Campaign Financing: Small House In Tampa Ground Zero For Mega Millions In Campaign Donations
A little over a year ago, no-party gubernatorial candidate Bud Chiles stood outside an off-white single-story building with a carefully manicured lawn in suburban Tampa and said, “This building behind me is ground zero for what’s wrong with Florida politics.”
The building’s address: 610 South Blvd., a designation found on the financial disclosure forms of countless political committees in Florida and all over the country. The unassuming building nestled in an unassuming neighborhood is a veritable political action committee mill, churning out millions of dollars and influencing elections all over the country.
The kicker: What is happening at 610 South Blvd. is completely legal.
Chiles — who eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Democratic candidate Alex Sink — was echoing the thoughts of millions of Americans who feel that too much money goes into our country’s political system, and we know way too little about where it comes from.
610 South Blvd. provides insight into a commonly overlooked aspect of campaign financing: Because so few people understand the nuances of campaign money, politicians and activists have a limited number of places to turn to when starting a committee. That leads to a high concentration of candidates and committees at a few select addresses, none more infamous in Florida political circles than 610 South Blvd.
Nancy and Robert Watkins together run Robert Watkins and Co., the accounting firm located at 610. Thirty-nine political committees are currently registered under the address with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The committees registered there have conservative leanings and ties exclusively to Republican politicians.
The organizations range from leadership PACs, 501(c)4s and 527s to campaign committee PACs and even a handful of Super PACs — a new and controversial type of PAC that allows groups to raise unlimited funds from corporations, individuals and unions. And these groups tend to bring in big money. In 2010, one of the Super PACs at 610 raised more than $4 million.
Watkins and Co. also has 19 state PAC clients filed with the Florida Division of Elections.
Nancy Watkins says her firm’s impressive number of clients exists because she has been in the business for more than 25 years. According to her, 610 South Blvd. is an “official address” for many groups “for a lot of reasons.” Mostly, she says, the firm provides a reliable and “durable mailing address” for all her clients.
Meredith McGehee — the policy director for The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works in the area of campaign finance and elections — tells The Florida Independent there are no rules against multiple PACs sharing an address.
McGehee calls the FEC’s rules for what passes as coordination among these groups “ridiculous,” and says that even if groups follow FEC rules, their activities would probably not “pass a smell test for regular people.”
According to McGehee, as long as the groups do not coordinate with each other in a way that violates FEC laws, they can communicate, work together and share an address. She calls the FEC’s rules for what passes as coordination among these groups “ridiculous,” and says that even if groups follow FEC rules, their activities would probably not “pass a smell test for regular people.”
“The rules are so loose,” she says. “So there is a lot they can do. They can coordinate in common sense terms — just not legal terms.”
McGehee says these groups, for example, can share an office and “talk about general strategy” and still not violate FEC coordination rules.
Watkins says the fact that all her clients share her address “does not create a relationship between them.” She says everything done at her business is ethical, and that she does not talk to one client about another.
Federal policy-makers from all over the country turn to Watkins and Co. for their services. Former Sen. Mel Martinez and Reps. Katherine Harris, Rick Renzi and Pat Roberts are among those with ties to 610 South Blvd. In 2008, Mike Huckabee registered his Florida presidential campaign committee with the firm.
Most have created their own leadership PACs with the company. Leadership PACs are political action committees that “can be established by current and former members of Congress as well as other prominent political figures,” according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Center, a nonpartisan research group, explains that “leadership PACs are designed for two things: to make money and to make friends. In the rough and tumble political game, elected officials know that money and friends in high places are very important to winning elections and leadership positions.”
Watkins and Co., however, are not only providing leadership PAC services for folks in D.C. The firm also houses the paperwork for a number of state PACs, or committees of continuous existence, associated with GOP members of the Florida Legislature. Steve Precourt, Ellyn Bogdanoff, Jack Latvala, Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, Anitere Flores, Steve Crisafulli and Kevin Ambler, to name a few, all run campaign finance activity through 610 South Blvd.
Furthermore, these state PACs associated with Florida legislators have raked in a lot of money. In the year 2011 alone, these committees have brought in about $400,000. Latvala’s PAC has raised about $230,000 this year.
The office building also serves as the home for four Super PACs, controversial independent expenditure-only committees. Super PACs are a new kind of political action committee created in the wake of the federal court case SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, which loosened up previous campaign finance regulations.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Super PACs “may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates.” Thanks to new rules, Super PACs can receive unlimited amounts of money from a corporation’s treasuries (i.e. profits), something that was previously illegal.
