The campaign-finance-reform lobby — the eight liberal foundations who fund more than a dozen front groups to create an appearance of a mass movement calling for campaign-finance reform — doesn’t just operate at the federal level. It operates at the state level as well.

My latest column in The Post is a case study of how these folks misrepresent themselves as “independent” and “nonpartisan,” with the media’s help, even though they’re closely linked with liberal causes:

Anyone still clinging to the notion that campaign-finance reformers are interested in “clean government” solely for its own sake should take a look at Illinois — specifically a race for a state Supreme Court seat last year that turned into the most expensive judicial contest in U.S. history.

The race was a money magnet — with more than $9 million spent by the time the dust cleared. Why? Because tort lawyers from all over the country go to Illinois’ Madison County to file lawsuits against deep-pocketed corporations.

…

Money rolled in from pro- and anti-tort-reform forces around the country. And so one group appointed itself traffic cop: the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, the state’s resident good-government watchdog. The “nonpartisan” group spearheaded a Tone and Conduct Committee — organized under the aegis of the state Bar Association — aimed at keeping advertising by outside interests to a minimum.

The media bought this charade hook, line and sinker, referring to the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform as “nonpartisan” and the Tone and Conduct Committee as “independent.”

In fact, the group has extensive ties to the trial-lawyer lobby.

Again, as I’ve stated many times, people should be able to lobby for whatever they want to lobby for and spend whatever money they want to spend in politics. But the campaign-finance lobby uses its speech specifically to curtail the speech of others. And they don’t do it out of an abstract commitment to “clean government.” They do it because they believe that certain kinds of restrictions on political speech will favor their liberal causes.

They should be called on it. And people should pay very close attention to where the money comes from.

(For more on this, see Cleta Mitchell’s groundbreaking report on the campaign-finance lobby from 2001: “Who’s Buying Campaign Finance Reform?” There’s a section on Arizona’s “Clean Elections” campaign, and it explains how the state-level movement works. Needless to say, George Soros is involved.)

UPDATE (5/1/05): Our friend Mark Schmitt emails in with this, a letter he wrote to The Washington Post back in 2001 regarding the ACU study I referenced (it also references a George Will column, which I did not cite):

To the Editor:

David Keene’s April 20 response to George Soros’s letter, regarding support for campaign finance reform, compounds an error by George Will by deliberately distorting publicly available facts.

Keene’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, the American Conservative Union Foundation, published a report last month encouraging legislators to oppose campaign finance reform solely because the supporters of reform included foundations that the ACUF denounces as “liberal,” such as the Open Society Institute and its chair, George Soros. Mr. Soros, as his letter states, personally contributed $100,000 in taxable funds to help a group of Arizonans seeking to place a reform option on their state’s ballot. Mr. Keene now argues that, in addition, support for the Arizona effort from national organizations that also receive support from the Open Society Institute should be attributed personally to Mr. Soros, for a total of 71% of the funds raised by the Arizona group. This is hardly normal accounting, and it is not backed up even by the ACUF report.

The ACUF’s report, citing no evidence, says only that OSI or Soros “may have” directed funds to Arizona through the intermediary organizations Keene cites, the Proteus Fund and Public Campaign, two independent and nonpartisan groups that receive support from numerous individuals and foundations. To the contrary, while not required to do so by law, OSI actually restricted its general support for these national organizations to activities other than ballot initiatives, principally research on the impact of money on politics in many states. We specifically prohibited these organizations from using OSI foundation funds for any effort to influence legislation or ballot initiatives such as Arizona’s. ACUF should have replaced the words “may have” with the words “did not.”

The ACUF report’s key point, that “there is too much money in the campaign finance reform movement,” is equally deceptive. Take Mr. Keene’s example of Arizona: The $892,000 raised for this effort was less than a third of what Arizona Senator Jon Kyl — a critic of reform — raised for his 2000 reelection campaign, even though Kyl had no major-party opponent! It is not that there is so much money supporting reform, but that Arizonans, like most Americans, will back reform whenever they are given the opportunity.

