Over the last two years, political reporters have shined a glaring spotlight on super PACs and their funders. Just ask super PAC mega-donor Harold Simmons; The Wall Street Journal went as far as reporting where he buys his underwear. But journalists haven’t managed to shed nearly as much light on the inner workings of so-called “dark money” nonprofit groups—which, like super PACs, can collect and spend unlimited sums, but aren’t required by law to disclose their donors.
One notable exception is ProPublica. Recently, a team of ProPublica reporters peeled back the curtain a bit on a little-known dark-money outfit that played a role in allowing Republican to retain their grip on the House of Representatives last November. The story of how they managed do so says a lot about both the possibilities and pitfalls reporters face in the post-Citizens United era.
Shortly after the 2012 election, ProPublica staffers Olga Pierce and Justin Elliott set out to answer a vexing question: How did Republicans wind up with a 30-plus-seat advantage in the House when the majority of Americans cast ballots for Democratic candidates? Part of the answer, multiple analysts have argued, is that Democratic voters are often densely packed into urban areas. Another part, of course, is partisan gerrymandering. After far-reaching GOP victories in the 2010 elections, Republican-controlled state legislatures seized on the once-in-a-decade redistricting process to redraw district lines in their party’s favor.
Still, this kind of disparity had only been seen three times in the last century. Suspecting there might be something else at work, Pierce, Elliott, and Theodoric Meyer began combing through redistricting-related lawsuits, nearly 200 of which have been filed since 2010 (for more on specific cases and related reporting resources, check out the excellent site All About Redistricting). They quickly homed in on a little-known North Carolina case, which had dredged up a wealth of information on Republican tactics. “We were shocked when we started looking though the discovery documents,” Elliott recalls. “There was all this incredibly juicy stuff, most of which hadn’t been covered at all locally.”
Eventually, the team pieced together a remarkably detailed picture of the state’s redistricting process. The driving force was an outside group called the Republican State Leadership Committee, which is headed by former George W. Bush counselor Ed Gillespie. In the run up to the 2010 mid-term elections, RSLC launched a front group called Real Jobs NC, which used bare-knuckle tactics to attack Democratic candidates. This helped Republicans seize control of both chambers of the state’s legislature for the first time in a century. RSLC then hired national party operatives to guide the new Republican majority through the redistricting process. As ProPublica reported in December:
Through the spring and summer, legislators in charge of redistricting traveled the state holding public meetings at local colleges, soliciting comment and proposed maps from citizens….But that input had little influence on the districts that were eventually drawn.
Instead, the real maps were being produced behind the scenes by a team that based its operations at Republican Party headquarters on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh. Armed with advanced mapping software, [Republican operative Thomas] Hofeller and others crafted districts that would virtually guarantee big gains for the party.
The results? Although more than half of North Carolinians voted for Democratic candidates, “the state’s congressional delegation flipped from 7-6 Democratic to 9-4 in favor of Republicans.”
The North Carolina suit also shed light on the funding behind this effort—or rather, how obscure the funding can be. In his introductory letter to state lawmakers, RSLC President Chris Jankowski wrote that his organization had retained “a team of seasoned redistricting experts” who were helping redraw district lines in “a number of states” and would do the same for North Carolina. Jankowski added, “The entirety of this effort will be paid for using non-federal dollars through our 501c(4) organization.” In other words, RLSC—which, as a political advocacy organization, is required to disclose its donors— would fund its gerrymandering operation through its dark-money arm, allowing the group to mask the effort’s funders.
ProPublica just noted via twitter that this story doesn't mention Kim Barker, who has led the way on dark-money reporting. Apologies for the oversight. Barker definitely deserves major kudos. You can read her work here:
http://www.propublica.org/site/author/kim_barker
#1 Posted by Mariah Blake, CJR on Thu 21 Feb 2013 at 03:54 PM
Wow, amazing. Politicians acting like . . . politicians. Drawing political maps to benefit their own party. Democrats would never do that in, say, California, correct? 'Dark money' - ooh, scary. Left-wing journalists, never unpredictable, didn't have a good angle to attack private money immediately after the 2012 elections again exposed the 'money in politics' meme (as if politics isn't about money, public and private) as what it has always been, intellectually, which is to say nonsense on stilts. Ideologues gotta keep trying to stuff reality into their theory, though, so the above reporter has found her angle.
In the meantime, the piggish behavior of the Democrats when it comes to power (and who needs money when you have the power?) goes mostly unremarked. Don't know if CJR noticed, but the majority opinion in that 'Citizens United' case was, basically, stripped of jargon, that other corporations and organizations of people had the same free speech rights as do The New York Times Corporation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. One measure of CJR's pollitical slant is that it has never engaged that fairly simple argument. Characteristically, in a recent editorial both stupidly argued and belligerent in its tone, the Times argued that it had speech rights that other groups should not have, for which it was chided by an exasperated Floyd Abrams, the Times' former 1st Amendment lawyer. CJR chastely averts its eyes.
But, to be fair, most other press organizations have been missing in action, too, in spite of the argument made by the Obama Administration's Solicitor-General in response to a question from the bench, that the government had the right to suppress any book, pamphlet, documentary or other media deemed by the government to be (a) a 'corporate' product, and (b) an endorsement, even implicitly, of a candiate or cause during an election season. Even the ACLU couldn't stomach what it could tell was the direction the 'reformers' were going on this issue, and filed a brief on behalf of Citizens United. Which is seldom noted as well.
Instead of shouting about the strong tendencies on the Left to regulate speech it doesn't like from the rooftops ('speech codes' on campuses and campaigns against 'hate speech' and 'commercial speech' are consistent with this tendency), after much posing about the threat of the Bush administration to freedom and liberty during those years, the MSM devotes its time to attacking 'money', i.e., the use of resoures by people on the Right to be political activists. Just like reporters who already have corporate megaphones, one might note - what's the 'cash value' of Paul Krugman's column to the Left? CJR won't ask. What a profile in courage.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 22 Feb 2013 at 05:18 PM