Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (Supreme Court Decision)

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      Justices Must Disclose Travel and Gifts Under New Rules

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      The change comes as members of Congress have called for the justices to be held to ethics standards similar to those for the executive and legislative branches.WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices will be required to disclose more of their activities, including some free trips, air travel and other types of gifts, according to rules adopted earlier this month.Under the new rules, justices and other federal judges must report travel by private jet, as well as stays at commercial properties, such as hotels, resorts or hunting lodges.The move comes as members of Congress have called for the justices, who have long faced less stringent reporting requirements, to be held to ethics standards similar to those for the executive and legislative branches.“To the extent this becomes a model for further activity for the Judicial Conference to clean up the Supreme Court mess, I think that’s significant,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat of Rhode Island who sits on the Judiciary Committee’s panel that oversees federal courts.Some advocates pushing for greater transparency on the court cautioned that the rules would be hard to enforce and that it would be nearly impossible to know whether a justice had failed to disclose a trip, flight or other perk.“The problem with any sort of transparency rule within the judiciary is the question of enforcement, the question of accountability,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, an organization critical of the court’s transparency. Without additional requirements, including a quicker turnaround for disclosing travel and gifts and penalties for failures to comply, the new measures are likely to have a limited effect, Mr. Roth said.“The bar is so low that you can get credit for doing the bare minimum,” he said. “Small but significant is where I’m at.”The new rules, which went into effect March 14, were adopted by a financial disclosure committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts.At a meeting in January, the committee discussed whether judges and justices would be required to file disclosures when they are hosted at commercial properties, such as resorts, according to a letter to Mr. Whitehouse from Judge Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, which provides support for the court system.By federal law, justices must file forms each year disclosing financial ties, including gifts. However, the rules for travel that is considered “personal hospitality” were not clearly defined, including for stays at commercial properties or trips in which a third-party pays.It is unclear precisely how oversight and enforcement would work for the justices. A court spokeswoman declined to comment.The most common enforcement mechanism stems from the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, which describes “misconduct” as “knowingly violating requirements for financial disclosure.” If an allegation arose, the chief judge of a circuit could review it and determine whether a punishment is warranted, but the act does not apply to the Supreme Court.Questions around travel by the justices have persisted for years, particularly since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Justice Scalia died while on a hunting trip at a lodge in West Texas owned by a businessman involved in a case that the court declined to hear in 2015.Justice Scalia, who had been staying at the ranch for free, had taken more than 250 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2014.In 2014 alone, he went on at least 23 privately funded trips, including to Ireland, Switzerland and Hawaii. Justice Scalia had been invited to the ranch by John Poindexter, owner of a Texas manufacturing firm. One of Mr. Poindexter’s companies, the Mic Group, had been the defendant in an age discrimination lawsuit by a former employee who had unsuccessfully sought review by the Supreme Court the year before.But Justice Scalia was hardly alone in accepting privately paid trips. From 2004 to 2014, Justice Stephen G. Breyer took 185 such trips, according to a database by the Center for Responsive Politics.The issue of privately paid travel also emerged in 2011, a year after the landmark campaign finance case Citizens United, which allowed unlimited corporate spending in elections. A liberal advocacy group, Common Cause, argued that Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from hearing the case because they traveled to a political conference in Palm Springs, Calif., sponsored by the businessman Charles G. Koch, one of the biggest donors to Republicans.Legal experts greeted this month’s move with cautious optimism.“In my world of transparency and judicial ethics, what we had until now was little more than a joke,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in legal ethics. “The rules were very lax and tolerated circumvention, and now we’ve taken a giant step away from that.”However, he said there was still a long way to go toward transparency and accountability, pointing to the lag time between when a gift is received and when it must be reported. Justices have until May 15 of the year after receiving a gift before they must report it.In theory, if a justice “knowingly and willfully” failed to comply with the rules, the attorney general could bring a case. In practice, though, he said, that has never happened. He added that it was also impossible to know how individual justices would respond to the stricter rules.“There’s no enforcement mechanism at the Supreme Court,” he said. “It will be up to each justice.” More

