After losing the 2004 Presidential election, a group of us here started a state-registered PAC. The point of the PAC was to find, promote and elect local candidates who share our views.
The PAC works like this: we collect twelve dollars a year from anyone who wants to join. We spend the money to promote the candidates and causes we support. We’re all volunteers.
I’m the treasurer of the PAC. I’m also a lawyer in private practice. In Ohio, I have to file a campaign finance report at least annually but more often quarterly, depending on PAC activity and the number of elections in any given year.
I follow these rules for filing. Because I’m a lawyer, and I’d like to remain one, I also follow these rules. (pdf).
If I don’t meet the filing deadline (which happened, once) I have to file a form to request an extension. I have hand-delivered this extension request to the county Board of Elections because I wanted to see it time-stamped, so I wouldn’t fret all weekend. I have also sat bolt upright in bed trying to recall if I did indeed attach the receipt for the candy we purchased to pass out at a parade, an episode of obsessive second-guessing every lawyer reading this will recognize.
I’m in favor of campaign finance disclosure, and sunshine laws in general, so I do not mind spending the 40 minutes or an hour it takes to compile the report and file it. In fact, our PAC members enthusiastically supported Jennifer Brunner for Secretary of State, and Jennifer Brunner tightened up the disclosure rules. She ran on it.
The PAC filing is a public record, so anyone in this county who wants to know who we are or who and what we’re backing may read the filing. This is a majority Republican county and I live and work here, as do all of the members of the PAC. Every single elected official countywide is a Republican, with the exception of the mayor of an outlying burg and a member of the school board, and all our PAC donors are Democrats.
Having said all that, I read things like this:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has amended his financial-disclosure forms after a liberal group, Common Cause, said he was failing to report the employment of his wife, conservative activist Virginia Thomas. In filings dated Friday, Justice Thomas asked court officials to amend disclosures going back to 1989, when he served as a federal appellate-court judge. An item on the forms asks judges to disclose any “noninvestment income” for their spouse. The form asks only for the name of the employer or other party paying the spouse and doesn’t seek a dollar figure.
Justice Thomas had checked “none” for that item, but now he wants the forms to reflect the names of the employers for whom Mrs. Thomas worked, including the Heritage Foundation from December 1998 through October 2008 Justice Thomas wrote that the information about his wife’s employment “was inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”
Federal campaign spending by groups other than candidates and parties this election cycle has far outpaced similar spending from the last midterm election and could rival the 2008 presidential campaign. But with recent decisions by the Supreme Court and the Federal Elections Commission, it has become harder to know whose dollars they are.
We went from 98% disclosure in 2004 to 32% disclosure in 2010, after Citizens. It sure has become “harder to know”!
I know Justice Thomas’ inadvertent omission isn’t a campaign finance question, but I do wonder where we’re going with this.
Did we reach some anti-transparency political consensus in this country that I somehow missed? Is sunlight not, in fact, the best disinfectant? See, I don’t think we did. I think most people agree that more information is better than less information, when making a decision on elected leaders. Yet, somehow, we ended up with a situation where local, individual activists are named where they live and work, and national corporate and moneyed interests are carefully protected.
It’s just incredibly dispiriting. If the objective here was to create cynicism and hopelessness in individual citizens, we succeeded. That we did that in the name of protecting and promoting political speech is obscene.
joe from Lowell
I hear you.
I quit the board of my local Habitat for Humanity organization because they wanted to do a project in the town where I had recently started working as a planner. I probably didn’t even need to under the conflict-of-interest laws, but if the people who were opposed to the project had been able to use my service on the board to case aspersions on the activities of the town in reviewing and promoting the project, I never would have been able to live with myself.
And then I read about the blatant, money-based conflicts that these Republican justices skate right over, and it sickens me.
General Stuck
Wingers are like rabid foxes. They fully understand that most raids on the chicken coup, will not be discovered by Ma and Pa Kettle, until it is likely too late, and the results of their mischief just become another pattern in the American Quilt.
This one, CU, will get ugly though, and very corrupt, most likely over time.
mikefromArlington
So now we got a SC justice who’s in the top court interpreting law who can’t follow simple instructions.
Is a lie detector test uncalled for? I mean, we need to know if he’s being sincere since he’s one of the justices determining the interpretation of the law of the land and all.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
The saddest thing of the whole endeavor is that justices could not fill out the form at all, and tell anyone who asks to go throw stones. It’s a voluntary, self-imposed form, and there are no penalties for not filling it out. The only thing keeping the SC justices honest is their own sense of self-respect and due dilligence.
Jason
Haha, non-lawyers can’t understand why you woke up in the middle of the night going “Gahh! The candy!!” But lawyers are nodding along, “yep, yeah, I’ve done that”. It’s a great profession.
Kay
@joe from Lowell:
We had women who wanted to volunteer for Kerry park across the street from the law office for meetings, because they were afraid being identified an activist Democrat would harm their prospects at work.
Which I completely understood, given how “hot” that election was, here locally.
Poopyman
Thanks to giving voice to what I’ve been feeling, Kay. For years.
I’m on an unpaid advisory board for the county and we have to file reports on any financial dealings with the local government. It’s not hard. Thomas’s obvious disdain for disclosure law is in itself obscene in any judge, let alone a SCOTUS judge. Hell, it’s obscene for any common citizen, IMO.
