Getting Righteous About Campaign Finance Law

 

Carolina Forward email blast: Feb. 27, 2023

The North Carolina State Board of Elections has launched formal investigations into two high-profile Republican figures and one Republican dark-money group in connection with the 2022 election. Last week, Carolina Forward filed two formal complaints uncovering illegally unreported campaign support during the 2022 election cycle:

1. The first regards E.C. Sykes, the 2022 Republican nominee for State Senate District 18, who accepted and did not report communications training provided to him by the group Alliance Defending Freedom.
2. The second regards former Republican Congressman Mark Walker’s “Win the Courts” organization, which provided material support to several Republican candidates for the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals which was never reported....

E.C. Sykes and “Alliance Defending Freedom”

E.C. Sykes is a multimillionaire investor, former businessman, and far-right Christian fundamentalist who ran for North Carolina’s State Senate District 18 in Wake and Granville counties. Sykes spent approximately a quarter of a million dollars of his own considerable wealth on his ultimately unsuccessful campaign, which he lost to Democrat Mary Wills Bode by a larger-than-expected 5.5 points....

...Sykes received strong support from a national Christian fundamentalist organization called the “Alliance Defending Freedom” (or ADF). The ADF is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and supports criminalizing homosexuality as well as the forced sterilization of transgender people....

Media training is a permissible form of in-kind material campaign support, so long as its value does not exceed the maximum allowable contribution limit ($5,600 in 2022). Like all campaign contributions, it must also be reported. Sykes did not.

Mark Walker and “Win the Courts”

Republican former Congressman and failed U.S. Senate hopeful Mark Walker unveiled a project called “Win the Courts” in mid-2022, dedicated to assisting Supreme Court and Court of Appeals candidates.

“Win the Courts” was organized as an independent expenditure committee (also known as a “dark money” group). One of its key activities was a colorful bus, pictured here, emblazoned with the images and names of Republican judicial candidates. The bus was a prominent prop at many Republican events.... “Win the Courts” also organized a rally in Greensboro....

Mark Walker and “Win the Courts” broke North Carolina election laws in a number of ways. It provided material campaign logistical support to several candidates, none of which was ever reported; it obviously coordinated closely with the Republican candidates it was organized to promote, which is also prohibited by law.

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In July 2022, I wrote about the Sykes-Bode contest for NCS18. Sykes was a worrisome alternative to a talented young Democratic woman.

Southern Poverty Law Center's info on Alliance Defending Freedom.

Mark Martin's Involvement in Election Denialism Targeted by Carolina Forward

 

It was very recently announced that former NC Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin was returning to North Carolina to become the founding dean of the brand new High Point School of Law. When Martin resigned his seat on the NC Supremes, he went to become dean of the law school at Regent University, the school founded by evangelist and Jehovah whisperer Pat Robertson.

Then came this bombshell news: The New York Times reported that Martin served as an informal advisor to Trump in the days following the election and supported an unsuccessful lawsuit that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s wins in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

The Times also reported that Martin told Trump that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to reject state election returns — a move Pence rejected.

The Washington Post reported that Trump spoke with Martin on Jan. 6, 2021, the day Trump supporters overran the U.S. Capitol. Martin has repeatedly declined to comment publicly about his involvement.

Martin’s appointment as dean has raised eyebrows since it was announced in June. Last month, the editorial board of the nearby Greensboro News & Record chided Martin and the university for failing to "address the brontosaurus in the room."

Carolina Forward intensified the debate this week when it purchased an interstate billboard near High Point University saying, “Mark Martin betrayed our constitution.” Carolina Forward is pressuring High Point University (which is affiliated with the United Methodists) to rescind Martin's appointment as dean of its law school.

“Mark Martin’s repeated attempts to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 election were a blatant violation of basic Constitutional principles,” said Blair Reeves, Carolina Forward’s Executive Director. “Martin was an eager and willing participant in an effort to overthrow a duly-elected American government, and helped inspire the horror of January 6th’s right-wing terrorist assault against the U.S. Capitol. He is no longer fit to practice law, let alone guide the course of legal education based on a Constitution for which he shows pure contempt.”

Protecting Gov. Cooper's Veto in 2022

 

Blair Reeves and his team at Carolina Forward have released their "slate" of progressive Democrats for 2022  (formerly known in 2018 and 2020 as the Long Leaf Pine Slate). Carolina Forward will be fundraising for them and offering other election strategies and polling support. Check them out.

Carolina Forward's main consideration this year is protecting Governor Cooper's veto power:

The Carolina Forward Slate is a collection of bold progressive leaders running to take and defend seats the NC State House and Senate. We used some very simple criteria in choosing our endorsements:

*Under our new legislative maps, which candidates can win?

*How many seats do we need to protect Governor Cooper’s veto power?

*Which seats must we defend, and where can we expand the map?

Republicans have controlled North Carolina’s legislature for over a decade, and the election maps are still gerrymandered to favor them. What keeps the most radical right-wing elements of the legislature from running amok is one thing: Governor Cooper’s veto power.

