OK, so we went ’round the mulberry bush in my last post on whether the online ads attacking Katherine Clark that PCCC is buying on Carl Sciortino’s behalf are “independent expenditures” that are encompassed by the People’s Pledge. I assumed that they were, but both PCCC and the Sciortino campaign explained that they are treating these ads as in-kind donations to the Sciortino campaign that are actually authorized by the campaign, so they are not “independent expenditures.”
Which might get them around the People’s Pledge, were it not for section 5 of that document:
The Candidates and their campaigns agree that neither they nor anyone acting on their behalf shall coordinate with any third party on any paid advertising for the duration of the 2013 special election cycle. In the event that any Candidate or his or her campaign or anyone acting on their behalf coordinates any paid advertisement with a third party organization that Candidate’s campaign shall pay 50% of the cost of the advertisement buy to the One Fund.
So, really, it’s pretty open and shut. If they’re independent expenditures, they’re covered; and if they’re not independent, i.e., they are coordinated with the campaign in the form of an “in-kind contribution” or otherwise, they are covered too. The ads say right on their face that they are “authorized” by the Sciortino campaign and “paid for” by PCCC … sure sounds “coordinated” to me.
Looks to me like checkmate for the Sciortino campaign on this point, which should probably just pony up $2,500 (half of the maximum in-kind donation that PCCC can make) to the One Fund to make the whole thing go away.
I am authorized to state that my esteemed co-editors, Bob and Charley, concur in the content of this post.
UPDATE: Having spoken at some length with the good people of PCCC, it turns out that there is actually an argument that these ads, which are funded by PCCC but authorized by the Sciortino campaign, don’t come within the People’s Pledge. Here it is:
- the preamble of the Pledge says that it is concerned with “independent expenditure advertisements and issue advertisements” funded by “independent expenditure organizations that are outside the direct control of any of the Candidates”;
- although PCCC is not under the Sciortino campaign’s control, these particular ads are authorized by the Sciortino campaign and therefore are under its control;
- the ads therefore fall outside the expressed intention of the Pledge;
- section 5, though inartfully drafted and therefore capable of being read literally to encompass the ads in this case, is really directed at a particular campaign finance loophole, namely, that before 30 days prior to a primary election (or 60 days before a general), campaigns may coordinate with outside groups on “issue ads” that the outside group may then fund independently and without limitation; and
- if you read section 5 literally, it would capture a lot of conduct that all candidates routinely engage in.
So, bottom line, it may be that ads produced and funded by a third party, but also authorized by a campaign and therefore treated as an in-kind contribution to the campaign (and thus subject to a $5,000 limit), are not encompassed by the People’s Pledge after all. Should they be? A topic for another day.
It seems to me that a great deal of trouble could have been avoided had the parties involved:
- not screwed up by initially running ads with a disclaimer stating that the ads were “not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee” (these ads were subsequently withdrawn); and
- in the press release announcing the online ad campaign, made an express statement and explanation to the effect that these ads were authorized by the Sciortino campaign and therefore fell outside the Pledge, instead of leaving it to the readers to decipher the tiny print at the bottom of the ads that states that the ads are “authorized” by Sciortino.
At the end of the day, I have to say that I wish the Sciortino campaign had not gone down this path. It ate up a bunch of my time that could have been better spent, but far more importantly, it’s a weird way to run an ad campaign. If Sciortino wants to attack Katherine Clark on the subjects mentioned in the ads, via an online ad campaign or otherwise, why not just do it himself, with his own ad budget? That way he can spend as much as he wants on the ads (instead of being limited by the $5,000 in-kind donation limit), and we don’t have this People’s Pledge sideshow. We’d also have him speaking for himself, instead of this confusing situation where an outside group is producing, funding, and distributing the ads, but he is still authorizing them. But, like the song goes, you can’t always get what you want.
A progressive breaks a foundational good government pledge that he himself signed less than two months ago. So much for idealism.