Super PACs do have to report their donors to the FEC on a monthly or quarterly basis; unlike traditional PACs, they cannot contribute money directly to political candidates.
As of Oct. 18, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that 156 committees are registered as Super PACs and have already “reported total expenditures of $2,596,787 in the 2012 cycle.”
The Super PACs listed under 610 South Blvd. include a conservative committee called the Coalition to Protect American Values; the Ending Spending Fund, a group that ran attack ads in Nevada against Harry Reid; the We Love USA PAC, a Super PAC famous for saying Obama is a “socialist” who “detests America”; and Dick Morris’ Super PAC for America.
The Super PACs listed under 610 South Blvd. include a conservative committee called the Coalition to Protect American Values; the Ending Spending Fund, a group that ran attack ads in Nevada against Harry Reid; the We Love USA PAC, a Super PAC famous for saying Obama is a “socialist” who “detests America”; and Dick Morris’ Super PAC for America.
The firm is also contracted by more traditional PACs, such as the American Issues Project. The group is known for spending $3 million on ads during the 2008 election tying the former founder of the Weather Underground Bill Ayers to Barack Obama. Most recently, the group focused on attacking the president’s stimulus legislation in 2010.
Also at 610: Florida Working Families, a PAC funded primarily by Big Sugar, notorious for its significant political reach in Florida and all over the country. Working Families launched negative ads against Jim Davis, attacking him for missing a vote in support of Israel, and successfully attacked Mary Barley, an environmental activist who ran in the Democratic primary for agricultural commissioner in 2002.
Watkins and Co. also provides services to a PAC funded by developers, lobbyists, builder’s groups and the Florida Chamber of Commerce called Floridians for Smarter Growth. The group was among the political forces opposing last election’s Amendment 4, known as the “Hometown Democracy” amendment. According to Ballotpedia, the amendment “proposed requiring a taxpayer-funded referendum for all changes to local government comprehensive land-use plans.” Floridians for Smarter Growth launched a successful attack against the amendment and coined (.pdf) the phrase the “Vote on Everything Amendment.”
In total, about 50 different PACs get their financial assistance and guidance from Watkins and Co.
According to the IRS’ records of tax-exempt groups, there are also four 527s using the address. 527s are advocacy groups that electioneer, and spend millions on a variety of positions and issues. While they may not explicitly tell voters to cast their ballots for a specific candidate, they clearly affect the way voters see a candidate or issue.
Watkins and Co. also handles the finances for a handful of tax-exempt nonprofits, including 501(c)4 organization. New rules now allow these types of groups to spend the money they raise anonymously, because their “primary activity” is lobbying.
McGehee says these sorts of details “reveal how the system really works” in elections.
Most people, she says, have little to no participation in this part of the political process. “About .08 percent of the population will spend more that $200 in an election cycle,” McGehee says.
Echoing Watkins, McGehee says that only a select few have the campaign finance expertise that Nancy and Robert Watkins provide, which contributes to the high number of clients 610 South Blvd. works with.
According to McGehee, there is also “a desire among these groups to know what everyone else is doing.” She says that is why the firm works exclusively with conservative groups and GOP policy-makers. ”It is rare that someone is serving both sides,” McGehee says. “It’s not accidental.”
The high concentration of key players in campaign financing — whether it is contributors or accountants — has led to a situation in which the political process is dominated by very few people. McGehee says that people have noticed, even though new rules have done nothing to correct the situation.
“There has always been this populist strain, whether its the tea party or Occupy Wall Street,” McGehee says, “that knows — and is angry about — our political system being dominated by monied interests.”
By: Ashley Lopez, Florida Independent, Published in The Washington Independent, October 24, 2011
Partisanship: Blame Grover Norquist, Not The Founders
Everyone recognizes that Washington is not working the way it should. This has led some on the left, like Harold Meyerson, to question whether the Founders “screwed up.”
Many on the right, meanwhile, are promoting radical changes to our constitutional system. They talk about a version of a Balanced Budget Amendment, which would require a super-majority for most changes in financial policy. This would enshrine in our Constitution the right’s do-little government philosophy.
But the Constitution is not the problem. If we want to get Washington working again, we should listen to the Founders — not blame them for problems of our own making or change the ground rules of the system of government they bequeathed to us.
True, the Founders established a deliberative democracy, with a series of checks and balances designed to prevent the majority from running roughshod over the rights of political minorities. But these checks and balances have served our nation well.