Sincerely,
Mark Schmitt
The Open Society Institute

Amazing… The Left figures out that campaign-finance reform can be dangerous to its First Amendment health:

Protect Your Right to ACT – Contact Your Senator Now

Between the Tom DeLay ethics scandals in the House to Bill Frist’s “nuclear” assault on the Senate filibuster, it’s really good to be in the Majority. If you don’t like the rules, change them. But they still have more power-grabbing moves up their sleeves.

The U.S. Senate is considering legislation (S. 271 and H.R. 513 - “527 Reform Act of 2005″) that would severely limit your ability to have a voice and an impact on the political debate.

ACT needs your attention now.

Last year, you helped ACT empower millions of voters in the most important election cycle of a generation. We made history and, together, built the foundation for a new kind of political campaign—one based on conversations with neighbors, not television sound bites.
Over 101,000 individual contributors gave generously seeking change—not political access. You helped us revitalize community politics and train the next generation of political organizers throughout the battleground states.

Passage of this legislation could change all of this. The 527 Bill would force independent Section 527 organizations like ACT, unions, advocacy groups, and other non-profit Section 501(c) organizations to use highly regulated and restricted federal PACs for much of their public advocacy and voter mobilization activity, even if non-partisan.

Essentially, this would limit the involvement of millions of individuals and organizations who work to mobilize, educate, and empower voters on the federal, state, and local levels. Help fight this aggressive assault on political free speech.

This legislation will skew federal election law more in favor of big business, stalwart backers of the GOP political agenda by allowing them to continue to spend for political purposes with no tax consequences, while non-profits risk both being taxed at the highest corporate rate on their political spending, and a loss of their tax exemption privileges.

The proposed 527 legislation goes far beyond the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act often known as “McCain-Feingold”. McCain-Feingold had a clear, necessary, and praiseworthy purpose: it took members of Congress out of the business of asking lobbyists and special interest fat cats for large unregulated donations, while preserving the free speech rights of American citizens to come together and express their views to Congress. This new bill overreaches and misdirects new and complex regulation against the already disclosed and independent activities of non-profit organizations, unions, and advocacy groups that pose none of the dangers that federal campaign finance law is designed to address.

Former Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign manager (now RNC Chairman) Ken Mehlman has credited – “ACT’s turnout prowess with helping keep Kerry within 119,000 Ohio votes of winning, and with the ability to keep future Democrats within striking range. We take their competitiveness very seriously.” (Wall Street Journal, 12/22/04.

Clearly they do, indeed, take us seriously.

It’s easy to point to an example like the Swift Boat Veterans’ attack ads as something we can all agree is unseemly. But this legislation is not really about “cleaning up politics” as they say. There’s more to it. For example, co-sponsor Trent Lott, who is leading the charge for a speedy passage, has never been a fan of reform until now. In fact, in 2002 he voted against McCain-Feingold at every turn! The New York Times noted in one editorial that Lott had spent years “using every parliamentary trick to block a fair vote on campaign finance reform.” The New York Times, 2/27/02

This bill is about silencing your progressive voice. Please don’t let that happen.

Contact your Senators today. Urge them to stand up for your right to ACT.

We can’t wage this fight without you.

Of course, as Byron York recently pointed out, now the 527 money is flowing to 501(c)(4)s.

Also: I told you so.

Red State highlights the Online Freedom of Speech Act:

Today in the House of Representatives, Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) introduced a companion piece of legislation to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s bill (S.678) to exclude the Internet from the definition of “public communication” in the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002.

This is a bill that deserves bipartisan support, and it’s exciting to see it off to a good start.

In short - if this bill passes both houses and becomes law in the next 50 or-so days, the disastrous FEC rulemaking process will be rendered moot. Remember, the FEC is only creating regulations for Internet activity because Congress didn’t specifically mention the Internet at all, and a federal judge ruled that even in the absence of specific direction of Congress, the FEC had to do so anyway.

This bill provides that direction, and creates that exclusion. It might not solve *all* the problems of regulation, but it’s miles and away the best solution right now. I’ve already heard from some liberal colleagues in the blogosphere, and we’re going to push this bill - and hard.

The blogosophere has proven extraordinary aptitude when it comes to attacking or stopping something, let’s prove that we can be just as much a powerful influence when it comes to creating and moving something forward.

