Portage County Legal News

Free speech defender challenges 'dark money'

KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: March 18, 2019

Near-hysterical charges lobbed at dark money are nothing new to the political scene during a given even-yeared election since the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in the Citizens United case in 2010.

Democrat rising star New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only last fall made a big noise about dark money and how unfair it is for upstart candidates the likes of her to break through.

Bradley Smith, law professor at Capital University Law School and chairman and founder of the Institute for Free Speech, pooh-poohs the notion that corporate money is any different than the $200 donation from the blue-collar worker who supports a local city council candidate.

"Most people have no idea what dark money is, but it must be bad because it is A. 'Dark,' and hence scary (and) B. 'Money,' and hence 'the root of all evil,'" he wrote in a regular column for the Washington Examiner. "In reality, dark money is pretty simple and not very scary at all."

Smith noted that candidates, political parties and Political Action Committees, or PACs, must disclose all donors who contribute more than $200 under federal law.

"Sometimes, however, groups that exist for things other than promoting candidates will spend money on an election ad," he wrote. "Because many people support these groups for reasons other than political activity, they are not required to disclose information on financial supporters unless those people gave for the purpose of financing political ads.

"But the group making the expenditure must disclose its political spending in excess of $250."

So, so-called dark money isn't really dark - the spending organization is known and the amount is known. The only unknown is the name of every individual who gave to the organization.

Smith cited a Center for Competitive Politics finding, based on data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics and the Federal Election Commission that determined dark money was less than 4 percent of all federal political spending in the 2014 election cycle. It accounted for only 2.9 percent of campaign expenditures in 2015 through 2016.

Smith, next, dispatched the purposeful characterization of these organizations as "shadowy." Many include a political party affiliation in their name, while other less well known groups, such as the Center for Individual Freedom require a simple internet search to learn the political persuasion of the group.

"Today, the United States has more campaign finance disclosure laws on the books than at any time in our history," Smith concluded in the piece. "So many, it seems, that even the most shadowy groups are often disclosing their donors.

"When the best examples of shadowy groups we can come up with are Planned Parenthood and the Republican Governors Association, perhaps it's time to put the dark money narrative to bed."

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