Then, in a particularly idiotic aspect of this botch, the pledge explicitly prohibits coordination with third parties, and yet the ads by their own admission say “Paid for by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Authorized by the Carl Sciortino Committee,” as David notes, and both the PCCC and the Sciortino Committee have confirmed the accuracy of that phrasing. So much for execution.
At least the $2,500 will go to a good cause. It has to be paid within three days of discovery of the violation, which I guess means by Saturday, or it doubles by half to, in this case, $3,750. Time to open the checkbook at the Sciortino campaign.
Here’s an idea…if you really want to help your candidate who is running 3rd or fourth in the polls…form a PAC…prepare attack ads against the frontrunner and the candidate running second…!!!!!
I find the whole fluff-up about the People’s Pledge so disingenuous…they all sign it as if that means they are beyond reproach and care about fairness while at the same time stuffing their campaign coffers with hundreds of thousands of dollars from lobbyists, PACs and individuals tied to any number of special interests. And when those individuals reach their legal limit, they direct them to give more to friendly PACs who support them indirectly. THE BEAT GOES ON, it’s name is hypocrisy.
Here’s an idea…if you really want to help your candidate who is running 3rd or 4th in the polls…form a PAC…prepare attack ads against the frontrunner and ENDORSE the candidate running second…!!!!!
but he raised his profile. He should have never gone here and then add insult to injury in defending it.
It’s times like these that gives people a peek into how they behave in crunch time and it doesn’t paint a good picture.
If Carl can’t keep the People’s Pledge he made 2 months ago, why would anyone think this isn’t how he would behave once in Washington?
As someone who is not a Carl supporter because of his lack of experience, I was glad he had raised his profile and looked forward to supporting him and working for him in the future. Having shown his truly colors just days away from the primary, I can’t imagine wanting him to be in any office. Given his behavior in the past couple of days, I don’t even see him as progressive. Breaking pledges is not progressive behavior. It’s same old, same old…..
… the People’s Pledge is crap, and this should be the final nail in its coffin.
I’ve absolutely given up on regulating political money in any form. If there’s transparency, I’ll declare victory. Anonymous donations are a pernicious trend.
and I can’t tell from your post what you think is wrong with PP either.
And yeah, the Sciortino campaign should just pony up and move on.
“Outside money” — so Ed Markey, for example, can conveniently agree to take advantage of Democratic infrastructure and deny his opponent his only real chance of winning. That dynamic will always be in play, no matter what the race, and the pledge will always benefit one candidate more than the other.
We nationalize every election — we shouldn’t, but that’s a topic for another day — and then we put some phony pledge around the money. It’s silly.
If there ever were a time when nationalizing every election — for either house of Congress, at least — made sense, this is it. Votes on the major national issues we face are overwhelmingly on partisan lines. Issues like what to do about the budget, NSA, etc. are far more important in this race than local issues.
I don’t want outside entities deciding which national issues are important in a given local district.
I will continue to ding any candidate that takes a significant amount of bulk outside money.
than what I understood by “nationalizing” an election. I’ve always used to to mean making the election more a referendum on the national parties than a contest between two local individuals.
The outside entities don’t decide which national issues are important in a given local district. You’ve got it exactly backwards.
The local district decides which national issues are important to them. Then, and only then, can outside entities run ads on those issues decided by locals to be important and have any affect on the race.
Advertising can create new issues just as it can create new desires.
It’s complicated, the power of propaganda is mediated by many things. But that power is considerable.
That’s how I look at it.
Instead of some anonymous group, Citizens for Real Native Americans, running the Fauxcahontis non-issue while Brown smirks with clean hands, he had to do it himself. Which crippled his image and discouraged more of the same.
So it makes candidates own the attack ads and pay a price for bad behavior. Pretty good for an agreement that does not cost a dime.
It’s not about “regulating” the behavior but about linking it to the campaign.
