Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,13
PACs). Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision overturned restrictions on independent expenditures from corporations and labor unions in 2010, more and more political spending has been routed through Super PACs. Typically, conservative Super PACs have outraised liberal ones in the dark money spending race. These groups can accept unlimited contributions from any nonforeign source for political use, provided they do not coordinate with specific candidates and campaigns. They must disclose those donations—eventually. But donors wishing to remain anonymous may simply donate to a 501(c)(4), which does not disclose the names. Then the Super PAC lists only the name of the 501(c)(4) on its disclosure. This is known as dark money because the money cannot be traced back to its original source.
The Problem with Donor Disclosure
The solution seems easy. Just require nonprofits to disclose their donors. Problem solved.
It’s not that easy. All politics aside, people would be less likely to donate to charity if they knew their donation would trigger calls and targeting from every other charity that sees their name on a donor list.
There are numerous other legitimate reasons American citizens or corporations may not want to make donations public, not the least of which is the threat of retaliation, intimidation, or boycotts. In 2015, watchdog group Judicial Watch released documents showing the IRS itself had used donor lists to select audit targets. The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel wrote a book thoroughly detailing the many ways public disclosures have been used—particularly on the left—to intimidate. In The Intimidation Factor, she explained how campaign finance disclosure laws have been successfully used to persecute private individuals who supported specific candidates.
I take the position that “dark money”—ominous though it sounds—is still constitutionally protected free speech. Our First Amendment rights do not end when we reach a certain income level. Furthermore, no donors should have to risk their livelihood in order to influence a political issue. In this country, you can donate anonymously to political causes and still be completely within the law. Democrats are doing it. Republicans are doing it. It is neither illegal nor immoral.
In one of many real-life demonstrations of why nonprofits oppose disclosure laws, the Obama campaign in 2012 waged an intimidation campaign against donors to the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. A campaign-sponsored website, keepinggophonest, called out eight Romney donors by name and followed up with tweets disparaging those individuals. Democrat-friendly media followed up with profile pieces that intensified the trolling and harassment. The onslaught targeted not just the individual donors, but their businesses, and by extension, their families and employees. How could such tactics not have a chilling effect on free speech?
Disclosure laws for nonprofits would eliminate dark money in American elections, but at a cost of compromising our First Amendment right to free speech. That price is too high.
The Changing Nonprofit Landscape
Americans gave $410 billion to charity in 2017. That represented a 5.2 percent increase in charitable giving over the previous year. The sector is the third-largest workforce in the United States, behind only retail and manufacturing in the number of people it employs, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. In twenty-four states and the District of Columbia, nonprofit jobs even outnumber manufacturing jobs.
Charitable donations are a huge part of who we are as a nation. But the nonprofit charity sector is also becoming a huge part of who Democrats are. The sector has become so politicized that conservatives in the industry tell me they have to hide their politics or risk being ostracized. I’ve heard anecdotal stories of how uncomfortable they feel at ostensibly apolitical conferences when speakers routinely use their time to bash the president or the Republican Party.
What I have learned since that first meeting in my office about nonprofits is terrifying. It raises important questions that can probably only be answered by IRS audits, which seldom seem to target left-leaning groups.
Increasingly, traditional 501(c)(3) charitable organizations are becoming fronts for partisan political campaigning. When they leverage the power of their charitable assets, nationwide infrastructure, and grassroots networks obtained through decades of legitimate charitable work to engage in partisan political activity, that is deceptive, wrong, and potentially illegal.
Over the last decade, some of America’s legacy nonprofits have figured out how to convert their vast fund-raising and grassroots apparatus into political weapons of war. They have pioneered new methods of fund-raising that may enable them to bypass campaign finance limits and disclosure and potentially access huge charitable reserves. They devised strategies to get out the vote, a nonpartisan activity, that would