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Thom's blog
McConnell's new campaign finance loophole..
Apparently, Mitch McConnell thinks that there wasn't enough spending in the last election. The incoming-Senate Majority Leader wants to slip a new campaign finance loophole into the upcoming budget bill.
Currently, individual candidates can receive $5,200 per donor in an election cycle, but national and state party committees can receive much, much more. There are regulatory limits on how much those parties can coordinate with candidates on political advertising. However, McConnell is trying to attach a policy rider to the omnibus bill that would remove the restrictions on candidates and parties working together to coordinate spending on advertising.
The only restriction left in McConnell's rider says that party spending could not be "controlled by, or made at the direction of" the candidate. It doesn't take a criminal mastermind to see how easy it would be to get around that guideline.
If his rider is successful, it would make the individual campaign contribution limits meaningless, as billionaires could simply donate more to the parties and candidates could influence how that money is spent.
McConnell himself helped clear the path for massive donations to parties in the McCutcheon case - which eliminated the aggregate cap on how much one individual could donate to political parties. Now, the Republican leader wants to be rewarded for his hard work.
We've seen the damage that massive campaign spending has done to our political system. We must continue to call for an amendment that says money is not speech, and we've got to fight hard to keep the meager regulations we've got left.
Call your Senators and tell them to keep McConnell's rider out of the budget, and tell them that we will keep fighting until we get the money out of our political system once and for all.
-Thom
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