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      Alito Says Leak of Ruling Overturning Roe Put Justices’ Lives at Risk

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      The leak of a draft opinion, he said, “gave people a rational reason to think” the eventual decision could be prevented “by killing one of us.”WASHINGTON — The leak of his draft majority opinion overruling Roe v. Wade put the Supreme Court justices in the majority at risk of assassination, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said during wide-ranging remarks in a public interview on Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative legal group.“It was a grave betrayal of trust by somebody,” he said. “It was a shock, because nothing like that had happened in the past. It certainly changed the atmosphere at the court for the remainder of last term.”“The leak also made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe and Casey targets for assassination because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us,” Justice Alito said.He said the idea was hardly fanciful, noting an attempt on the life of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. A California man armed with a pistol, a knife and other weapons was arrested in June near Justice Kavanaugh’s Maryland home and charged with attempted murder. Among other things, the man said he was upset with the leaked draft suggesting the court would overturn Roe, the police have said.The leaked draft was published by Politico in early May, while the decision itself was issued in late June. The decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruled Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had established a constitutional right to abortion, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed Roe’s core holding.Understand the Supreme Court’s New TermCard 1 of 6A race to the right. More

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      Rob Stein, Who Changed How Politics Is Funded, Dies at 78

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      In the wake of Republican electoral victories in 2004, he convened major liberal donors to finance a network of political groups aligned with Democrats.Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist who helped reshape American politics by pioneering new ways for wealthy liberals to influence policy debates and elections, died on Monday at a hospice facility in Washington. He was 78.His son Gideon said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer.After a varied career in which he worked as a public interest lawyer and a top adviser to the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration and created nonprofit groups and a venture capital fund, Mr. Stein found his calling in the wake of the 2002 elections.The president’s party usually fares poorly in midterm elections, but Republicans captured the Senate, giving them control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, as well as the majority of governorships and state legislative seats. This left Mr. Stein concerned that Republicans could be headed for long-term dominance if Democrats failed to understand and counter their rivals’ superior tactics and political machinery.He spent months obsessing over the advocacy groups and think tanks that collectively constituted the conservative movement. He routinely stayed awake past midnight studying tax filings to map the flow of cash to these groups.Mr. Stein crystallized his research into a PowerPoint presentation called “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” which was intended as a sort of Rosetta stone for understanding the conservative movement and its funding. He began showing it to Democratic political operatives and major donors around the country, developing a following among some of the most influential figures on the left.After President George W. Bush was re-elected and Republicans increased their majorities in Congress in 2004, Mr. Stein launched a coalition of major liberal donors, the Democracy Alliance, to offset the Republican advantages detailed in his presentation. Each member had to commit to donating at least $200,000 a year to groups recommended by the alliance — including outfits supporting progressive causes, like fighting climate change and protecting abortion rights, that generally aligned with the Democratic Party.Its founding members included some of the biggest donors on the left, among them the financier George Soros.The alliance’s donors have combined to give more than $2 billion to recommended groups, the organization said. Their donations have helped seed some of the most important institutions on the left, including America Votes, Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.It wasn’t long before Republicans were trying to organize donor coalitions of their own to mimic some of the strategy behind the Democracy Alliance.