You like Elizabeth Warren, right? You’re glad she won? There’s a non-zero chance that, but for the Pledge, she wouldn’t have. That Pledge kept untold millions of dollars of SuperPAC advertising off our airwaves. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed the result … or maybe it would have. It sure made watching TV last fall a lot more pleasant than it otherwise would have been.
But flip that … what are Wendy Davis’s chances, in Texas, without outside money?
Texas has no direct contribution limits for either individuals or PACs (unless they’ve recently changed their rules). So there is no need for third parties to run independent expenditure ads in that race. They can just roll wheelbarrows full of cash into the Davis campaign and let her figure out how to spend it.
The mighty Texas Democratic silent majority?
You, I, or any other American citizen can send all the money we want to Wendy Davis. If some wealthy Democrat from Massachusetts, or California, or wherever, wants to write her a check for ten million bucks, he or she can do it.
people get all worked up about Citizens United and Oh My God What Are We Going To Do … when we have already shown how to solve the problem here in Massachusetts. Again, not a single third-party TV ad hit the airwaves in the Brown/Warren race. That is an amazing true fact.
But we need a more global solution.
Don’t forget outside money occasionally backfires. Richard Tisei overplayed his hand against Tierney. The outside ads allowed Tierney to call Tisei extreme, and he de facto was, because of the overplaying.
I’ll rephrase the question above: if we keep outside money out here, how do we justify giving to Al Franken, Wendy Davis, Cory Booker, or any other out of state politician we like?
The People’s Pledge covers spending on a candidate’s behalf by an outside group. That doesn’t mean outside Massachusetts, it means outside the candidate’s official campaign.
Donations to candidates’ official campaigns from people who live out-of-state is not the same thing. Nobody’s going after that. Warren got a ton of money from people outside Mass. and so did Brown, especially in 2010. But those contributions are subject to the individual contribution limits, which still exist for donations directly to candidates but no longer exist for expenditures by independent groups.
But it comes down to the same thing. The groups buy ads, they try to affect the race. I’m not convinced this a problem.
Or rather, it is a problem, but we don’t solve it by keeping both sides out, because that just favors whatever party is stronger, locally. That’s not the path to change.
with people giving money to anyone they want, in-state or out-of-state. I just would much rather hear from the candidates themselves than from shady third parties doing the candidates’ dirty work.
here in MA, if you max out as an individual donor to a candidate, the candidate will ask you to give additional contributions to the state party and designate an earmark to be used by/for that candidate…that skirts campaign finance transparency…if I want to make it appear that I don’t take money from PACs or lobbyists or special interests, I can just have them give it to the party and those names will not appear on my OCPF reports, but the money will be used for mailings supporting me or condemning my opponent.
that a donor has no control over money given to the state party. You can request that it be used to support X candidate, but AFAIK the party could decide that another race needed it more, and direct the resources there.
Political spending should only use annotated money. It should be very clear who the source of the money is, and through which hands it was changed.
Don’t outlaw earmarked donations, but force it to be disclosed. And let the voters decide based on the disclosure who contributed to what political attack.
I don’t think you’re wrong that the People’s Pledge leaves a lot to be desired or that this is (or should be) the nail in the coffin.
We can’t give up on regulating political money, but the problem with the People’s Pledge is it fails to do that. It creates a set of obscure unregulated nonrules that are vague to the general public, ever changing from election to election and little but a new horse race issue to suck away time spent covering real issues.
Furthermore, while I’m all for placing limits on donations, I’m vehemently against the notion that campaigns should try to infringe on the first amendment rights of member-driven organizations.
The People’s Pledge doesn’t work and can’t, at least as campaigns have agreed to it thus far. Meanwhile, it’s proven to be an increasing distraction from the real issues, which is exactly what it was supposed to prevent in a lot of ways.
