In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats. But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections. A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groupsincluding one run by the Koch brothers networkreveals the participants worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bills provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasnt worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.
Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a spoiler. When presented with a very neutral description of the bill, people were generally supportive, McKenzie said, adding that the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description. In fact, he warned, theres a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts. As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislations opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use under-the-dome-type strategiesmeaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congresss roof, such as the filibusterto stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be incredibly difficult. He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to engage with the other side on the argument that the legislation stops billionaires from buying elections. McKenzie admitted, Unfortunately, weve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives. He said that when his group tested tons of other arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasivepeople found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most. McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue. He related that an A.O.C. message we testedone claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding people in the Trump Administration accountable by identifying big donorshelped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since what she means by this is unclear. Sadly, he added, not even attaching the phrase cancel culture to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. It really ranked at the bottom, McKenzie said to the group. That was definitely a little concerning for us. Gretchen Reiter, the senior vice-president of communications for Stand Together, declined to respond to questions about the conference call or the Koch groups research showing the robust popularity of the proposed election reforms. In an e-mailed statement, she said, Defending civil liberties requires more than a sound bite, and added that the group opposes the bill because a third of it restricts First Amendment rights. She included a link to an op-ed written by a member of Americans for Prosperity, another Koch-affiliated advocacy group, which argues that the legislation violates donors freedom of expression by requiring the disclosure of the names of those who contribute ten thousand
The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passed on March 3rd, largely along party lines, has been described by the Times as the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century. It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawingand often gerrymanderingcongressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bills sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights sick and un-American. He declared, Weve got to prove democracy works. But as the State Policy Networks conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot. The Supreme Courts Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as social welfare organizations, which dont publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in the 2020 federal election cycle more than a billion dollars was spent by dark-money groups that masked the identity of their donors. Of that total, more than six hundred and fifty-four million dollars came from just fifteen groups. The top spender was One Nation, a dark-money social-welfare group tied to McConnell. The For the People Act requires greater disclosure of the identities of donors who pay for election adsincluding those released on digital platforms, which currently fall outside of such legal scrutiny. It also requires that donors who give ten thousand dollars or more to social-welfare groups be identified, if that donation is spent to sway elections. Donors who fund non-election-oriented activities by such groups can remain anonymous. And, notably, the legislation calls for the disclosure, for the first time, of large donors trying to exert control over the selection of judicial nominees. This provision appears to target groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network, on the right, and Demand Justice, on the left, which have mounted multimillion-dollar public-advocacy campaigns to influence the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees. Brendan Fischer, a campaign-finance-reform advocate in favor of the legislation, said that the conference call showed that wealthy special interests are working hard to protect a broken status quo, where billionaires and corporations are free to secretly buy influence. After listening to the recording, Fischer, who directs the Campaign Legal Centers Federal Reform Program, added that it exposed the reality that cracking down on political corruption and ending dark money is popular with voters across the political spectrum. On the call, McKenzie, the Koch operative, cited one ray of hope in the fight against the reforms, noting that his research found that the most effective message was arguing that a politically diverse coalition of groups opposed the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union. In our message example that we used, we used the example of A.C.L.U., Planned Parenthood, and conservative organizations backed by Charles Koch as an example of groups that oppose H.R. 1, he said. I think, you know, when you put that in front of people . . . theyre, like, Oh, conservatives and some liberal groups all oppose this, like, I should maybe think about this more. You know, there must be bigger implications to this if these groups are all coming together on it. However, that test message was inaccurate. Planned Parenthood does not oppose the For the People Act. It is, in fact, on a list of organizations giving the legislation their full backing. And the A.C.L.U. supports almost all of the expansions of voting rights contained in the bill, although it has sided with the Koch groups and other conservative organizations in arguing that donors to nonprofit groups could be harassed if their names are disclosed. Advocates for greater transparency in political spending argue that there is no serious evidence of any such harassment. Asked if she could cite any examples, Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the A.C.L.U., said that the only one she knew about was atypicalthe online backlash experienced by the actor Mila Kunis, after she had made a donation to a pro-abortion group in the name of Mike Pence, a staunch opponent of abortion rights. With so little public support, the bills opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senates filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosis campaign to take over Americas elections, Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government. Pressure tactics from dark-money groups may work on individual lawmakers. The legislation faces an uphill fight in the Senate. But, as the January 8th conference call shows, opponents of the legislation have resorted to under-the-dome-type strategies because the broad public is against them when it comes to billionaires buying elections.
I must honestly say I can't fathom how the public hasn't forcefully put an end to those two by all means.
I genuinely feel like that should have or must have happened before I was born and I'm living in some kind of freak accidental timeline.
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Number of Mega Cookies given: (::::) 32 *Tips top hat, adjusts monocle, and walks away with a cane.* And yes, that IS Mr. Peanut laying unconscious on the curb
Sadly, hell doesn't exist and evil continues to win and get away with it because of the apathetic populace. "Good men do nothing" and et cetera. They and others do their evil because we let them.