Imagine a country where the government makes laws and requires citizens to obey, yet citizens can’t read some of those laws unless they purchase the text, sometimes for a large amount of money, from a private organization. Imagine a country where a citizen posts the building safety laws of his own town on a website
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Is your member of Congress serving you, or serving himself? Many lawmakers, when they approach retirement, begin negotiating with lobbying firms to receive multimillion dollar salaries after they leave office. In some cases, a Senator or Representative will slip language into a bill or write an earmark that benefits a special interest, and when they
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Poor Senator Orrin Hatch. FreedomWorks, a group run by Dick Armey, a congressman who left office to become a corporate lobbyist, is running a series of ads to defeat Hatch in the Utah Republican primary. As iWatch News reports, FreedomWorks has used an accounting trick to move 100% secret money from its 501(c)(4) to its
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When Republic Report launched Sell Out Of The Week feature, our initial winner was President Obama, who earned the prize for embracing his super PAC, essentially endorsing unlimited corporate cash invading the democratic process, after having failed over three years in the White House to take some critical steps to clean up the system. We’ve
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There’s a lot to like about the state of Vermont: cheddar cheese, Chubby Hubby, maple syrup, and the Green Mountains. And now, a thorough rejection of corporate personhood. Yesterday, in what the Associated Press called “the most concerted effort” to amend the U.S. Constitution to declare that corporations are not people, 58 Vermont communities voted
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Transparency is a conservative value — at least it used to be. In the past, conservative Republicans voted time and again for greater public oversight in the public process. But in recent years, because of pressure from corporate lobbyists, reformers in the GOP have transformed into supporters of dark money slush funds. For instance, when
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In a post-Citizens United era with little to no transparency, many political attack groups have skirted the few mandatory disclosure laws still on the books. In 2010, NPR’s Peter Overby and Andrea Seabrook noted that attack ad groups appeared to be refusing to fill out forms with local broadcasters required by the FCC. The paperwork,
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Today, an especially sunny and warm day in Washington, D.C., citizens rallied on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court to let the court know that it’s time to overturn its 2010 Citizens United decision, which opened the door for unlimited corporate spending in political races. This comes on the heels of the court’s decision to
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