Free Republic

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell bluntly warned Republican senators in a private meeting not to sign on to a bill from Sen. Josh Hawley aimed at limiting corporate money bankrolling high-powered outside groups, telling them that many of them won their seats thanks to the powerful super PAC the Kentucky Republican has long controlled. According to multiple sources familiar with the Tuesday lunch meeting, McConnell warned GOP senators that they could face “incoming” from the “center-right” if they signed onto Hawley’s bill. He also read off a list of senators who won their races amid heavy financial support from the...

The Florida political committee once controlled by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis transferred $82.5 million last month to a super PAC supporting his presidential campaign, according to information posted to the committee’s website. The shift of the funds has been anticipated ever since DeSantis entered the race with tens of millions of dollars left over from his 2022 reelection bid. However, the move nevertheless makes official an unprecedented effort by DeSantis allies to test the limits of campaign finance laws to benefit a presidential contender. The Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, has already filed a complaint with the Federal Election...

The governor's state political committee, Friends of Ron DeSantis, had at least $86 million in the bank at the end of April. Federal Election Commission rules state that “a candidate’s authorized (federal) committee may not accept funds or assets transferred from a committee established by the same candidate for a nonfederal election campaign.” But DeSantis' political operation will direct that money to his supportive super PAC thanks to a gray area of federal campaign finance law. It's even possible that a transfer has already taken place, but it would not be made public until the end of the month under...

Vice President Harris hauled in nearly half a million dollars in book royalties during her first year in office, ethics disclosure forms show. Harris reported $325,000 in royalty earnings from her 2019 book “The Truths We Hold,” and another $130,000 for her children’s book “Superheroes Are Everywhere,” Bloomberg reported Friday. The cash far outstripped President Biden’s, who reported between $15,001 and $50,000 in royalties for “Promise Me, Dad,” — a heartfelt 2018 memoir about his late son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015.

A record-shattering tab for TV ads, $12 million for a self-created tech firm to rival Donald Trump’s digital operation and nearly $250,000 on swank office furniture for his sprawling Manhattan headquarters — that was just a fraction of Mike Bloomberg’s budget for the first five weeks of his young, self-funded presidential campaign. Bloomberg’s top two campaign lieutenants, chair Patti Harris and manager Kevin Sheekey, are on track to earn annual salaries of $375,000, according to a campaign aide. And that doesn’t account for the vintage Bloomberg staff bonuses, which totaled $1.5 million the year of his 2005 mayoral race alone....

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, one of the most outspoken members of the anti-Trump ‘resistance’ in Congress, is facing fresh questions about a longstanding controversy regarding how her campaign raises money and how those funds have flowed to her daughter. The California congresswoman has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars each election cycle from some of her state’s biggest politicians paying to be listed on her slate mailers—sample ballots traditionally mailed out to about 200,000 voters in Los Angeles highlighting whom she supports. Since 2004, the campaign in turn reportedly has paid $750,000 to the congresswoman’s daughter, Karen Waters, or her...

Russ Feingold's bad week just got a little worse. A a jaw-dropping expose in the Boston Globe , reports that employees of a prominent Democratic law firm in Boston, had been operating a straw donor scheme to benefit various U.S. Senate campaigns since 2010. The law firm, Strouss and Bradley, would have employees give the maximum legal donations to Democratic Senate campaigns and then reimburse them their money as "bonuses."

Newt Gingrich laid it out perfectly on Sunday. The forced ouster of Mozilla co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich this week was a sign of the "new fascism" of liberalism that's sweeping American life. "People need to realize, if you're a young faculty member, in a lot of places if you're a young member of a news department and you have the wrong views – meaning conservative – you have no career," Gingrich said on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." "This is just the most open and blatant example of the new fascism, which says, 'if you don't agree with us...

News articles concerning the most influential political donors in America typically list the same names: The Koch brothers, George Soros, Sheldon Adelson and, lately, Tom Steyer. But as we reach the end of 2015, none of these billionaires has spent big in the 2016 contest, at least not at an individual candidate level. In their absence, a number of lesser known donors are shaping up to be major players in 2016. Here are five to watch: 1. The DeVos Family We're cheating by including a whole family in our list, but there is no way of separating out this high-spending...

Pointing to the effects of "horrible" super-PACs, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Sunday said America needs to come up with a solution to keep big money out of politics. "Well, I think you need it, because I think PACs are a horrible thing," Trump said on CNN's "State of the Union" when asked if he would pursue campaign finance reform. The billionaire businessman, who said he is self-financing his campaign, said the wall separating super-PACs and candidates running for public office is illusory. "First of all, everyone's dealing with their PAC. You know, it's supposed to be like this...