“It just changed the way people thought about their philanthropy,” said David Brock, the former conservative journalist who became a leading Democratic operative and who founded Media Matters.In the 2022 election cycle, Media Matters and a network of affiliated groups subsequently created by Mr. Brock are on pace to spend $100 million, Mr. Brock said. He added that none of that would have been possible without Mr. Stein and the Democracy Alliance.“It was revolutionary for our side, and over the last 20 years it was the sole reason why sustainable Democratic infrastructure got built,” he said.Mr. Stein, center, with Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, and Kerry Healey, a former Republican lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, in 2018. Mr. Stein worked on building coalitions of donors and operatives across party lines.Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia SummitRobert Jay Stein was born on Oct. 26, 1943, in Wheeling, W.Va. His father, Charles, owned a chain of lumberyards, and his mother, Janis (Harrison) Stein, was involved in local arts, social service and religious organizations.He graduated from the Linsly Military Institute (now the Linsly School) in Wheeling before attending Antioch College in Ohio, a hotbed of progressive politics and activism.The abrupt transition shaped Mr. Stein’s politics.“It opened my brain to both conservative values and liberal values, and I became respectful of both, even though over time I became more in the liberal camp,” Mr. Stein said in an interview last month.He went on to the George Washington University Law School in Washington, where he would make his home for the rest of his life.He worked as a public interest lawyer for 10 years, then helped create or run a series of nonprofit organizations focused on issues including nutrition, refugees, organizational management and voter participation.Ahead of the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Mr. Stein was recruited to develop a presentation about mobilizing voters. That led to positions as an adviser to the Democratic National Committee under Chairman Ronald H. Brown, and then as chief of staff to Mr. Brown when President Bill Clinton named him commerce secretary in 1993.Mr. Stein left the Commerce Department shortly before Mr. Brown’s death in a plane crash in 1996 to help start a venture capital fund focused on women-owned businesses. When he formed the Democracy Alliance, he infused it with principles typically associated with venture investing.In addition to his son Gideon, from his marriage to Mary Ann (Efroymson) Stein, which ended in divorce, Mr. Stein is survived by his wife, Ellen Miley Perry; their daughter, Kat Stein; two other children from his first marriage, Dorothy and Noah Stein; and five grandchildren.After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision prompted a surge in political spending, much of it funded by undisclosed sources, Mr. Stein grew increasingly concerned that big money was deepening polarization and distrust in government.While he urged Democrats not to “unilaterally disarm,” he also began talking about ways to bridge partisan divides and reform politics. That became a larger part of Mr. Stein’s focus after Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016.He advised several groups on building coalitions of donors and operatives across the political spectrum to fight what he saw as a slide into authoritarianism exacerbated by Mr. Trump.Mr. Stein applied thinking and strategy from the Democracy Alliance to encourage “a new cross-partisan pro-democracy infrastructure,” said Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican operative who has worked to loosen Mr. Trump’s grip on the party.“He was especially attentive to those of us on the right who had never had common cause with Democrats,” said Ms. Longwell, who helped create and run two organizations that oppose Mr. Trump and his allies: the Bulwark website and the political group Defending Democracy Together.She said Mr. Stein, whom she considers a mentor, was “a relentless cheerleader for the project of democracy.” More

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      Ron DeSantis and Other Republicans Desecrate What Their Party Long Championed