For example, David’s spent 2 diaries — and 2 updates to those diaries — focusing on whether or not there’s even a violation, instead of fleshing out MA-05’s candidate issues or even, if all we can care about is ‘horse race’ stuff, questioning why it’s so horrifically bad for PCCC to spend 5k in in-kind donations that we need to spend multiple posts on it days before the election, but not for another organization that just spent about 150k trying to hoodwink voters into thinking Katherine Clark was endorsed by Liz Warren.
So… these are a few reasons why the People’s Pledge is deeply flawed and ultimately won’t work, but it’s wholly different from trying to tackle unlimited money spent by corporations to try to buy elections.
Wow, I could not disagree more. It does work, and it has, brilliantly, in the Brown/Warren race. Of course it’s not perfect or complete (it would be great if it encompassed direct mail, for instance), but it kept untold millions of dollars of shady third-party ads off the airwaves in the nation’s most closely-watched 2012 Senate race.
Of course I’d prefer not to have spent the time I did in the weeds of the PCCC/Sciortino thing, but one blogger’s time isn’t much of a cost when we consider the benefit.
but 1) the People’s Pledge was an experiment in Brown/Warren and the takeaway from that experiment was that no Republican (or really anyone who would be more likely to lose without outside spending, even from good organizations) would ever agree to it ever again, 2) your reply doesn’t address one of my main points in that while it’s fair to place monetary limits to expenditures, it’s wholly unfair and anti-free-speech to attempt to ban completely ban most practicable forms of outside spending for people and organizations, and 3) even more glaringly, fails to address my most important point
These are problems that will compound as we go forward. Whether it’s candidates making unreasonable demands as part of a “People’s Pledge,” then whacking the opponent for not agreeing to it in our he-said-she-said media that will almost inevitably place blame on the opposition.
It was a nice experiment, but it has failed — since the takeaway for campaigns (the takeaway that matters for these purposes) is that agreeing to a “People’s Pledge” as understood now could cost candidates the election.
Either the People’s Pledge will decreasingly be used going forward or it will have to be reformed to make sense. Just look at this campaign — look how even the most progressive caliber of candidates will get treated by it, over tiny dollars and while still arguably following it. Why on earth would anyone agree to it when this is what they’ll get?
So allow me to offer a suggestion: make the People’s Pledge only apply to negative outside campaigning, or give it actual regulatory framework in which while candidates can still voluntarily choose to participate, standards are set that aren’t changed campaign to campaign and which prevent the ‘case’ of whether or not someone is in violation of it from being a matter of public debate… decided in newspapers and prominent blogs, shooting from their hips before all the facts are in.
What benefit? It a) isn’t clear by anything written here if there’s a violation, even though a reader would be clearly colored to think poorly of the candidate in question (it’s one giant loaded question) and b) this was done in the very last moments of a very competitive campaign, over a tiny amount of dollars that wasn’t an outside expenditure.
At the very least, this was an opportunity cost: there were better issues to cover. At the worst, I think both of these diaries, as written, were irresponsible given the context of this election and the minimal impact of this expenditure.
(1) Of course it was an experiment, and it still is. So what? If we never experiment, nothing will change. If the takeaway is that nobody likely to benefit from outside spending will ever agree to it again, so be it. Maybe we’re seeing that now in the Boston Mayor’s race.
(2) I just think this misses the point. Yes, of course the Pledge is an effort to prevent a certain category of speech from entering a certain race. But importantly, it does not and cannot “ban” or otherwise require it. I’ll say this again, because apparently it needs to be said: any outside group is free to spend all the money they want on any race in which one of these agreements is in effect. Nobody can stop them. And the candidates in these races have a First Amendment right to declare publicly that they would prefer such groups stay away. These pledges are a particularly forceful way of doing that.
(3)
With the exception of the phrase “unregulated nonrules,” what you’ve offered up here is a pretty good description of campaign finance law in general. Ask any member of “the general public” – including those that have law degrees – what an “electioneering communication” is, and you’ll get a lot of blank stares.
As for your suggestion:
How would you do that? A new regulatory agency? A new state-run enforcement mechanism? I think the candidates agreeing amongst themselves on how they want to do this is a much better solution.
