Dan Weiner and Brent Ferguson:
The appeal of a pass-through entity like the Wisconsin Club for Growth is obvious. Whereas Walker’s campaign committee was subject to contribution limits and disclosure rules, the group could raise unlimited contributions and keep its donors secret, even as Walker’s control of the entity still guaranteed that its ads would contain – as another email put it – all the “correct messaging.”
You don’t need to be an election lawyer to see this reduces campaign finance rules to a farce. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court invalidated political spending limits for corporations like the Wisconsin Club for Growth because it assumed that such spending would be independent of candidates’ campaigns and fully transparent, and so pose little corruption risk. The court held that limits on direct contributions to candidates and disclosure were enough to protect the integrity of our political system. But such rules are pointless if a candidate can get around them as easily as Walker did.
These revelations are a stark example of what most political practitioners already know: Candidates and supportive groups like the Wisconsin Club for Growth often coordinate their activities with one another to get around campaign finance rules. In 2014, theBrennan Center released a report documenting many instances of such coordination and showing how hard it is to write and enforce laws to prevent it. The problem has likely only gotten worse as candidates and groups have become more sophisticated and realized the potential benefits and low risk of coordinating their spending.