Of course, I’d like to see some off-line freedom of speech. But, baby steps…

Another slam dunk by Democratic campaign-finance lawyer Bob Bauer.

Here, he explains how the logic behind new campaign-finance regulations — let’s call them speech restrictions, shall we? — speech restrictions morphed from stopping “corruption” to stopping the “appearance of corruption” to stopping “circumvention” of the previous regulations to stopping the “appearance of circumvention.”

The logic is self-sustaining and has no endpoint. People have to remember this.

There is no end point to what the “clean-government” folks want. Reform isn’t a goal, it’s a never-ending process. After all, what would the people in the campaign-finance-reform industry do if their goals were ever achieved? They’d be out of business. So they call for more and more and tighter and tighter restrictions until the First Amendment as we used to know it is a distant memory.

Democracy Project has a great post up on Pewgate:

Here’s one example of how Pew money was used to produce the kind of reports that Pew’s bosses knew they could expect, complete with foregone conclusions on the issue at hand, in order to pass legislation sponsored by a man (McCain) they honored, who in turn benefits from loopholes that he wrote into the law.

Read the whole thing. The Web of connections here is immense. This is not a transparent network that “everyone already knows about,” as some would claim. It’s a well-orchestrated and well-hidden campaign to deprive you of your right to advocate political opinions that are opposed to those of the Pew Charitable Trusts and other major donors.

No one cares about clean elections for the sake of clean elections — outside of a few academics. This movement is, and always has been, about achieving liberal policy goals through supposedly policy-neutral election reform.

Having not one substantive criticism to make of my reporting on the campaign-finance reform lobby (on where the money behind the lobby comes from and how it set out to deceive the American people and Congress), the lobby has fired back by… calling me names.

I’m flattered, I assure you, but it really is a bit childish — and it should embarrass them that they’re reduced to hurling insults and innuendo at a 25-year-old.

The latest response to my reporting in this vein comes from Mark Schmitt, director of policy and research at the Open Society Institute. In a blog post, he twice references my youth — as if this were somehow relevant to the accuracy of my reporting — stating at the top of his post that I am “a young product of the conservative quasi-journalism training system.”

Schmitt also writes: “A junior editorial writer at the New York Post didn’t just happen to ‘unearth’ a video made a year ago. A decision has been made to discredit campaign finance reform and the groups involved in it.”

Now, let me get this straight. I transcribe a video where a former program director of the Pew Charitable Trusts explains how his foundation set out to mislead Congress — remember, the facts of this story have not once been questioned — and I’m a quasi-journalist? And then Schmitt accuses me of being part of a right-wing conspiracy to discredit campaign-finance reform — based on not one scrap of evidence — and he’s an arbiter of journalistic ethics?

This truly puzzles me.

Schmitt also makes one other mistake. He writes: “What’s the real agenda behind these attacks? It’s probably not to repeal McCain-Feingold.”

Let me be clear: My agenda is absolutely to see McCain-Feingold repealed. And, yes, I’m quite interested in “discrediting” campaign-finance reform — because I believe it to be a crime against the Constitution and have publicly expressed this view for years.

Oh, and by the way: Are the folks over at The American Prospect, which accepted undisclosed money to flak for campaign-finance reform, quasi journalists in Schmitt’s opinion? How about the folks over at NPR who took more than $1 million to do the same thing?

Maybe Schmitt has some choice words for them.

UPDATE: Schmitt seems to have taken down his post.

This is the version that was sent to me:

The Post editorial was written by Ryan Sager, a young product of the conservative quasi-journalism training system who takes credit for “unearthing” the “bombshell” Treglia video, all of which is posted on his blog.

Good commentary on all this is linked on Professor Rick Hasen’s indispensable Election Law Blog. Hasen’s own comments are helpful, as are the more critical thoughts of Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer and notable campaign finance reform skeptic.

Bill Allison of the Center for Public Integrity has also joined this debate and deserves a special prize for attempting to engage with Sager as if they were both responsible adult professionals.

I offer my own thoughts as an expert witness.

First, let’s be clear, this is all part of something bigger.

