Jim Rubens: Conservatives, Stand up for Our Freedom of Speech by Ending Dark Money
By Jim Rubens
We may have wrapped up our state’s municipal elections, but the 2022 multi-billion-dollar misinformation campaigns are already well underway and in voters’ mailboxes — orchestrated by the big-money power players of our current “political system.” Recently I got a grim preview in my mailbox: A glossy flyer and box of bogus prescription bottles from the self-styled “Common Sense Leadership Fund,” advising New Hampshire voters that, “Liberals in DC are plotting to impose socialist price controls on your Medicare Part D! … Contact Senator Maggie Hassan … and tell her to stand up for YOU, not Chinese Communists or DC liberals.”
Happy 2022 election season.
New Hampshire Republicans like me will be saturated over the coming election year with this type of alarmist, dumbed-down messaging about critical issues like high healthcare costs which, to be resolved, require informed and thoughtful citizen deliberation. Why? The outcome of New Hampshire’s 2022 Senate race could determine party control of the U.S. Senate and the multi-trillion-dollar decisions that the Senate will make. Over $130 million, almost entirely from out-of-state sources, was spent on this race in 2016.
So, what is Common Sense Leadership Fund, Inc. that created this message, anyway? CSLF is a 501c(4) nonprofit “social welfare organization” formed in March 2021, in Virginia’s DC suburbs. It’s run by Kevin McLaughlin, who previously ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a fundraising arm of GOP Senate campaigns. CSLF is decidedly big league, given that NRSC spent $330 million in the 2020 cycle to elect Republicans to the U.S. Senate.
CSLF might have saved their money with me. With certainty, I will back the Republican who will challenge Senator Hassan, and red baiting does not dissuade me from wanting lower drug prices.
Organizations such as CSLF emerged after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which fundamentally altered the campaign money landscape. Billions of dollars to influence American voters are now controlled by a handful of political aristocrats from New York, California and Washington, DC. Their concentrated money will drown out any real political conversation here in New Hampshire. Most of their “conversation” will be shallow, misleading attack ads.
These concentrated money aristocrats have nationalized every swing election, and, in doing so, have dismembered federalism and the 10th Amendment.
So, why use the name CSLF, an obvious front for NRSC, on this mailing? Because the people who write the big-money checks are afraid to show their faces or be associated with this hair-on-fire nonsense. But run the money through CSLF and anything goes. The key difference: CSLF may receive contributions in unlimited amounts from individuals and businesses without publicly disclosing their identities, aka “dark money.”
Dark money is no small problem. When dark money is included, 2020-cycle spending topped $1 billion. Dark money is grossly under-reported because donors channel money through untraceable shell companies and nonprofits. Anyone who is opposed to Chinese Communists influencing our elections would do well to note that foreign dark money players are now significantly doing so, a specific example being $1.3 million in Chinese dark money that flowed to Jeb Bush’s 2016 Super PAC.
And for Republicans who think keeping big-money sources secret somehow creates an advantage for us, the left is now lapping the right in the dark money race — $447 to $190 million in favor of Democrats during the 2020 cycle. For ingenuity and scale, the prize goes to Arabella Advisors on the left, eclipsing any dark money operation on the right.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unintentionally opened this massive dark money loophole. Unintentional, because the Citizens United court opined that “… transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.” Former Justice Antonin Scalia, a hero to free speech conservatives, wrote in 2010’s Doe v. Reed decision, “[r]equiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”
Fortunately, an elegant solution to dark money is at hand: the For Our Freedom Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, restoring pre-Citizens United powers to Congress and the states to set reasonable limits on campaign money and to distinguish between people and organizations such as unions or corporations. The For Our Freedom Amendment would also enshrine in our Constitution legislative power to require campaign money disclosure. And it is supported by super-majorities of both Democrat and Republican voters.
Conservatives would be better served getting our elected representatives and candidates behind the For Our Freedom Amendment than continuing to sift through the expensive garbage lobbed at our homes and screens by dark money.
Watch this video to hear more from Jim Rubens on the need to reform big money in politics:
Jim Rubens is a Republican, past New Hampshire state senator, New Hampshire GOP platform committee chair, and 2014 and 2016 candidate for U.S. Senate. He is a board member for American Promise.
This op-ed was originally published by the New Hampshire Union Leader.
