Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the DISCLOSE Act of 2015.

Simply put, this bill would end the massive undisclosed spending in elections that is undermining public faith in our democracy, creating what one newspaper called ``a tsunami of slime.''

Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's disastrous 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. With that feat of judicial activism, which will likely go down with Lochner v. New York as one of the Supreme Court's worst decisions, the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court overturned the laws of Congress protecting our elections' integrity, thwarted the will of the American people, and allowed unlimited anonymous corporate money to flood into our elections.

Worse still, even though the justices decided 8-1 that laws promoting disclosure of outside spending were necessary and appropriate, everything that has happened since has shown a concerted effort to prevent and frustrate disclosure. So the billionaires and corporations spending tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars on elections can continue to do so with no public knowledge and no accountability.

The Citizens United decision hangs on a series of irretrievably flawed assertions. Among them is the premise that unlimited corporate expenditures would be fine because there would be a regime of ``effective disclosure'' that would ``provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.''

However, following Citizens United, that regime of ``effective disclosure'' has completely broken down, with billionaires and corporations spending unlimited secret money in elections. In the 2014 elections, the most expensive midterm elections in our history, with over $3.6 billion spent, the Washington Post reported that at least 31 percent of all independent spending was spent by groups that are not required to disclose their donors. And that doesn't even count spending on so-called ``issue ads,'' which is also not reported.

The first line of defense for campaign finance laws is supposed to be the Federal Election Commission. However, 5 years after the fact, the FEC just held a public meeting to consider rules to implement the Court's decision in Citizens United, and incredibly, the commissioners did not even consider rules to require disclosure.

That has left the problem largely to the Internal Revenue Service, because so many of the offending organizations are non-profits. And they mangled this. First, they failed to investigate big non-profit groups spending hundreds of millions of dollars on elections making what appeared to be illegal, material false statements about election spending on these IRS forms. Then the IRS singled out organizations for scrutiny based on words in their names suggesting that they were politically active. Recently, the Treasury Department and the IRS proposed new rules to require disclosure by 501(c)(4) groups. Along with fifteen of my colleagues, I commended the effort to ensure disclosure by these non-profits. However, the IRS withdrew the proposed rules, and the latest reporting says that new rules won't be ready for the 2016 elections, another failure of disclosure.

The DISCLOSE Act would put some transparency into the ``tsunami of slime.'' The bill, which is unchanged from the version introduced last Congress, would require organizations spending money in elections--including super PACS and tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups--to promptly disclose donors who have given $10,000 or more during an election cycle. The bill includes robust transfer provisions to prevent political operatives from using complex webs of entities to game the system and hide donor identities. This is not a new idea. Many Republicans, including several in the Senate, used to support disclosure.

Senator Alexander has said, ``I support campaign finance reform, but to me that means individual contributions, free speech, and full disclosure.''

``I don't like it when a large source of money is out there funding ads and is unaccountable,'' said Senator Sessions. ``To the extent we can, I tend to favor disclosure.''

Or as Senator Cornyn put it, ``I think the system needs more transparency, so people can more easily reach their own conclusions.''

Senator McConnell once summed it up nicely: ``Virtually everybody in the Senate is in favor of enhanced disclosure, greater disclosure. That's really hardly a controversial subject.''

And he was right--until Citizens United. Suddenly Republicans are fighting to keep the American people in the dark to protect their wealthy funders.

The high disclosure threshold and other provisions in the bill protect membership organizations from having to disclose their member lists, and from having to disclose any donor who does not wish his or her contribution to be used for political purposes.

Our campaign finance system is broken. Immediate action is required to fix it. Americans of all political stripes are disgusted by the influence of unlimited, anonymous corporate cash in our elections, and by campaigns that succeed or fail depending on how many billionaires the candidates have in their pockets.

Passing this law would remove the dark cloud of unlimited, anonymous money from our elections, and would prove to the American people that Congress is committed to fairness, equality, and the fundamental principle of a government ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' As Republican former Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter has said, the DISCLOSE Act is ``appropriately targeted, narrowly tailored, clearly constitutional and desperately needed.''

I thank our 35 cosponsors of this bill so far, and Representative Van Hollen for introducing in the House, and I urge my colleagues to support the DISCLOSE Act of 2015.

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