When you boil it down, he’s still a Chicago thug.
(Politico) — The Obama administration is considering a number of measures to compel disclosure of the kind of anonymous campaign contributions that helped finance millions of dollars of attack ads against Democrats during the 2010 elections.
The White House last week began circulating a draft executive order that would require companies seeking government contracts to disclose contributions — including those that otherwise would have been secret — to groups that air political ads attacking or supporting candidates.
The proposed order follows several actions by regulatory agencies that have a similar intent of making corporate and individual donations more transparent.
Last month the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a decree that could result in shareholders having more say in corporate election spending. Democratic appointees to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission are pushing measures that could make public currently anonymous contributions to outside groups.
Taken together, the moves represent a broad administrative push to implement reforms that Congress failed to pass last year to blunt the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United vs. FEC in January 2010.
That decision prompted a deluge of outside advertising that liberals say favored Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections [that’s BS, unions spend the most during the midterms — ed.].
Administration critics, including the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are seizing on the White House’s draft executive order, in particular, as evidence of an attempt to use executive power to punish or silence political adversaries, while rewarding supporters.
Calling the draft executive order “an affront to the separation of powers . . . (and) to free speech,” chamber spokeswoman Blair Latoff said it “lays the groundwork for a political litmus test for companies that wish to do business with the federal government” and is “less about disclosure than intimidation.”
But congressional Democrats and White House allies applauded the draft executive order as an overdue effort to prevent the 2012 elections from being hijacked by undisclosed big moneyed special interests — on both sides of the partisan divide.