NYT editorial: Stealth Money

Stealth Money

We can’t turn on the television these days without being assaulted by ads anonymously savaging candidates. Welcome to politics in post-Citizens United America. The Supreme Court allowed unlimited campaign spending by corporations and unions but didn’t require the folks picking up the tab to stand behind their words.

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Republicans, so far, have the advertising whip hand as partisan operatives solicit and spend large under the cover of blandly named “good citizen” committees. There is good reason to fear that foreign corporations are also taking advantage of the new no-tell rules.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, which has unleashed a barrage of attack ads against Democratic candidates and the White House, denies that offshore moguls are anteing up. That would be more credible if the chamber disclosed its donors. Shareholders of the chamber’s corporate members should demand that.

Even as it loosed this destructive new era, the Supreme Court stressed that disclosure was the appropriate alternative to limiting political money. Republicans, led by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, once touted that approach. They dropped it once the lion’s share of the lucre began rolling their way.

A campaign finance bill, the Disclose Act, fell a vote short in the Senate last month. Another vote is promised after the election, with Democrats offering to negotiate changes that keep the focus on transparency. Might voters dare to hope that the frenzy of stealth spending could prompt support from Republicans prized for their supposed independence: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts?

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Anonymous attack ads reach CT

By Mark Pazniokas

The era of big-money, anonymously financed attack ads has arrived in Connecticut with commercials accusing two Democratic congressmen of providing free health care to illegal immigrants and Viagra to sex offenders.

U.S. Rep. Christopher Murphy, D-5th District, one of the targets of the ads, immediately linked his new tormentor, the American Action Network, to a Who's Who of Republicans prominent in the George W. Bush administration.

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But the group, while it does share office space and a telephone system in Washington with an organization run by Bush advisor Karl Rove, has roots that go farther back, to the re-election campaign of Richard Nixon in 1972.

The American Action Network's founder is Fred Malek, a high-ranking official in the Nixon White House and re-election campaign, whose excesses led to post-Watergate reforms requiring transparency in campaign finance.

(Malek also was a figure in an investment scandal involving former Connecticut treasurer Paul Silvester.)

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