John PM
I think the word inadvertant needs to be placed in quotation marks. Republicans do not do anything “inadvertantly.”
Poopyman
And the most obscene thing is that this is now seen as business as usual for government officials.
fucen tarmal
we secretly replaced rights granted to individual citizens, presumed at the time to be human, with folgers chrystals. lets see if anyone notices, more to the point, if anyone who notices can really stand up to intense scrutiny of their personal coffee expertise.
curious
@mikefromArlington: how crazy is it that the “misinterpretation” was in his favor! for 20 years. so, so lucky.
Mike in NC
Ah, yes, blame the abominable IRS for making those pesky forms so hard to understand and fill out.
RossInDetroit
IOKIYAR. Case closed. For them, spirit of the law takes second place to what you can get away with.
Benjamin Cisco
Feature, not bug, etc.
soonergrunt
Somehow, I think the fact that the impeaching body, the House of Representatives, is in the control of Weepin’ John might have something to do with the timing of this.
Anton Sirius
Bingo.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Also, it’s funny he knew how to fill out the form before 1989, but then all the sudden forgot how.
kay
@soonergrunt:
I am honestly unclear on the bigger issue, as far as political speech/disclosure.
If I want to boycott, say, Koch industries and products, as a response to their political speech opposing the health care law, don’t I have to know the money comes from Koch Industries to do that?
satby
If he’s so stupid he misunderstood disclosure instructions each year for over 20 years, he’s too stupid to be on the Supreme Court.
Can someone go to the next session of the court and scream “You lie” at him?
soonergrunt
@kay: I’m saying that if he had a requirement, even a voluntary one, to disclose certain information, and he failed to do so for twenty years, it’s interesting to me that he finally comes out and rectifies the situation (which is like admitting his failure to comply with the law in the first place) when the one group that can begin the process to remove him from office is now in the hands of people who will never do so.
I don’t know what the law is, so I could be wrong, but for a Supreme Court justice to use that defense, that he didn’t know what the law was, gives me pause about both his integrity and his intelligence.
kay
@soonergrunt:
I haven’t read the rules, so I won’t comment on whether he’s violated any, but I agree with you generally.
IMO, people pay close attention to things they care about. That he would be so cavalier is unsettling. I’m assuming he signed it, which is (in my experience) understood as his assurance it’s accurate and complete. Too, the WSJ article I linked to shows the form. This is not unclear. It’s a straightforward, plain-language query.
Elie
@General Stuck:
Hello General — good to see you —
I totally agree but am hopeful that we will eventually move to a new and better phase…
I believe that our American society – both political and social, is undergoing very significant upheaval as part of a process of change. Our status in the world has shifted as well.
I dont think we can know ultimately how things will shake out, but I am hopeful that people DO actually see through this. I just hope we can build the energy and will for making change more broadly in the general voting population. I acknowledge that things may get worse before they get better though…
debbie
It’s been a little over two hours since this thread was posted. Have Thomas’s defenders played the race card yet?
debbie
@soonergrunt:
His sudden “fix” is of a piece with his wife’s recent demand for an apology for something that happened years and years ago. They’re a perfect couple.
Ash Can
@debbie:
They have in the comment thread of the WSJ article, at least.
cmorenc
It bothers me quite a bit more than the failure-to-disclose that a sitting US Supreme Court Justice’s wife is regularly employed by any sort of hard-core ideological legal activist organization, left or right. Yes, the male or female spouse of a Supreme Court Justice has every right to follow an independent career, but OTOH when that spouse’s employment raises, with frequent recurrence, at least a vivid appearance of conflict with cases being decided by the spouse on SCOTUS, then it’s time either for one spouse or the other to yield and move on to different employment where there is no such conflict, or else at the very least for the justice on SCOTUS to recuse themselves on any case where their spouse’s activities create a strong appearance of conflict.
Kat
@Kay: We went from 98% disclosure in 2004 to 32% disclosure in 2010, after Citizens. … Did we reach some anti-transparency political consensus in this country that I somehow missed?
I just heard on Thom Hartmann this morning that in the Citizens United ruling, the justices wrote that Congress should pass a law requiring transparency. The House passed such a law, but only 59 Senators voted for it, so it didn’t pass the Senate.
I ingest a lot of political news on a regular basis, but today was the first time I’d heard about the justices’ recommendation of transparency in their CU ruling, or about the transparency legislation failing to pass by one vote in the Senate.
Kat
@Kay: If I want to boycott, say, Koch industries and products, as a response to their political speech opposing the health care law, don’t I have to know the money comes from Koch Industries to do that?
I know this is not your main point but, I’d say your biggest problem would be figuring out which brands of which products contribute to the Koch brothers’ bottom line. So far, the only two that have stuck in my memory are Brawny paper towels and Stainmaster carpet. Can anybody here link us to a complete list?
kay
@Kat:
I just find the argument against disclosure to be so damaging, because it plays into this nonsense conservatives are promoting that any push-back against their speech is somehow “silencing” them.
WTF? How did we go from “lively debate” to “I get to scream at you, but you can’t say anything back?”
They’re turning this whole idea on its head. Again. They’re redefining it.