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Was the Presidency Bought Last Month, or Not?

December 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Over at Mischiefs of Faction, Seth Masket wades into the post-election "Potato Chip Analogy" poli-sci wars, which you can find summarized at The Monkey Cage (the question turns on the fact that Americans spend more money annually on potato chips than they did on the election campaign.) Here's the numbers-crunching professor (and friend of The 101) asking whether six billion bucks for an election cycle is really the corrosive, anti-democratic force it seems to be: ...If campaign spending is bribery, then by God, $6 billion is too much! $100 is too much! But it's not bribery. What exactly ... Read More

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Also on Maplight, Follow your Favorite Initiative

August 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

And one more: to follow the money behind California's upcoming initiatives, go here: votersedge.org/california. (Another Maplight site.) Right now, the data shows that $18.3 million has been raised in support of Jerry Brown's tax initiative (the largest amount comes from SEIU); $85,000 has been raised to fight against it. For the anti-death penalty initiative, $3.9 million has been raised in support, and $136,000 against. We are working on a story for our November issue about that convoluted issue (our national want of the death penalty, if only fair and humane). ... Read More

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Track Your Favorite Super PAC

August 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

For a closer look at where Super PAC money is coming from, see Maplight's State of Influence Super PAC tracker here: http://maplight.org/content/73013. You can also get a breakdown by state of who is funding what. The top funded Super PACs are here: http://maplight.org/content/73011. ... Read More

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Political Infamy Is Raising Money — For Both Sides

July 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One bored weekend in the fall of 2009, political scientist Justin Buchler was sitting at his computer thinking about the things we think about when we think about Michele Bachmann. He typed the congresswoman’s name into Google just to see what suggested search terms would come up. “And very quickly I saw that several of the suggested searches were epithets,” he recalled. More specifically, these were the 10 recommendations: “michele bachmann quotes,” “michele bachmann wiki,” “michele bachmann census,” “michele bachmann photos,” “michele bachmann crazy,” ... Read More

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Federal Contractors May Be Told to Disclose Donations

April 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The White House has been trying for the past year to figure out how to blunt the impact of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision, a controversial ruling that opened a flood of corporate money into political campaigns, often with little disclosure. The president tried publicly scolding the Supreme Court justices in his State of the Union last year. His allies in Congress tried passing a law requiring companies to own up to their newly unrestricted political spending. Failing all that, the White House is mulling another idea — forcing at least those ... Read More

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Following the Money a Year After Citizens United

January 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Last January, critics of the controversial Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision — which knocked down long-running restrictions on corporate campaign money in elections — envisioned an ominous scene. Anonymous corporate millions would flood into closely contested elections, elbowing out the influence of average voters, warned many (including the president). Now, at the decision’s one-year anniversary, hard data is beginning to bear out the grave forecasts, contradicting even some of the Supreme Court’s own predictions. In the wake of Citizens United, outside groups in last ... Read More

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Asking Companies to Reflect Shareholders’ Politics

April 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
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Ever since the Supreme Court endorsed the political free-speech rights of corporations in January in the contentious Citizens United case, the decision’s critics have been searching for ways to blunt the ruling’s impact — preferably before the test case of this fall’s midterm elections. Their ideas generally sidestep the most comprehensive and least likely counter-attack: a full-blown constitutional amendment allowing Congress to regulate political spending by corporations. (Read another way, such an amendment would specify that free speech is for people, not ... Read More

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