The Washington Post reports, "rank-and-file senators hijacked a debate over a narrowly tailored ethics bill and won broad approval Thursday of a more far-reaching reform package that would impose new conflict-of-interest rules and mandate more transparency on K Street. . . . Senate leaders, who had hoped to quickly approve a modest provision that would formally outlaw equity insider trading by lawmakers and their staff members, instead navigated a mine field of reform offerings that went far beyond the relatively simplistic underlying legislation. Rather than just forbidding lawmakers and their staff members from trading on private information they learned from their positions, the legislation extended restrictions to the executive branch and Washington’s consulting class on a vote of 96 to 3."

George Will examines state campaign finance restrictions in this column.  He notes, "A Florida law requires disclosure, including the name and address of the contributor, of any contribution, no matter how small — a penny for your thoughts? Report it — to a political committee. A Washington state law is notably protective of the political class: There must be litigation before a campaign to recall a public official can start, and lawyers are essentially forbidden from volunteering their help with that litigation. In Mississippi, anyone can put up his or her own Web page about a ballot issue, but the Web page designer must disclose the time he or she took to do it. And anyone who spends more than $200 on political speech — say, a small ad in a local newspaper — is required to give the government monthly reports about his or her political activity. . . . Campaign regulations usually focus on money, supposedly to prevent quid pro quo corruption or the appearance thereof pertaining to candidates. But many laws cover activities involving ballot measures, which suggests that, for reformers, limiting political speech is itself the goal."

From USA Today: "Nearly two-thirds of the $95 million that flowed into super PACs driving presidential and congressional politics came from wealthy individuals, challenging the notion that money from corporations is dominating the 2012 election, a USA TODAY analysis shows. . . . [F]inancial reports filed this week show less than $1 out of every $5 flowing into super PACs' coffers came from corporations. The lion's share of that corporate money is linked to privately owned firms . . . . "

• Speaking of the Super PAC "coordination bill," it sounds like an interest group lobbyist isn't done writing it yet.  Democracy 21/Fred Wertheimer asserted in a press release: "Democracy 21 is also preparing a legislative proposal to shut down the kind of candidate-specific Super PACs that are functioning for the first time in the 2012 presidential election.  The legislation would treat these candidate-specific Super PACs in legal terms as arms of the presidential campaigns, as they are in reality. The legislation would treat a candidate-specific Super PAC run by associates of the candidate as affiliated with the candidate’s campaign and subject to the candidate’s contribution limits." 

And according to BNA, Sen. Schumer announced that persons who exercised their constitutional rights would be called before Congress and harassed: "Schumer indicated that he and other Senate Democrats increasingly are concerned that the recent contributions, most of which have gone to conservative, Republican-leaning organizations, represent an attempt by wealthy donors and corporations to buy disproportionate influence over the government.  He said that donors to Super PACs and so-called Section 501(c)(4) organizations would be called in to testify and would be asked 'why they gave.'"  Or, as the New York Times puts it, "They said they would haul donors before the committee to ask why they were handing over hundreds of thousands of dollars — and in some cases, millions — to these groups, and what they expected in return."

According to published reports, at least one Super PAC, Priorities USA Action, received a contribution of more than $215,000 from Priorities USA, its affiliated 501(c)(4) tax-exempt group.  Priorities USA Action is a candidate-specific Super PAC supporting President Obama’s re-election. Priorities USA also is supporting President Obama's re-election.

Since 501(c)(4) groups do not have to report their donors, this amounts to a money-laundering scheme to hide the true sources of the money going to the Super PAC supporting President Obama, which is supposed to disclose its actual donors.

 "The court has put more weight on that distinction between coordinated and independent than that distinction can bear," Weintraub says. 

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"When you read the bare facts," says the FEC's Weintraub, "it makes people scratch their heads and say, 'In what sense is that not coordinated?' Super PACs are functioning as alter egos of the candidates' committees, and are being run by their friends." Who, I ask Weintraub, has the responsibility for policing coordination? "We do, I suppose," she says. Then she sighs.

AP reports, "NBC asked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Saturday to pull a campaign advertisement made up almost entirely of a 1997 'Nightly News' report on Newt Gingrich’s ethics committee reprimand. . . . The footage was used without permission and the extensive use of the broadcast 'inaccurately suggests that NBC News and Mr. Brokaw have consented to the use of this material and agree with the political position espoused by the videos,' NBC’s vice president of media law, David N. Sternlicht, wrote Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades."

This matter appears to involve complaints similar to those in the recent dust-up between Robin Carnahan's campaign and Fox News.

Earlier this month, CREW issued a press release announcing that it was leading a "petition drive through the White House’s “We the People” website to force President Obama to get off the sidelines and fix the FEC.  The administration has promised an official response to any petition that receives 25,000 signatures within 30 days."  The petition reads, "we urge you to nominate new commissioners to the FEC prior to the 2012 elections."

