Republicans to Secret Donors: We’ve Got Your Back (Yet Again)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/5435764016/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

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Today, Senate Republicans marched in lockstep with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) by filibustering the DISCLOSE Act for the second time in two days. Democrats needed 60 votes to proceed to an actual vote on the bill, which would require unions, corporations, and secretive nonprofits to disclose the big donors behind their political activities. The final vote was 53 to 45.

After the vote, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who introduced DISCLOSE this spring and later whittled it down to a simpler, 19-pageversion, dinged his GOP colleagues for supporting disclosure in the past and then blocking a full vote on his bill. (No Democrats joined the Republicans in voting against a full vote.) But Whitehouse said the fight to make dark-money groups more transparent wasn’t over. “Joshua didn’t get the walls of Jericho to fall the first time he and the Israelites walked around the city,” Whitehouse said in an interview Monday night.

Republicans offered a variety of reasons for blocking the DISCLOSE Act. Sen. McConnell claimed the bill created “the impressions of mischief where there is none,” and amounts to “nothing more than member and donor harassment and intimidation.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a vigorous supporter of campaign finance reform in the past, said the bill favored labor unions—a claim flatly rejected by Whitehouse. “There is no union loophole in it,” he said. “It is the same rules for any organization no matter what.”

David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes more regulation of political money, said the bill overreached because it would also compel disclosure for nonpolitical ads. “There are plenty of ads that are lobbying related,” Keating told Politico. “You would have to go through all the red tape for those. It’s being billed as an election disclosure bill, but it covers way more than that.”

Pro-reform advocacy groups slammed the Republicans’ filibuster of the DISCLOSE Act. Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21 and the dean of the pro-reform community, said in a statement, “In a disgraceful disregard for the interests of the American people, Republican senators have voted to protect secret, corrupting contributions made by millionaires, billionaires, and corporations to influence federal elections.” Others took the long view. “Taking back our democracy is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, in a statement.

Even if it were to pass, the DISCLOSE Act would not take effect until January 2013. It’s unlikely to be introduced again before the November election.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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