Republicans are eager to use former Sen. Russ Feingold’s signature issue against him in 2016, as the Democrat wages a comeback bid in a Senate contest key to his party’s quest for the majority.

After losing re-election to a fourth term in 2010, Feingold, who had championed limits on spending in federal elections, launched the Progressives United PAC, which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported spent a large percentage of the $7.1 million it raised on overhead and staff salaries. Republicans are already attempting to use that news to paint Feingold as a hypocrite.


“This kind of hypocrisy is going to disappoint a lot of Wisconsinites — and it should,” Feingold’s opponent Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said in a statement to CQ Roll Call. “Sen. Feingold has become just like every other career politician in Washington, saying one thing while doing another.”

Feingold is the co-author of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that set limits on federal election spending. In 2010, after the Citizens United Supreme Court case allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited funds in elections, Feingold refused to allow those groups to support his re-election bid against Johnson. Feingold went on to lose re-election to Johnson by a 5-point margin in the 2010 tea party wave.