The problem is not the democratic system bestowed upon us by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. The problem is the additional obstacles to action – the filibuster, hyper-partisanship, and special interest pledges – that our Founders would have found abhorrent.
Our Founders struck a delicate balance between the promotion of majority rule – the essential predicate for a democratic government of “We the People” – and the desire to protect minority rights and prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” The Constitution is designed to delay and temper majority rule while allowing a long-standing majority to get its way.
So, for example, the Constitution staggers the election of senators so that only one third of the Senate can change hands in any one election. As a result, it usually takes more than one election for any one party to gain a governing majority.
Modern politicians have placed layer after layer of lard on this deliberative system of government, ultimately producing the gridlock now plaguing Washington. The Senate Republicans now use the filibuster rule as a virtual requirement. Every piece of legislation must enjoy a super-majority of 60 votes in the Senate — meaning a determined minority can permanently stop the majority from getting its way.
President George Washington, in his farewell address to the nation, warned about just such “alterations” to our constitutional system. He said this would “impair the energy of the system.”
Washington also decried political parties. He passionately warned the nation against any effort “to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party.”
While political parties were forming and solidifying even as Washington uttered these words, our modern politicians have enshrined hyper-partisanship through tricks like the “majority of the majority” rule, whereby the House speaker will only bring to the House floor legislation that has the support of the majority of his political party.
It is hard to imagine a more powerful example of the precise party-over-country danger Washington warned us about.
Washington may have had the likes of Grover Norquist in mind when he warned that some men “will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Even anti-tax Republicans, like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Rep, Frank Wolf, have now decried the oversized role Norquist’s no new taxes pledge played in forcing the debt ceiling showdown and helping to prevent any solution that would have included new revenues. Coburn and others have warned their colleagues against putting Norquist’s “no–tax” pledge over their oath to support the Constitution and to serve “we the people” – not Norquist or any other special interests.
Washington today has serious problems, but we should not blame the city’s namesake for them. Rather, politicians of both parties should support a reform agenda designed to remove from our political system the modern procedural obstacles that have produced our current gridlock.
Maybe even in these divided political times we can all agree that when casting blame for what ails Washington, the fault it not with George Washington and our other Founding Fathers. It’s with the causes of our current gridlock – including figures like Norquist and his no-tax pledge.
By: Doug Kendall, Opinion Contributor, Politico, October 22, 2011
The GOP’s Latest Tax Gimmickry: Soak The Poor
It’s one of the strangest things in our politics: The only “big” ideas Republicans and conservatives seem to offer these days revolve around novel and sometimes bizarre ways of cutting taxes on rich people.
Given all the attention that Herman Cain’s nonsensical and regressive 9-9-9 tax plan has received, the Republican debates should have as their soundtrack that old Beatles song that droned on about the number nine.
Now, Texas Gov. Rick Perry hopes to pump up his campaign with a supposedly bold proposal to institute a flat tax, which would also deliver more money to the well-off. Perry plans to outline his proposal this week, but he has already touted it as a sure-fire way of “scrapping the 3 million words of the current tax code.”
There is absolutely nothing new about this idea, and candidates who pushed flat taxes in the past saw their campaigns flat-line, most prominently businessman Steve Forbes in 1996 and again in 2000. Politically, the idea falls apart rather quickly when middle-income voters realize that its main effect is to cut taxes on the financially privileged while usually raising them on Americans who have more modest incomes.
Note to Perry: Voters are shrewd in figuring out whether tax proposals really benefit them. That’s why raising taxes on millionaires — the exact opposite of what Cain and Perry want to do — wins support from a broad majority.
But the more interesting question is: Why are today’s Republicans so enthralled by tax gimmicks? Their party, after all, was once innovative in thinking about affirmative uses of government. The Grand Old Party instituted the Homestead Act and created land-grant colleges, the interstate highway system, student loans, the Pure Food and Drug Act and even a prescription drug benefit under Medicare.
It was Richard Nixon who supported laws establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In signing the OSHA bill, Nixon called it “one of the most important pieces of legislation, from the standpoint of 55 million people who will be covered by it, ever passed by the Congress of the United States, because it involves their lives.” Yes, government regulations save lives, a view now heretical in the GOP.
Republicans have boxed themselves into a rejection of both their own traditions and the idea that government can do any good. Thus they have confined themselves to endless fiddling with the tax code. Almost everything conservatives suggest these days is built around the single idea that if only government took less money away from the wealthy, all our problems would magically disappear.