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      In 2010, the Supreme Court held that “political speech does not lose First Amendment protection ‘simply because its source is a corporation.’” The case was Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and the conservative justices sided with a group barred by the government from airing a political documentary.Republicans used to celebrate that decision. “For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” said Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader. The Supreme Court, he added, “took an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups.”Mr. McConnell was standing up for a principle: People have a bedrock right to form associations, including corporations, and to use them to speak their minds.In the last few years, however, as large companies have increasingly agitated for left-of-center causes, many Republicans have developed a sudden allergy to corporate political speech, one that will have vast consequences for both the party and the nation.Disney’s Magic Kingdom Park in Florida.Ted Shaffrey/Associated PressConsider the recent drama in Florida. The evident retaliation by Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Republican allies against Disney, a major corporate player in their state, is part of a larger trend: What critics once called the party of big business is now eager to lash out at large companies and even nonprofits it deems inappropriately political — which in practice means anti-Republican.Conservatives angry at technology platforms over what they see as unfair treatment of right-of-center viewpoints have found a champion in a Republican senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has introduced bills to reform legal protection for certain social media platforms and offered the Bust Up Big Tech Act. J.D. Vance, running in the Ohio Republican Senate primary, has suggested that we “seize the assets” of the Ford Foundation and other progressive NGOs; he also called for raising the taxes of companies that showed concerns about state-level voting legislation favored by Republicans last year. Leading right-wing commentators, from Tucker Carlson of Fox News to Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire, cheer the efforts on.Too many conservatives seem to have no qualms today in wielding state power to punish their political opponents and shape the economy to their whims. This is not just a departure from the Republican consensus of the last half-century. It is a wholesale rejection of free markets and the very idea of limited government. It will make America poorer and the American people more vulnerable to tyranny.Republicans’ reversal is easy enough to explain: As companies increasingly accede to activist demands to make themselves combatants in a culture war, they have alienated broad swaths of the population. Twenty years ago, according to Gallup, fewer than half of Americans said they were somewhat or very dissatisfied with “the size and influence of major corporations.” Today, that number is 74 percent. Defending economic liberty is now passé. Taking on “big business” has become an effective way to score political points on the right, at least when the businesses are also seen as “woke.”The change may be politically expedient, but it will have grave costs. Conservatives once understood that free markets are an engine that produces widespread prosperity — and that government meddling is too often a wrench in the works. Choosing winners and losers, and otherwise substituting the preferences of lawmakers and bureaucrats for the logic of supply and demand, interferes with the economy’s ability to meet people’s material needs. If Republicans continue down this path, the result will be fewer jobs, higher prices, less consumer choice and a hampering of the unforeseen innovations that make our lives better all the time.But conservatives are turning on more than markets; they may be turning on the rule of law itself. The First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging people’s ability to speak, publish, broadcast and petition for a redress of grievances, precisely because the American founders saw criticizing one’s rulers as a God-given right. Drawing attention to errors and advocating a better path forward are some of the core mechanisms by which “we, the people” hold our government to account. The use of state power to punish someone for disfavored political speech is a gross violation of that ideal.The American economy is rife with cronyism, like subsidies or regulatory exemptions, that give some businesses advantages not available to all. This too makes a mockery of free markets and rule of law, transferring wealth from taxpayers and consumers to politically connected elites. But while ending cronyism is a worthy goal, selectively revoking privileges from companies that fall out of favor with the party in power is not good-government reform.One might doubt the retaliatory nature of Republicans’ corporate speech reversal, but for their inability to quit stepping in front of cameras and stating the quiet part aloud. In the very act of signing the law that does away with Disney’s special-purpose district and several others, Mr. DeSantis said this: “You’re a corporation based in Burbank, Calif., and you’re gonna marshal your economic might to attack the parents of my state. We view that as a provocation, and we’re going to fight back against that.”But if government power can be used for brazen attacks on American companies and nonprofits, what can’t it be used for? If it is legitimate for politicians to retaliate against groups for political speech, is it also legitimate to retaliate against individuals? (As Senator Mitt Romney once said, “Corporations are people, my friend.”) And if even the right to speak out is not held sacred, what chance do the people have to resist an authoritarian turn?Conservatives, confronting these questions, once championed free markets and limited government as essential bulwarks against tyranny. Discarding those commitments is not a small concession to changing times but an abject desecration, for cheap political gain, of everything they long claimed to believe.For decades, the “fusionist” governing philosophy — which, in bringing together the values of individual freedom and traditional morality, charges government with protecting liberty so that the people will be free to pursue virtuous lives — bound conservatives together and gave the Republican Party a coherent animating force. That philosophy would reject the idea that political officials should have discretion over the positions that companies are allowed to take or the views that people are allowed to express.The G.O.P. today may be able to win elections without fusionism, but it cannot serve the interests of Americans while wrecking the economy and undermining the rule of law.Stephanie Slade (@sladesr) is a senior editor at Reason magazine.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Supreme Court Wary of Donor Disclosure Requirement for Charities