Because Democrats have the votes to sustain Governor Cooper’s veto, they are able to force Republican leaders to negotiate in a bipartisan fashion to get significant legislation passed. Here is a brief list of recent Republican legislation that Governor Cooper’s veto power has successfully stopped:

*Defunding election cybersecurity

*A virtual ban on abortion access

*Overruling local control over school masking decisions

*Attempts to curtail and restrict voting access

*Abolishing permits and required training for handgun purchases

*Repealing all COVID precautionary measures

Public Corruption in North Carolina

 

Political corruption remains a big motivating factor for how voters view their government. We just came off four years of some of the most astounding, out-in-the-ever-loving-open political corruption in our nation's capitol, and that display of civic putrefaction must have had something to do with the resounding loss of power in Washington for a Republican Party that sold its moral compass to gain favor with a Golden Ass. That spectacle of money-grubbing self-interest rivaled nothing in our history so much as the Robber Baron period at the end of the 19th Century, which also happened to coincide with the Rise of the Corporations.

Not surprisingly, a new statewide poll commissioned by Carolina Forward finds overwhelming evidence that the voting public in North Carolina sees public corruption as "a major problem" (and how you choose to define "major" is the whole ballgame). Furthermore, this poll finds corporations, and their political $$, fingered as a major cause of public corruption. The money game in politics could spoil a nunnery, let alone a 25-year-old Congressman from Hendersonville, say.

I'm not able to reproduce the poll's handsome pie charts here, but they're worth studying. Some 67% responded that corruption in our state government is a major problem (vs. 21% "minor problem"), and a whopping 80% say that large corporations have too much power in the state legislature (vs. 8% "Not too much"). Since that watershed election of 2010 and the illegal gerrymandering that followed it, the state legislature has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Berger Moore, a casual partnership that operates with an iron fist and plenty of ruthlessness (another name for corruption, I could argue).

Item. The leader of a giant insurance conglomerate corrupts the chair of the NCGOP, who in turn attempts to corrupt the Secretary of Insurance. The insurance executive is now in jail, the GOP chair, pardoned by Donald J. Trump. Many others from both political parties (yuck!) also benefitted from the insurance executive's generosity and did not give the money back.

Item. Harnett County Rep. David Lewis, chairman of the influential House Rules Committee in Raleigh, charged with federal financial crimes -- essentially embezzlement from his own campaign funds to pay for his personal life, which had been (just incidentally) difficult to keep straight and even, so a bunch of money went into Lewis's pocket where it didn't belong. ("But he needed it, Judge!") Rep. Lewis pleaded guilty, took a deal, resigned his House seat, and served no time.

Item. The multitudinous "deals" House Speaker Tim Moore has allegedly made, based on his power to move shit. Moore is the Gaston County brass monkey who turned to gold in Raleigh.

Item. North Carolina's newest Secretary of Labor, Josh Dobson of McDowell County (Marion), has ethics allegations (double-dipping) filed against him with the Legislative Ethics Committee less than a month before last fall's election. Luckily, the Legislative Ethics Committee is also run by his fellow Republicans. Nothing has come of the complaint so far.

Item. The Ashe County Sheriff scandal of 2017, wherein a new Republican sheriff appointed to the office by the all-Republican Ashe County Commission to follow the administration of a popular Democratic sheriff who retired. Said new sheriff is pretty quickly facing felony charges, followed by misdemeanor charges for refusing to comply with a public records request from WBTV. That sheriff agreed to resign, with charges dropped.

I could go on. I haven't even touched on the voter suppression efforts of the Watauga County Republican Party, starting in 2013, and the never chronicled election of 1998 in Watauga, when the corruption of a local ambulance service fueled a Democratic flip of the County Commission. The stories I know!

The Utility of the Carolina Forward Poll

Whether that 80% who disdain the outsized power of corporations, overlapping with the 67% who say public corruption is "a major problem" in North Carolina -- whether those pluralities ever put two-and-two together and actually vote their ethics -- that's a well with no water in it. We've maybe become so used to public corruption, the plain daylight buying of votes and offices, that we hardly even notice unless the corruption touches us directly. (All public corruption does touch us directly, but that's a hair-splitting for another day.)

Carolina Forward

 

Blair Reeves, who was the visionary behind last year's Long Leaf Pine Slate, proved himself an adept at raising independent money for a slate of some 19 Democratic candidates running for the NC Senate and House. Reeves vetted those candidates and shared their stories with an expanding base of progressives.

Because of the Trump effect, only two of those 19 made it to the General Assembly. Blair Reeves is determined to do better. The fight is still very much in him. So he's rolled over his experiment in fundraising into a 501(c)4, "a progressive policy non-profit" he's calling Carolina Forward. Here's the new website, where you can also donate (which I just did).

In his announcement email this morning, Reeves writes:

Let us not mince words: the 2010s were a disaster for North Carolina families, schools, workers, its environment, and (especially) vulnerable communities. If we are to avoid a second decade of more of the same, we must expand, and redouble, our fight. Most importantly, we must change tactics. The same old, tired approaches and strategies and playbooks simply will no longer do. They are not working. It’s time for something different.

We need new ideas, as well as better ways to distribute them. We must develop a deeper bench of younger leaders across the state who understand that the old rules of the game have changed and that partisan politics have evolved. There is generational change happening all over our country, and it’s time that wave came to North Carolina politics. Carolina Forward will invest in these priorities so that when the next election cycle comes around, our dollars can go even further in winning hearts, minds, and most importantly, votes.

We saw in 2020 some outstanding young candidates emerge all over the state, and Reeves intends to nurture more of them, so we expect that Carolina Forward will be participating in candidate recruitment as much as candidate fundraising.