Andy Kroll talking:
Jim Bopp is, if not the central character on the conservative side, the libertarian side of this fight, he is one of the main characters. He is in this piece. You know, he is a cool, calm, very soft-spoken attorney who lives in Indiana, who, you know, over the past 20 years or so, has just demolished hundreds of campaign finance laws at the state and federal level. And he’s done it in a very methodical way. He’s done it in a very sort of subtle or quiet way. You know, there’s not much fanfare. He doesn’t belong to a think tank or a big white-shoe law firm.
And the thing with Jim Bopp that I really focus on in the piece is that Jim Bopp did not decide one day that he was going to start toppling laws governing money in politics, spending restrictions, disclosure laws, etc. What Jim Bopp did was sort of hitch his wagon to the anti-abortion movement—he was the counsel for the National Right to Life organization, he represented the state chapters—and essentially used the culture wars. He used the anti-abortion movement. More recently, he’s used the anti-same-sex marriage movement to—you know, basically as a vehicle to go around the country and challenge the legality of rules about money in politics. And he has been quite successful, even more so when John Roberts and Samuel Alito joined the U.S. Supreme Court, essentially paving the way for the Citizens United decision and, frankly, another big decision before that, which was the Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC. And that was something brought by Jim Bopp. And so, he has this—sort of pioneered this strategy, and it has been incredibly effective. And it’s—he is a large part of why we’re in this cash-drenched political system, this political environment that we have now.
the culture wars have been—obviously they have been chugging along for decades now. And they—you know, it’s incredibly divisive. It’s a reason why we have, you know, a conservative—massive conservative movement, and you have people in the middle of the country who seemingly vote against their own economic interests, as Tom Frank has written, for instance, in the past. Jim Bopp just recognized that, you know, he could go about tackling and taking down campaign finance regulations and loosing this torrent of money in our politics, and he could do it sort of under the guise of National Right to Life or the National Organization for Marriage, which is virulently anti-gay marriage. And he could do that, and people wouldn’t necessarily pick up on it as much—until they have now, because he’s been so successful. But he was very subtle about it, and he knew that the culture wars were not just about the issues, like guns or gay marriage or abortion, but that underlying all of these issues is money, and it’s money in politics. And he—you know, he realized—and I read—and I quote somebody in piece to this effect: he realized that those culture war issues, as well as every other issue, you know, money in politics underlies all of this policy. And if you can deregulate money in politics, deregulate campaign finance, as Bopp has, you can essentially buy the policy outcomes that you want. You’ve knocked down the laws governing how much money can come into our system, and then you can just get the policy outcomes that you want, whether it’s on gun rights, whether it’s on tax policy, you know, whatever. And this is sort of the genius of Jim Bopp, if you will.
“Wanna Buy an Election?: Inside the 40-Year Campaign to Sell Democracy to the Highest Bidder.”
Monika Bauerlein talking:
It’s an astronomical metaphor, of course—you know, we have dark matter in the universe—where the universe of politics is full of these visible celestial bodies: politicians and campaigns and traditional PACs and talking heads and surrogates and pundits and so forth. But then flowing around them is this dark matter, this money that we don’t know exactly—as, in fact, none other than Senator John McCain has said that we don’t know where it’s coming from, we don’t know what it’s trying to buy, we don’t know where it’s going, and it exerts this incredibly powerful force on the movements of all the things that we see.
It is an influx of money for broadcasters, and to some extent, print media. And, you know, surely they all need it. It is also true that it’s really hard to follow for reporters. It’s not—you know, because it’s dark money, it doesn’t disclose itself, it doesn’t advertise itself, it often doesn’t hold press conferences. So you have to really chase—I mean, the kind of work that Andy has to do of identifying the source behind a TV ad that’s in heavy rotation in, you know, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and saying this is being paid for by a P.O. box that gets its money from another P.O. box in suburban Virginia that gets its money from another P.O. box in Texas, and behind that last P.O. box are three corporations that are really underwritten by the same individual. You know, that kind of thing is very hard to do, and most news organizations at this point don’t have the bandwidth or the reporting power to go after it, which is why, up until now, we had laws requiring disclosure and requiring these entities themselves to tell citizens what they’re up to. And that’s all gone, or mostly gone, as a result of the Citizens United decision.
Wisconsin recall election earlier this month, the most expensive in the state’s history, with more than $63 million spent. Governor Walker, who survived the recall, outspent Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett seven to one, close to eight to one.
The group behind it was called the Coalition of American Values, which it does really not get more generic than, I guess, Americans for a Better America. What I found—so this ad comes out. As you mentioned, it really does have a potent message. And in retrospect, you know, or in hindsight, we now know that it was incredibly potent, because exit polls showed that a lot of the people who voted for Walker were really voting—you know, were voting on discontent over the recall itself. So, I start digging into this group, find that their address in Milwaukee, in the state, is a mailbox, essentially, and that their office—they have another office in Virginia, and that’s a UPS store box. And so, there is no home address or home office. The treasurer, as far as I could tell, and we could never actually pin this down, was a gentleman named Brent Downs, who appeared to be a recent graduate of a university in Milwaukee, didn’t answer phone calls, didn’t reply to emails.
And what brought them to my attention was not only were they running this ad and spending six figures on this ad around the state, they had not filed a single report with a state disclosing their spending. I mean, it’s one thing to just funnel money through an incorporation—an incorporated entity in Virginia into Milwaukee, into Wisconsin, and not tell us where your money came from, and they can legally do that with the weird way that campaign finance law works in Wisconsin post-Citizens United, but we also had no idea what they were spending. And I raised this with the elections watchdog in Wisconsin. And not only had this group not disclosed its donors, but they had not even filed a report on their spending, as required. This is what brought them to my attention before the election. They said they were going to fix it. They still hadn’t.
And so, what you—you know, the takeaway here is you have Wisconsinites who are completely in the dark about a group called the Coalition for American Values, running ads in their state, telling them that this recall is bad; not only do they not know who the donors are, based on our tattered campaign finance system, but they also don’t know how much this group is spending, really, and where, as the group is required to disclose. And so, it was just a—it was a really, really disturbing glimpse into how dark money can come into a state election and put out this message, and surely have an impact on voters, and keep those same voters entirely in the dark about how much is being spent, who’s spending it, and just who the heck is behind this group in the first place.
Part 1: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/22/dark_money_will_secret_spending_by
– source democracynow.org
Andy Kroll, reporter for Mother Jones magazine. His new cover story is “Follow the Dark Money.”
Monika Bauerlein, co-editor of Mother Jones magazine.