Dark Money Groups Free To Spend Money Without Disclosure Again After Appeals Court Ruling
WASHINGTON -- An appeals court Tuesday overturned a ruling issued earlier this year that required independent groups spending money in elections to disclose their donors if they ran a certain type of campaign ad. The decision will immediately open the door for non-profit groups spending millions on this fall's election, like the Karl Rove-founded Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, to shift their funds back to these ads in order to help protect their tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Service regulations.
The appeals court overturned a March 30 ruling by district court judge Amy Berman Jackson in Van Hollen v. Federal Election Commission. Jackson had found that a 2007 FEC regulation improperly interpreted the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law and wrongly required groups spending money on so-called "electioneering communications" to only disclose donors who had earmarked their contributions for that specific expense, when it should have required the disclosure of all donors.
The March Van Hollen decision was seen as a victory for advocates of disclosure for independent groups that have flooded the 2012 election with an unprecedented amount of spending on campaign ads. The biggest spenders have been groups that do not disclose their donors because they are organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code covering non-profits. These groups have spent well over $200 million so far this cycle.
While the Van Hollen ruling was seen as a victory for disclosure, it did not wind up forcing any group to expose its donors. Non-profit groups simply shifted their spending from "electioneering communications," which are ads that mention a candidate but do not call for their election or defeat, to "independent expenditures," ads that explicitly take a position on the candidate's election.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/dark-money-groups-court-ruling_n_1893745.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