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      The case, from California, could affect the regulation of “dark money” in political contests.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday seemed skeptical of California’s demand that charities soliciting contributions in the state report the identities of their major donors.A majority of the justices appeared to agree that at least the two groups challenging the requirement — Americans for Prosperity, a foundation affiliated with the Koch family, and the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative Christian public-interest law firm — should prevail in the case.It was less clear whether the court would strike down the requirement entirely for all charities as a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of association. And the justices gave few hints about whether their ruling, expected by June, would alter the constitutional calculus in the related area of disclosure requirements for campaign spending.Justice Stephen G. Breyer repeated concerns expressed in supporting briefs that the case could have broad implications. “This case is really a stalking horse for campaign finance disclosure laws,” he said.In the context of elections, the Supreme Court has supported laws requiring public disclosure. In the Citizens United campaign finance decision in 2010, the court upheld the disclosure requirements before it by an 8-to-1 vote. In a second 8-to-1 decision that year, Doe v. Reed, the court ruled that people who sign petitions to put referendums on state ballots do not have a general right under the First Amendment to keep their names secret.If the approach of the groups challenging California’s requirement for charities were adopted, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “I don’t see how the public disclosure at issue in Doe would have survived.”Derek L. Shaffer, a lawyer for the challengers in Monday’s case, said that the electoral context was different and that charities needed protection given the nation’s volatile political climate. He added that California’s reporting requirement subjected donors to the real potential of harassment, particularly in light of the state’s history of failing to keep the donor lists secret.“Think about medical organizations that may take views about masking, about vaccinations,” he said.Contributing to a charity for Asian-Americans, he said, might have seemed uncontroversial not long ago. “But today, in 2021, sad to say,” he said, “it could be a life-or-death issue that their identities have been disclosed.”Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to agree that donors may be endangered by disclosures of their identities. “In this era,” he said, “there seems to be quite a bit of loose accusations about organizations — for example, an organization that had certain views might be accused of being a white supremacist organization or racist or homophobic.”The challengers received support from hundreds of groups across the ideological spectrum, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Cato Institute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh read from a supporting brief filed by the last two groups: “A critical corollary of the freedom to associate is the right to maintain the confidentiality of one’s associations, absent a strong governmental interest in disclosure.”The case, Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta, No. 19-251, concerned a requirement that charities file with California a copy of an Internal Revenue Service form that identifies major donors. Federal law requires the I.R.S. to keep the form confidential.California also promised to keep the forms secret, but it has not always done so. According to court papers, it had inadvertently displayed over 1,800 forms on its website. The state has said that it has imposed new security measures.Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said there was little reason to trust the state. “The brief filed by the A.C.L.U. and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund says that we should regard your system as a system of de facto public disclosure because there have been such massive confidentiality breaches in California,” he told Aimee A. Feinberg, a lawyer for California.She responded that a judge had said the state’s efforts “to rectify past lapses and to prevent them in the future were commendable.”Mr. Shaffer said California had other ways to investigate potential fraud, including by auditing individual charities.Justice Elena Kagan said not all charities objected to making their donors’ names public, suggesting that a blanket rule was not needed. “Most charities disclose their donors,” she said. “In fact, it’s part of their strategy, that the more disclosure there is, the more fund-raising and association there is.”Mr. Shaffer said that anything less than a ruling doing away with the requirement entirely for all charities “will be a Pyrrhic victory.” Requiring thousands of charities to litigate whether their donors could be subject to harassment would be, he said, a burden at odds with First Amendment freedoms.Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the acting United States solicitor general, proposed a middle ground that did not seem to interest the justices. She urged the Supreme Court to return the case to the federal appeals court in California for a fresh look at whether the two groups challenging the requirement had provided sufficient evidence that their own First Amendment rights had been violated. More

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      Outside Money Floods Mayor’s Race, Raising Ethics Concerns