To your final point: sure, as I said, I’d rather have spent the time writing about something else. But since the explanation of why what happened with PCCC and Sciortino is within the Pledge is highly technical and requires some familiarity with campaign finance law to follow, I still think my previously-stated view is correct:
Could not agree more with this part of your update to this post, David:
I assume the answer to your question above is that the Sciortino campaign preferred to have a third party do the attacking for them so Carl didn’t have to look like he was attacking an opponent and going negative. Understandable but not cool, imho. Either let the third party do the attacking on their own w/out coordinating, which is fair. Or do it yourself and be up front about it, also fair. Either of those would be far more legit and above board — both for PCCC and the Sciortino campaign — from my POV.
I like Carl a lot, heck I volunteered for his first campaign. And I’m a member and supporter of PCCC. But this episode doesn’t reflect very well on either one of them, imho. Which is a shame.
You are spending too much ink on this very technical question that invovles, at most, $2,500. The real issues are being ignored.
Katherine Clark sponsored a bill that provides prosecutors with broadly expanded wiretapping and surveillance capabilities. That’s a huge problem. Let’s talk about that issue!
Don’t change the subject. The issue is integrity, and it’s a real issue.
Campaign finance is important, but I’ve been surprised at how many people on BMG have been focusing on it to the exclusion of actual policy differences among candidates.
How can we not focus on it, when one of the candidates has made it the cornerstone of his campaign?
Citizens United has been discussed front and center in each debate, courtesy of Will Brownsberger, and that is a good thing, because there have been and continue to be many things misunderstood about Citizens United.
There is no issue with integrity. It’s hard to figure out if an actual violation occurred. If it did occur, it’s pretty minor.
If you want to talk about integrity, how about Emily List’s mailing that implied that Elizabeth Warren had endorsed Clark? A lot of people are upset about that mailing, but Clark did not issue a statement acknowledging the situation and asking Emily’s List to stop the mailing. Clark did nothing! And, to me, that calls into question Clark’s integrity.
You want to talk about Clark, apparently. I still say it’s trolling.
to say the topic of the thread does not deserve to get more pixels than substantive policy issues.
He addressed the issue:
Then suggested more important issues were being ignored.
That’s not even remotely on the same planet as trolling.
He addressed the issue for the sole purpose of changing the subject to his preferred subject.
We could haggle over the definition of trolling, but that was the goal. When David encouraged him to write another thread, he returned to his subject of choice, further hijacking the thread.
The ads were about Clark and wiretapping. I suspect that people forgot what the ads were trying to say. I am not trying to hijack this thread. I am just saying that the content of those ads is a more important issue than this confusing technical discussion about whether the ads violated the People’s Pledge.
By all means, I encourage you to write up the wiretap issue!
I am not a lawyer, and I am not good at writing. And, unlike the Katherine Clark piece that you posted, I don’t have a paid staff person who can write an article for me
Here’s how I see the wiretapping issue:
1. The ACLU is opposed to Clark’s bill.
2. Clark’s bill is called an “upgrade” but gives prosecutors broad new surveillance power for even minor drug infractions.
3. Clark’s wiretapping bill is an issue that several of the candidates have taken opposite positions.
“…If you read section 5 literally, it would capture a lot of conduct that all candidates routinely engage in.”
The sheer knowledge of legalistic training from our candidates is showing – not in crafting the People’s Pledge, but in working around it.
If they did not mean to read the People’s Pledge literally, why did they bother to sign it? Was it just for show, to prove to constituents that they’re all five birds of a feather?
To think that four of the five candidates even want to amend the Constitution to prevent electioneering by organizations, unions, corporations… They’re all lawyers and writers of law with many years of service, and they can’t even figure out how to write a political activity agreement and stick by it.
Brownsberger has it right: no constitutional amendment, full transparency, strictly limited political donations, and leave everything else to the choosing of the candidate and the judgement of the voters.