Citizens United undermined more than 100 years of campaign finance law when it gave corporations the First Amendment right to spend money in elections. Congress had said in 1907 that corporations did not have that right; that First Amendment rights were the rights...
Non-party organizations form political action committees (PACs) to make the campaign contributions the FECA bans them from making themselves. The FEC defines every PAC as belonging to one of two broad categories: connected and nonconnected. Nearly all connected PACs were formed by corporations, trade...
The point of disclosure is to let voters see who is financing election campaigns. That was why the Supreme Court upheld the disclosure law in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United, and that was the purpose of the law when...
Even a week can be a long time in politics, so predictions about longer periods should be made, and read, with caution. That said, it does not feel like much of a risk to say that the future looks bright for opponents of reform....
By 2015, “outside money” had come to mean spending by super PACs and politically active tax-exempt groups. Super PACs are registered political committees under the FECA and must disclose their donors; their spending is labeled “outside” only because it is done outside the formal...
Congress passed the 1974 FECA amendments in response to the Watergate scandal. The amendments were the most comprehensive revision of campaign finance law in history, but they incorporated most of the laws that had been on the books since the Tillman Act in 1907....
1907
An Act To prohibit corporations from making money contributions in connection with political elections (Public Law 59-36, Tillman Act)
http://legisworks.org/congress/59/session-2/publaw-36.pdf Chap. 420
This was the first federal campaign finance law. The original bill was drafted and introduced by Senator William E. Chandler (R-NH)...
Super PACs are independent expenditure committees that can take contributions of any size from any American individual, corporation, or labor union, and spend without limit. They made a huge splash when they were first formed in 2010, turning candidates’ attention away from the merely...
Public funding for presidential elections was the most controversial and most innovative part of the post-Watergate reforms. It was not controversial with the public, which supported it by large majorities, and every serious presidential contender participated in the program from 1976 through the rest...
The rise of the super PAC was also the rise of the politically active billionaire. Dropping the old restrictions on who could give how much to whom did more than turn the attentions of fundraisers from millionaires to billionaires. It also freed billionaires to...