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      For the first time since the Supreme Court allowed unlimited spending in elections, candidate super PACs are flooding money into a New York mayoral election.New York City’s pivotal mayor’s race has unleashed an army of super PACs the likes of which the city has never seen.Raymond J. McGuire, the former Citigroup executive, has one. So, too, does Shaun Donovan, President Barack Obama’s former housing secretary, and Scott Stringer, New York City’s comptroller. Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, has one and soon may get another.The proliferation of super PACs supporting individual candidates in the race — a familiar theme in presidential races, but unheard of in a New York City mayoral contest — points to the gravity of this year’s election in the midst of a pandemic.But it also raises the question of whether the super PACs are simply a way to get around campaign finance limits and may lead to scrutiny of possible coordination between the outside funds and political campaigns, a practice that would violate campaign finance rules.The issue came into sharp focus on Thursday, when New York City’s Campaign Finance Board withheld the release of public matching funds to Mr. Donovan’s campaign. The board said it wanted to ensure there had been no coordination between the campaign and the super PAC supporting him, which is largely funded by his father.In a statement he read during the Thursday meeting, board chairman Frederick Schaffer said the board required further information from the Donovan campaign and New Start N.Y.C., the super PAC created to support Mr. Donovan’s campaign.The board first reached out to New Start N.Y.C. for more information on March 25, following a New York Times article on the super PAC, according to its treasurer, Brittany Wise. The super PAC responded the very next day.Michael Donovan, Mr. Donovan’s father, said there has been absolutely no coordination between him and his son. They talk “about the grandchildren” and other personal matters, he said.“I’m very dis-involved, and my son is very very careful that we don’t talk about anything involving the PAC,” said Mr. Donovan, an ad tech executive, when reached by phone.Ms. Wise said there had been no coordination with the campaign. Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for Mr. Donovan, said, “We follow the law.”The questions surrounding Mr. Donovan illustrate the continued repercussions of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited outside spending in elections.Coordination between super PACs and political campaigns is notoriously hard to prove. And the penalties, when there are any, are often slaps on the wrist.The stakes are particularly high in New York City, which is deploying its new, more generous matching funds program — designed to reward candidates who raise small-dollar donations from New York City residents — for the first time in a mayor’s race. On Thursday, the board doled out another $10 million to six qualifying candidates in the race, including Mr. Stringer and Mr. Yang.The board gave out $2.3 million to Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner; $2.2 million to Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit head; $900,000 to Maya Wiley, the MSNBC analyst and former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio; and $300,000 to the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams — candidates who so far have no apparent super PAC support.Critics argue that the rise of super PACs threatens the efficacy of the new system by allowing candidates to effectively have it both ways. Mr. Donovan, Mr. Stringer and Mr. Yang are participating in the matching funds program. Mr. McGuire is not.“Right now, independent expenditures are a monster that’s getting bigger and bigger, and the good guys have not figured out a way to slay it yet,” said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, a good-government group. “It’s like patching one part of your roof and the water finds another way in.”There were no super PACs explicitly supporting individual candidates in the 2013 mayoral primary, officials said.This mayoral election is different. Mr. McGuire’s super PAC has raised more than $4 million dollars from donors like Kenneth Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot; the art world philanthropist Agnes Gund; and the real estate developer Aby J. Rosen.Mr. Donovan’s has raised more than $2 million, nearly all of it from his father. The super PAC for Mr. Stringer, a collaboration between Food and Water Action and New York Communities for Change, a social justice group, was just formed on Monday. It aims to raise a modest $50,000 to $100,000, using those resources to mobilize a pre-existing volunteer network, according to its treasurer, Sam Bernhardt.Mr. Yang’s super PAC, Future Forward NYC, has only raised $35,000 so far, according to state records, though its founder, the entrepreneur and investor David Rose, said he aims to raise more than $7 million.Mr. Rose suggested that the existing spending limit for campaigns that participate in the matching funds system — $7.3 million — was not enough to win a New York City mayor’s race.“New York City is the single biggest market around, and to try to do a big campaign on quote-un-quote that kind of money is challenging in this media market,” he said in an interview. “My goal is to see if we can double that.”Lis Smith, a former adviser to the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, said she was also in the process of organizing a super PAC supporting Mr. Yang’s candidacy, aiming to counteract the bombardment of negative advertising that the presumptive front-runner is expected to face in the coming weeks.The goal is to raise $6 million, Ms. Smith said, so that Mr. Yang’s message was not “drowned out by millions of dollars in negativity.”The PAC, reported by Politico, is partnering with veteran ad makers and political operatives who have worked on behalf of Mr. Obama and Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.“Every day Andrew’s opponents wake up, get out of bed, attack Andrew, and then go to sleep,” Ms. Smith said. “We need to make sure their negativity doesn’t drown out Andrew’s message.”Kimberly Peeler-Allen, the treasurer of New York for Ray, the super PAC supporting Mr. McGuire’s candidacy, said the spending allows Mr. McGuire to compete. The PAC has spent more than $2 million on ads to introduce the candidate to the general public.Ms. Peeler-Allen acknowledged that super PACs are problematic. But she and Ms. Smith also argued that it makes no sense to unilaterally disengage in a race with so much at stake.“Until there is significant campaign finance reform in this country, we have to use the tools that we have to create the change that we want to have,” Ms. Peeler-Allen said.Mayor de Blasio, who has himself engaged in creative fund-raising efforts that have drawn legal scrutiny, agreed.“We need a reset in this whole country on campaign finance,” he said on Thursday. “We need a constitutional amendment to overcome the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, and we need to reset the whole equation to get money out of politics across the board.” More

