I’ve heard the ominous music. I’ve seen Sen. Michael Bennet blasted as a reckless spender, the man who cast the deciding vote for “Obama-care,” who wasted billions on the stimulus. I’ve seen Ken Buck decried for ethics violations, his stance on abortion, for refusing to prosecute a rape case. Then there have been the attacks on Ryan Frazier for sending jobs overseas, on Rep. Ed Perlmutter for giving away “billions to Wall Street billionaires.” Betsy Markey votes with Nancy Pelosi 94 percent of the time! Cory Gardner wants to tax the wind!
By now chances are good you’ve seen and heard all these political attacks too, if you’ve turned on your television, opened your mail box, or logged on to the Internet. But odds are good you don’t know who is paying for them.
This election season Colorado is ground zero for a crazy amount of spending – $39 million and counting, according to the Sunlight Foundation’s outside money tracker—from groups outside the state, determined to sway our votes; that’s on top of money spent on ads by the candidates’ own campaigns. Indeed, the Colorado Senate race between Bennet and Buck has drawn more outside cash than any other race in the country.
Where are all these groups getting the cash to pay for these advertisements? Many of them aren’t saying. The Chamber of Commerce has spent nearly $2.2 million on “issue advertisements” — ads that stop just short of saying “vote against candidate x” — in the Senate race.
Because the group is registered under the 501(c)6 section of tax law, it is not required to disclose its donors publicly. American Action Network, headed by former Minnesota GOP Sen. Norman Coleman, recently kicked in $725,000 on issue advertisements running in Colorado’s seventh district race.
As a 501(c)4 organization, this group, too does not disclose their donors. By our calculation, when you take away the money spent by national party committees, 28 percent of the cash spent on Colorado races comes from outside groups that do not disclose their donors.
Other newly minted groups have also jumped into the fray, the offspring of the recent Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision, which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on ads explicitly urging votes for or against a candidate.
These new “super PACs” include American Crossroads, which gets fundraising and advice from GOP operative Karl Rove and has spent upwards of $5.6 million on the Colorado Senate race. American Crossroads does disclose its donors to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — and they include Texas builder Bob Perry, the one and same who funded the 2004 “Swift Boat” attack on John Kerry. However its sister organization, Crossroads GPS, which has put more than $200,000 in the Senate race, does not.
Not all the Super PACs are conservative. Women Vote has weighed in on the race between Markey and Gardner. Women’s Vote Women Action Fund, a 501(c)4, which does not need to disclose donors, has gotten into the Bennet v. Buck wrangle. The NEA Advocacy Fund, associated with the teachers union, the National Education Association, is another “super PAC” spending big here—some $1.9 million reported so far.
Recent court decisions, years of FEC rulings that border on the nonsensical and an Internal Revenue Service that rarely enforces rules for non-profit groups engaged in political spending have led to the spending spree. Meanwhile, the Senate recently rejected the DISCLOSE Act, which would have brought more transparency to the system. Fittingly, Colorado this year is a trial run of the new Wild West of outside spending. Just wait until 2012. Cue ominous music—and fade.
Nancy Watzman is a Denver-based consultant for the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for transparency in government. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