There is a history to this. The Republican fixation on taxes dates to the mid-1970s, when supply-side economics began taking hold. The late Jude Wanniski, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal who campaigned indefatigably on behalf of lower marginal tax rates, came up with the “Two Santa Clauses” theory. He argued that if Democrats earned support by giving voters benefits through government programs, Republicans should play Santa by giving people tax cuts.
Wanniski sold his tax ideas to Jack Kemp, one of the most ebullient political figures of his generation, who in turn sold them to Ronald Reagan. Reagan made Kemp’s 30 percent tax cut (co-sponsored with Sen. Bill Roth) a centerpiece of his 1980 campaign. The political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams perfectly described the result in a 1981 essay. “After years of learning that ‘you don’t shoot Santa Claus,’ ” he wrote, “the Republicans decided to nominate him.”
But Republicans have a problem now. In the Kemp-Reagan days, they were selling across-the-board tax cuts. Most of their benefits flowed to the rich, but almost everyone got a piece. Today, many Republicans complain resentfully that less prosperous Americans don’t pay enough in taxes — overlooking the fact that citizens who don’t pay income taxes still shell out a significant share of their earnings in payroll, sales and (directly or through their rents) property taxes.
Reagan’s optimism has thus been replaced by crabby put-downs of the less affluent. Perry said it directly in his announcement speech: “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” Considering the other injustices in our society, this seems an odd and mean-spirited obsession.
“Tax the poor” is a lousy political slogan. That’s why Cain’s 9-9-9 plan and Perry’s flat tax are doomed to fail. Among conservatives, Santa Claus has given way to Scrooge.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 21, 2011
How Fox News Is Really Destroying The Republican Party
Would more House Republicans rather have John Boehner‘s job or Sean Hannity’s? How many Republican presidential candidates would rather be in a Fox News studio than the White House? The wave of stunt candidates so far — Donald Trump, Herman Cain — and those who have opted out of the race to keep their TV gigs — Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin — suggests the answer is a non-zero number. Even seemingly serious establishment candidate Tim Pawlenty has reportedly hit up Roger Ailes for a post-campaign contract (Ailes shot him down.) If the GOP‘s presidential circus this year has taught us anything it’s the allure of conservative media over Republican politics, and media seems to be winning.
Tea Partiers have two career tracks: get elected or become a pundit. And it often seems like they’re using one to audition for the other. Louisiana Rep. Tom Graves, whom his local newspaper describes as a guy with “a far noisier, more peppery style, [who has] proven quite adept at drawing free media attention,” is one of the House freshmen who, as we noted earlier, House Speaker John Boehner is having a hard time controlling, largely because the top Republican on Capitol Hill doesn’t have much to offer him. Graves, of course, is a popular guest on Fox.
Donald Trump scored a regular spot on Fox & Friends by claiming his researchers had found evidence Obama might not have been born in America. He’s not a big fundraiser, he’s not a policy wonk, and the majority of Americans don’t like him, but candidate after candidate has lined up to meet with him in Manhattan, not some farm in Iowa. Sarah Palin, too, pretended to run for president for months, only to opt to keep her day job as paid TV analyst, which she said would leave her “unshackled.” Mike Huckabee, who was in the top two in national polls for the first half of the year, decided to stay on the network having just built a nice mansion for himself in Florida. Fox cancelled Rick Santorum‘s Fox contract when he started running for president, but given that Santorum lost his last election in 2006, it might be nice to get that job back once he loses this one too. Michele Bachmann rose to prominence with her many cable news interviews, but in recent months, she’s been undone by her own unscriptedness, implying vaccines cause mental retardation just because a woman walked up to her and told her so. That might be something a conservative talk show host can get away with, but much harder on the campaign trail.
And then there’s Herman Cain. He’s going through a crisis of seriousness despite ascent in the polls, in no small part because he seems more interested in selling books than building a political organization that can win elections. At least, as he told Businessweek‘s Joshua Green, he’s not being greedy about it. “I’m still doing paid speeches,” Cain told Green, “But I have not raised my prices. This economy’s on life support, so I’m very mindful of those companies that would like to have me come and speak. But I’m not gonna take advantage of my newfound popularity just to put more dollars in my pocket.” Yet!
Is it any wonder why the only guy who seems to want the GOP’s nomination more than he wants a timeslot on Fox News is the one who’s already too rich to care about Roger Ailes’s money?
By: Elspeth Reeve, The Atlantic Wire, October 20, 2011
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