From his new perch at Boston Magazine, David S. Bernstein reports that Gabriel Gomez (who apparently does not yet know his position on abortion and just can’t shake his shady tax deduction problem) has set up a “Victory Fund,” a joint venture between the Gomez campaign and the National Republican Senate Committee. As Bernstein writes:
It’s not a coincidence that this account was set up just before the upcoming fundraiser with John McCain, as reported by the Globe‘s Jim O’Sullivan. The top ask for that event is $37,600, which is an odd figure until you realize that the most one can give to Gomez is $2,600 and the most one can give to the NRSC PAC is $35,000. Apparently it’s too much to ask rich people to write the two separate checks, so the Victory Fund lets them write one…
The main advantage of this is that givers can feel certain that the NRSC will know to use that $35k on its campaign to get Gomez elected, rather than some other effort. Which, by the by, it can do because Gomez won’t sign the “People’s Pledge” to prohibit spending by outside groups.
The funny thing is that, when Deval Patrick set up a similar “Victory Fund” in 2009, on a much smaller scale (maximum contribution $5,500, less than 15% of the max one can give to Gomez’s fund), the Massachusetts Republican Party raised holy hell. Patrick and the Mass. Dems abandoned the idea, and the state legislature passed a bill banning such joint venture funds.
That ban, of course, applies only to state candidates. And so we’ve had the spectacle of Scott Brown setting up a Victory Fund in 2011, and Mitt Romney setting one up last year that gave almost $9.4 million to…the Mass. GOP.
Par for the course. The GOP howls about how corrupt the Democrats are. The Democrats cave, ceasing the activity in question and passing legislation to outlaw it (our state legislature is, after all, more than 80% Democratic). Then the Republicans do the same thing on a scale seven times bigger.
Precisely.