesday night. Grab your popcorn and plop down in front of the television, because I hear the networks are carrying it. The presidential debates. It’s the Super Bowl of electoral politics. And boy, am I excited. Romney’s series of gaffes and his subsequent slip in the polls has granted political pundits and network executives the license to raise the stakes of the customary 90 minutes mildly contentious conversation to an ev...
In the 2008 election, Senator McCain frequently criticized then-Senator Obama for his connection to, among other unsavory figures, the fiery and controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Recently, a pro-Republican Super PAC announced their plan to dig up the Wright card and use it against Obama in election advertisements. However, using Wright in any way to attack Obama, or even mentioning Wright at all, would be about the most foolish thing eithe...
ver the past decade is a Homeric epithet) and the Pokémon-quoting Herman Cain (whose 9-9-9 plan confirmed that simplicity, truly, is marketing gold), defeat in the Republican primary has been a matter of allowing the media to package your campaigns into a central flaw. Success, all the same, has been a matter of defying the media’s labels. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” was a task Ms. “Crazy-Eyes” made extremely...
...l undermining by a liberal agenda through the upholding of Roe vs. Wade, and what could be the passage of Obamacare. Liberals will claim that the Supreme Court continues to serve an oligarchy by defending vast corporate super PAC contributions, choosing presidents, and upholding a broken health care system. This court decision will not only affect the manner in which we interact with our government, but also how heated the election season will be...
photo from Wikimedia Commons It was inevitable that President Obama and Vice President Biden would begin attacking Mitt Romney’s former role as co-founder and head of the highly successful Bain Capital private equity firm. Voters got a preview of this sort of attack back during the primaries, when a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC released a laughably misinformed video slamming Romney for the failure of a few companies in which Bain had invested. N...
...aps most importantly, campaign finance laws must be reformed to limit the ability of corporations to determine the direction of American politics. In October, Chevron proudly made a $2.5 million donation to a Republican Super PAC, and the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that Mitt Romney received nearly $5 million in donations from the oil and gas industry. It is unacceptable that corporations, as McKibben puts it, “have far more free wil...
...Romney’s campaign. She spoke at an exclusive Romney weekend fundraiser in Utah, where attendees had to pay $50,000, and received rave reviews – click here to listen to the audio. Rice also recently became involved in a Super PAC, called ShePAC, for conservative women. Not to anyone’s surprise, like all other potential nominees, she avoids the subject and completely rejects her being chosen as Romney’s number-two, quite expertly I may add – she p...
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