Heitkamp Pushes Plan to Fight Back Against Secret Money in Elections

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Continuing her efforts to bring more transparency to our elections, U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp is co-sponsoring legislation to crack down on secret campaign spending.

In the 2012 federal elections, Super PACs and 501(c) nonprofit groups spent $1 billion in unlimited contributions from millionaires, billionaires, corporations, labor unions and other special interest groups to influence voters. As much as $400 million of this total came in the form of secret donations. The DISCLOSE Act of 2014 would require organizations that spend money on elections to disclose their spending on those activities as well as their major individual sources of funding in a timely manner.

"When I was working on increasing campaign finance transparency as North Dakota's Attorney General, there was bipartisan consensus that rooting out secret money was good for our democracy," said Heitkamp. "To make the changes necessary to improve the integrity of our electoral system, Republicans and Democrats need to work together on solutions. The DISCLOSE Act is a commonsense plan that will help make sure the public knows who is spending money to influence our elections. It should be legislation we can all agree is needed."

The DISCLOSE Act requires any covered organization that spends $10,000 or more during an election cycle to file a report with the Federal Election Commission within 24 hours, detailing the amount and nature of each expenditure over $1,000 and the names of all of its donors who gave $10,000 or more. Transfer provisions in the bill prevent donors from using shell organizations to hide their activities.

Since she was North Dakota's Attorney General, Heitkamp has pushed for more campaign finance transparency. Last month, Heitkamp backed a constitutional amendment to allow Congress and States to set reasonable restrictions on political campaign donations to reduce the drastically growing influence of big money in financing campaigns and even the playing field for all campaigns both large and small.

Following recent Supreme Court decisions, there have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent in Federal elections by special interest groups that do not need to disclose their donors. The Supreme Court laid the groundwork for a broken system many years ago, which is addressed specifically by the amendment Heitkamp cosponsored. In 1976, the Court held in Buckley v. Valeo that restricting independent campaign expenditures violates the First Amendment right to free speech, essentially saying that money and speech are the same.

Building on this flawed precedent, the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 that corporations deserve the same free speech protections as individual Americans. Since then, corporations have been able to spend unlimited amounts of money on political activity and mostly negative campaign advertising.

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