A junior editorial writer at the New York Post didn’t just happen to “unearth” a video made a year ago. A decision has been made to discredit campaign finance reform and the groups involved in it. The scare-mongering about the Federal Election Commission being required to regulate bloggers was the first hit, this is the second. Republican attacks on the watchdog groups that have been critical of Tom DeLay is a third.

What’s the real agenda behind these attacks?

It’s probably not to repeal McCain-Feingold, a regime that both parties have learned to live within and that probably still hurts Democrats slightly more than Republicans. It could be to discredit McCain as a potential 2008 candidate or as a gadfly. Or it could be to discredit the critics of DeLay, or just to change the subject and put the groups on the defensive.

That’s the last I’ll say about that, though, because just as the sources of support for campaign finance groups has little bearing on their arguments, the provenance of these charges has little to do with whether they are valid or not.

I generally agree with Hasen that this is much ado about nothing, although I have to admit that Treglia sure makes it seem otherwise, and there are some very real concerns.

The basic story, stripped of hyperbole, is just this: some foundations ranging from the fairly liberal (OSI, Ford) to the moderate (Carnegie Corporation, Pew) to the conservative (Smith-Richardson) funded a number of organizations from the mid-1990s and continuing into the present that were working on issues related to money in politics at the state and federal level.

The McCain-Feingold law was a small part of that effort for most of these foundations, though a bigger component for Pew. All of it is public, on both ends — the foundations make their grants public and the organizations make their funders public.

Again, the best way to clear this up is to have the report be public. There’s a lot more to say, but let me quickly comment on point that I think is legitimately taken by Sager and others. The role of foundations in campaign finance reform, as in other issues, should be covered more thoroughly by the press.

I think most foundations could deal with the scrutiny and many would welcome it and find it a healthy challenge. Apart from this issue, foundations are simply an important sector in our public policy because we long ago made a decision that many of the things that government does in other countries would be done in the U.S. through private initiative with a tax advantage. Foundations are semi-public institutions and should be treated and studied as such.

Treglia’s speech was addressed to an audience of journalists at a seminar on how to cover philanthropy, which helps me understand what he was trying to do: he was basically telling them, here was a huge story you overlooked. But the reason that the role of foundations in campaign finance reform was overlooked is absolutely not, as Bob Bauer argues, that the press favors campaign finance reform. It was overlooked because the press has no idea how to cover foundations at all. The role of foundations in the school voucher movement, noted above, is equally unknown, the role of conservative foundations in promoting radical legal doctrines is unknown, the role of liberal foundations in voter registration projects is unknown, the role of liberal foundations in, say, establishing after-school programs is unknown.

There are always stories about George Soros, the individual, but virtually nothing about the foundation that he founded but which is managed by others. There is occasionally coverage of the Ford Foundation, the best known of all major U.S. Foundations, very little of its almost as large brethren such as Pew, the Carnegie Corporation, the Hewlett and Packard Foundations, MacArthur (apart from the fellowships), etc. is not And there are real scandals to be unearthed at foundations, of which this is not one. Stephanie Strom of the New York Times is the first reporter I’ve seen to really develop this beat; let’s hope she remains on the philanthropy beat long enough to really master it, unlike her predecessors.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Schmitt has this to say in the comments:

Ryan,

I absolutely did post that by accident (I had transfered it between several computers and had line breaks in it that I needed to fix, and posted it as a “draft” to typepad so I could edit it, which apparently didn’t work. That’s the only reason I took it down.

I do intend to repost it in an edited form, shortly. One of the edits will be to remove any reference to your motivations or experience. You obviously did interesting work here.

In the meantime, I would appreciate your pulling down your post. I will let you know immediately when a version that’s for public consumption is ready.

I’ll certainly link a new version, but it’s not my habit to “disappear” posts for almost any reason.

FINAL UPDATE: Here is a link to Schmitt’s updated post. It certainly is toned down.

If there’s one point on which I agree with Schmitt, it’s that I’d like to see the Political Money Line report on the money behind campaign-finance reform made available for free. But PML is a for-profit company, and they’ve so far decided not to do that.

PS: Knowing how the TypePad software works, I certainly accept Mr. Schmitt’s explanation that he meant to post a draft, not for public consumption. I accept his apology. But I still find that draft revealing.