As Donald Trump leads yet another national poll, the New York Times' Jonathan Martin asks a question that has consumed the political world: Can anyone inside the Republican Party -- via negative TV ads or a scorched-earth campaign -- stop Trump? And if so, do they even have the will do it? "Almost everyone in the party's upper echelons agrees something must be done, and almost no one is willing to do it," Martin writes.*snip* The campaigns and allies for three establishment presidential candidates -- Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich -- have spent a combined $47.5 million in...

MADISON, Wis. — Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, one of the louder critics of speaking fees for government officials, still hasn’t answered his critics’ calls to release the full amount of honoraria the Democrat has pocketed. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel piece this week revealed Feingold took in more than $100,000 in speaking fees between February 2012 and June 2013, much of that money for discussions on the corrupting influence of money in politics. The Wisconsin GOP, however, believes Feingold, the godfather of campaign finance reform, has yet to reveal all of his earnings from speaking engagements before that period. “To...

The IRS documents released by the government watchdog group on April 9 revealed that the senator, along with Senator Carl Levin, pressured the agency to go after political nonprofits – which turned out to be overwhelmingly conservative non-profits.. A May 1, 2013, email exchange between Lois Lerner and other top IRS staffers revealed that 11 days prior to Lerner’s admission in a ABA meeting that the IRS had “inappropriately” targeted conservative groups, she met with select top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a “marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen....

MADISON, Wis. — Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold is doing more than dropping hints that he may seek another run at the seat from which he unceremoniously dumped during the conservative revolution of 2010. Multiple media accounts assert the Wisconsin Democrat has been “reaching out” to supporters — possibly potential donors — in recent weeks to feel out a 2016 Senate bid against first-term Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. But is the man whose name is synonymous with campaign finance reform and expansive political speech policing violating the long-standing federal Hatch Act, which limits executive branch employees like Feingold from politicking...

{THE FILM IS NOT IN GERMAN!] Gut recherchierter Dokumentarfilm, mittels dessen Leute erkären, warum sie nicht besonders scharf darauf sind, Hilary Rodham Clinton als zukünftige Präsidentin zu bekommen. Gegen Hilary ist Bundesmutti eine nette ältere Dame.

Liberals do not understand that the Citizens United v FEC Supreme Court decision is actually a good for free speech and the First Amendment, visiting liberals at the Cato Institute said. Citizens United allowed a conservative group to distribute an anti-Hillary Clinton film. NYU law professor Richard Pildes, a panel member at the Center for Responsive Politics’ recent half-day conference at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. , said that “one of the great myths about Citizens United…is that Citizens United is responsible for the tremendous growth in outside spending since 2010.” “You see many academics and journalists writing stories…comparing...

At the Shadow Party’s "Take Back America" conference in Washington on June 3, 2004, following a glowing introduction from Hillary Clinton, George Soros stepped to the podium to explain to the audience that when it came to electoral politics in the USA, he was a newcomer. Only his outrage over Bush’s invasion of Iraq had stirred him to get involved in the partisan struggle. "[I]t is the first time that I feel that I need to stand up and do something, and become really engaged in the electoral process in this country," Soros said.[1] This was far from the truth,...

A while back, I suggested in this space that Obamacare might go the way of McCain-Feingold. That campaign finance “reform” law was not, you will recall, killed by a single lawsuit or act of Congress. Indeed, the general consensus at the end of 2003 was that McCain-Feingold was in perfect health. Less than seven years later it was, for all intents and purposes, dead. It had succumbed to a long series of attacks by determined opponents who were convinced that it was unconstitutional. Much the same thing is obviously happening to PPACA. Congress has already been compelled to repeal a...

After the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision Wednesday that threw out a cap on the total amount wealthy donors can give to federal candidates in an election season, Democrats and self-proclaimed do-gooders cried foul at the prospect of more big money's tainting Washington politics. Federal law continues to cap individual contributions to congressional candidates at $5,200, but the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decision eliminated the $48,600 cap on the total individuals can contribute to candidates and the $74,600 cap on donations to political committees. An online New York Times story announced, "The ruling, issued near the start...

Justice Clarence Thomas’s influence was on full display in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision to strike down a key campaign finance restriction.  And it’s just one in a string of cases in which Thomas could be dragging the court toward his way of thinking. Chief Justice John Roberts penned Wednesday’s plurality decision, which eliminates the limit on the total dollar amount an individual may give to political candidates and committees.But Thomas, seen by many as the court’s most conservative justice, wrote a concurring opinion that both represented the decisive vote in the 5-4 decision, and beckoned the justices to go further.Thomas...