[Vision2020] The Power of Anonymity

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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July 16, 2012
The Power of Anonymity

Two years ago, Congress came within a single Republican vote in the Senate
of following the Supreme Court’s advice to require broad disclosure of
campaign finance donors. The justices wanted voters to be able to decide
for themselves “whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called
moneyed interests.”

The court advised such disclosure in its otherwise disastrous Citizens
United decision in 2010, which loosed a new wave of unlimited spending on
political campaigns. The decision’s anticorruption prescription has grown
even more compelling as hundreds of millions of dollars in disguise have
flooded the 2012 campaigns — a great deal of it washed through
organizations that are set up for the particular purpose of hiding the
names of the writers of enormous checks.

The ability to follow the money has never been this important since the
bagman days of the Watergate scandal. But when the Democratic Senate
majority made a fresh attempt to enact a disclosure bill on
Monday<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/disclose-act-new-donor-transparency-law-blocked-in-senate/2012/07/16/gJQAbm7WpW_blog.html>,
the measure was immediately filibustered to death by Republicans, like
other versions.

Still, the vote was a chance for the public to see who stands for and
against such basic transparency in political spending. The answer: not one
Republican showed the courage to break ranks and speak up for disclosure.

Republicans have been the main beneficiaries of corporate and independent
spending sprees. The party’s lock-step opposition to letting voters see who
writes the big checks is an embarrassment to Congress.

Opponents are crying that disclosure violates donors’ privacy and favors
unions. This is election-year nonsense to give cover to the aggressively
partisan groups that pose as “social welfare” organizations but tip the
campaign scales heavily with stealth financing.

The Senate measure would require corporations, unions and any other
organization paying for election-cycle messages to disclose expenditures of
$10,000 or more within 24 hours and identify donors writing checks of
$10,000 or more. It would further require reporting of third-party money
transfers, a shadow device to hide contributors.

The measure’s chief sponsor, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, has tried
to win Republican support by eliminating a provision requiring that the top
five donors be identified at the end of election commercials.

But Republicans turned their backs, including John McCain, once the great
champion of campaign finance reform who has been predicting that “huge
scandals” will inevitably flow from Citizens United.

Voters concerned about the big-money distortion of politics now know
precisely who put the issue quietly to bed.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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