Tag Archives: Citizens United

November 2, 2011 · 7:57 pm

Who’s Paying for the GOP’s Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election? | Mother Jones

Big money may well be the death of democracy in the U.S…..

Elections can be bought here just like in any third world banana republic…

Mainly thanks to the Roberts Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, but there are other loopholes that need to be closed…..

And  I have decided it’s time to do away with the Electoral College.  It’s become just another tool for the GOP to manipulate.

Remember Al Gore got more popular votes than George W. Bush.  It was the Electoral College and the Supreme Court that gave us President George W. Bush.

I wonder if it’s not already too late to save popular Democracy in the U.S.A…..

From MotherJones.com:

Over the past six months, someone—or a group of someones—has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund an effort to change the rules of the 2012 presidential election to make it very difficult for President Barack Obama to win reelection. But the shadowy lobbying group mounting this campaign hasn’t disclosed its donors—and under current law, it doesn’t have to.

In two states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, GOP legislators have introduced bills that would change how electoral votes—a candidate needs 270 of the 538 to win the presidency—are awarded in a presidential election. Under the current system, the winner of the statewide popular vote receives all of the electoral votes from that state.

If the Republican plan becomes law in either Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, those states would change how electoral votes are awarded. The new plan would allot electoral votes on the basis of vote totals within congressional districts. If a candidate wins a congressional district, he or she would receive one electoral college vote. Whoever does best in the statewide race would receive two electoral votes.

Because Republicans will draw the boundaries of the congressional districts in both states, the new rules would mean that Obama could win the states but still receive fewer electoral votes than his Republican opponent. Should a Republican split the states’ electoral votes with Obama (even if Obama draws more votes), that could provide the GOPer with the margin of victory in a close race. (Under the US Constitution, it is up to the states to allot electoral votes as they see fit.)

In Pennsylvania, a secretive nonprofit group called All Votes Matter has been pushing the electoral vote scheme since May. All Votes Matter has close ties to the Pennsylvania GOP—it hired a number of former top state Senate staffers-turned-lobbyists. “It was pretty much the Senate GOP All Star Lobbying Team and [former state House Democratic Counsel Bill] Sloane,” Peter DeCoursey, the bureau chief for Capitolwire, a newswire that’s read religiously by Harrisburg insiders*, explained in September.

Between April and June, the group spent $77,700 to lobby state officials to support legislation to implement this scheme. By early September, GOP Gov. Tom Corbett and the state House and Senate leaders, Mike Turzai and Dominic Pileggi, both Republicans, had all expressed their support for the idea. It was “the best $77,700 anyone ever spent on potential legislation,” DeCoursey wrote. “The entire state governing wing [was] for a bill that [hadn’t] been introduced yet.”

A week later, though, the landscape had changed significantly. Mother Jones and other national media outlets drew widespread attention to the story, and the state GOP chairman and the vast majority of its congressional delegation came out against the plan.

via Who’s Paying for the GOP’s Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election? | Mother Jones.

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October 30, 2011 · 3:03 pm

Outside Groups Eclipsing G.O.P. As Hub of Campaigns – NYTimes.com

More fallout from the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed unlimited Corporate money to flow into Campaigns.

Now the Corporations and their billionaire leaders can simply buy candidates and campaigns outright instead of having to use the political parties as a middle man.

And they don’t have to deal with all those messy campaign finance regulations the Political Parties have to deal with…..

Karl Rove and this merry Band of Billionaires are already planning how to put their agenda into play next year.

This is going to be nasty.  It’s going to be a campaign season like we’ve never seen before with all this unlimited Corporate Cash spreading lies, disinformation and propaganda from the Presidential Campaign level (the Koch brothers and their Astroturf candidate Herman Cain) all the way down to the School Board races (See Art Pope in NC).

I’m really not sure our Democracy can survive this…..

I think it may be too late- the Corporate Coup d’etat may have already happened and we are just now realizing it….

From today’s New York Times:

At a time when the Republican National Committee remains weighed down by debt, outside conservative groups, freed from contribution limits by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year, are playing an ever larger role and operating in an increasingly coordinated fashion. In the coming months, the conservative groups will consult among themselves as they open pre-election advertising barrages against Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats.

They have begun conversations about how to divide up the swing states where each group is likely to focus its energies, with some like Americans for Prosperity expecting to shift chiefly to Senate races and the White House. Others, like the new Congressional Leadership Fund, will look to preserve the Republican hold on the House.

Groups that have made defeating Mr. Obama their top priority expect to invest heavily in some of the new swing states where Mr. Obama made inroads in 2008, like Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. Other groups, operating in concert, will target Democratic senators they believe are ripe for unseating, like Bill Nelson of Florida, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

At a time when the Republican presidential primary race has featured increasingly tough stances against illegal immigration, the independent groups have begun an aggressive program of outreach to Hispanics, hoping to offset Democratic gains among a critical voting bloc.

And they are planning to coordinate offensives in states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where money and organizing could pay dividends simultaneously in the presidential, Congressional and local legislative races.

via Outside Groups Eclipsing G.O.P. As Hub of Campaigns – NYTimes.com.

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October 3, 2011 · 8:06 pm

Art Pope, Citizens United, and North Carolina Politics : The New Yorker

Very scary article in this weeks “New Yorker” about Art Pope and how he’s used his money to effect North Carolina politics….

The “Citizens United” decision by the Supreme Court last year is really hurting Democracy in America.  We are only just now starting to see how much….

Here is a brief excerpt from a very long article.  I encourage you to click the link and read it in it’s entirety.

For years, Pope, like several other farsighted conservative corporate activists, has been spending millions in an attempt to change the direction of American politics. According to an analysis of tax records by Democracy NC, a progressive government watchdog group, in the past decade Pope, his family, his family foundation, and his business have spent more than forty million dollars in this effort. Sizable as Pope’s contributions have been, they are negligible in comparison with his fortune. The Pope family foundation—of which Art Pope is the chairman and president, and one of four directors—reportedly has assets of nearly a hundred and fifty million dollars.

This wealth has enabled Pope to participate in the public arena on a scale that few individuals can match. Some have compared him to Charles and David Koch, the conservative oil-and-chemical magnates, whom Pope regards as friends; Pope has at times joined forces with them, attending some of their semi-annual secret planning summits and, through the family foundation, contributing millions to many of the same causes. Pope, in addition to being on the board of Americans for Prosperity—which David Koch founded, in 2004—served on the board of its predecessor, Citizens for a Sound Economy, which Koch co-founded, in 1984. Charles Koch recently praised the Popes, along with other donors, for providing financial support for the 2012 election effort, and tax records show that Pope has given money to at least twenty-seven groups supported by the Kochs, including organizations opposing environmental regulations, tax increases, unions, and campaign-spending limits. Pope, in fact, helped fund the legal center run by James Bopp, the lawyer who made the initial filing in the Citizens United case

More:   Art Pope, Citizens United, and North Carolina Politics : The New Yorker.

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