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      Mitch McConnell Lashes Out at Corporations Criticizing Voting Restrictions Laws

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      Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has long argued that corporate campaign donations are a protected, nearly sacred, form of political communication. On Tuesday he made the case that business executives might be better off limiting their free speech to writing checks. In recent days, Mr. McConnell, the minority leader, has lashed out at executives with Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta and other corporations for criticizing Republican-led efforts to impose restrictions on voting access in Georgia and other states, accusing them of “bullying” politicians. Mr. McConnell went even further on Tuesday, speaking in his home state during an extended back-and-forth with reporters.“My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics,” said Mr. McConnell, after an appearance promoting vaccine distribution in Louisville. “It’s not what you’re designed for. And don’t be intimidated by the left into taking up causes that put you right in the middle of America’s greatest political debates.”When asked to define the activities that executives should avoid, he responded, “I’m not talking about political contributions.”Brian Fallon, a former top aide to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, said Mr. McConnell’s comments reflect the struggle of a once-powerful leader trying to find his way following his loss of the Senate majority and a break with former President Donald J. Trump over the Jan. 6 riot.“The earth is shifting under his feet,” said Mr. Fallon, who now runs a group opposed to Mr. McConnell’s judicial nominations. “He’s criticizing corporations for wading into political debates after years of defending their right to spend unlimited sums on political campaigns. This is a guy used to calling the shots, but he is suddenly powerless and flailing.”People close to Mr. McConnell say he is simply pointing out the political perils of business leaders jumping into partisan debates, even though he has often touted the support of corporate leaders for his efforts to cut taxes and regulation.Mr. McConnell told reporters he was not implying business leaders did not have the right to express themselves, but suggested the best way to communicate was by contributing money to campaigns.“Republicans,” he said, “drink Coca-Cola too, and we fly.” Companies and sports leagues were “not very smart” to weigh in on the voting bills, he said.And M.L.B.’s decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of the Georgia law, he added, was “irritating one whole hell of a lot of Republican fans.” Mr. McConnell was one of the leading opponents of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that restricted spending by corporations and unions, challenging it in court nearly two decades ago. And he celebrated the landmark Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court that struck it down in 2010, a decision that asserted corporations had similar free speech rights to individuals.“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process. With today’s monumental decision, the Supreme Court took an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups,” he said in a statement at the time. More