Now, Politico reports, "at the halfway point of a 30-day petition signature period, the petition has attracted fewer than 4,100 signatures –  it needs 25,000 by Feb. 10 — and CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan is blaming the White House for technical problems she says are preventing people from signing....The White House, however, tells PI there’s no indication that petition system bugs are causing significant problems.

At the end the day, though, CREW freely admits that the interest groups behind the petition really don't care what the public actually thinks about their issue:  "Sloan says that regardless of the petition’s outcome, CREW, along with other petition sponsors — Americans for Campaign Reform, Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters, Public Campaign, Public Citizen, United Republic and U.S. PIRG — will continue pressing the Obama administration to reform the FEC."

Brad Smith writes in this Wall Street Journal op-ed, "From the start, reaction to Citizens Unitedv. Federal Election Commission has bordered on the hysterical.... [Sen.] Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), proposed a constitutional amendment last month that would not only prohibit corporations from speaking on political elections, but would prohibit any group of citizens organized ‘to promote business interests’ from speaking about elections.... A national coalition, Move to Amend, seeks a constitutional amendment providing that ‘artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities . . . shall have no rights.’  The coalition seems oblivious to the fact that this would apply to campaign committees and nonprofits such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club, and would allow legislatures to make the advocacy of Move to Amend's goals illegal for most of the coalition's ‘endorsing organizations’ (which are themselves corporations)....The goal of this misinformation is clear. Reformers, who sit mainly on the political left, and their Democratic Party allies hope to silence voices that they perceive to be hostile to their political interests. Two years after Citizens United, American democracy seems as robust as ever. This may be what its critics fear most—a vibrant debate that they cannot control and fear they will lose."

FEC Chair Caroline Hunter has this op-ed in the Washington Times. She writes:

Contrary to some suggestions that superPACs are acting under the radar and outside of any regulation, they are, in fact, subject to the same long-standing disclosure requirements and objective rules applicable to everyone else.

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Notwithstanding the FEC’s initial bipartisan approval of superPACs and the inescapable conclusion of the court rulings, these outside groups have come under fire for allegedly acting on candidates’ behalf and for being the campaigns’ “evil twin.” Before reaching such conclusions, however, it is important to understand that superPACs must abide by the same rules as all other similarly situated speakers.

First, superPACs may not serve as an arm of a candidate’s campaign. With the exception of leadership PACs, any political committee that is established, maintained or controlled by any candidate or agent thereof is deemed to be part of the candidate’s campaign and thus cannot accept unlimited funds from individuals, corporations or unions, as superPACs may do. (The FEC recently also rejected unanimously a proposal by a leadership PAC to accept unlimited funds.)

Second, superPACs may not coordinate with any candidate. The FEC has objective standards for determining when individuals or groups are coordinating their speech with campaigns. These rules apply to everyone, whether a superPAC, George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association or an average Joe. These rules, passed after much deliberation with bipartisan votes, have been fodder for Comedy Central personalities (whose corporate employer enjoys the media exemption) for being underinclusive. The alternative, however is to leave government regulators to determine on their own whether an ad has the intent or effect of benefiting particular candidates. This type of subjective speech supervision would be unconstitutionally vague, unpredictable and inhibitive to speakers.

Third, superPACs are subject to the same disclosure requirements as traditional PACs. They must register with the FEC and file regular reports for all spending, as well as additional special reports for spending exceeding certain thresholds. These disclosures are all made available promptly on the FEC’s website.

Regular FEC watchers will recall that FEC Vice Chair Ellen Weintraub recently used the "evil twin" phrase (from a Ruth Marcus op-ed: “’I view the super PAC as the evil twin of the candidate’s campaign committee,’ Federal Election Commission member Ellen Weintraub told me. . . . ‘How can it possibly be true that to give more than $2,500 to a candidate is potentially corrupting but to give millions to an outside group that is acting on the candidate’s behalf is not?’ Weintraub asked.”). Hunter's reference to "subjective speech supervision" is a reference to her Democratic colleagues' approach to a recent Advisory Opinion request, in which FEC Democrats announced that the objective regulatory standards for determining unlawful coordination could be disregarded when those regulations might yield an undesirable result. (Disclosure: lawyers from this firm brought that AO request.)

Like independent expenditure committees, recall committees in Washington have at most a tenuous relationship with candidates. The contribution limit here is thus materially indistinguishable from the limit we invalidated in Long Beach. Under Washington’s recall system, political committees seeking to recall officials do not coordinate their spending with candidates for office. In the event a recall is successful, the successor to office is appointed by a governmental entity designated by state law — in this case, the Pierce County Council. See Wash. Rev. Code § 36.16.110; Pierce County, Wash., Charter art. 4, § 4.70. Thus, as Washington law is structured, expenditures by recall committees are similar to independent expenditures. See Citizens United, 130 S. Ct. at 910 (defining independent expenditures as “political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate”). Given that recall committees “do not coordinate or prearrange their independent expenditures with candidates, and they do not take direction from candidates on how their dollars will be spent,” they do not have the sort of close relationship with candidates that supports a threat of actual or apparent corruption. Long Beach, 603 F.3d at 696.