Budget rider would expand party cash The measure would expand the ways a donor could contribute.

A provision tucked deep inside the $1.1 trillion spending bill filed by Republicans on Tuesday night would dramatically increase the amount of money a single rich donor could give to national party committees each year — from $97,200 to as much as $777,600.

The provision, inserted as a rider only hours before it was filed, would mark a further erosion of campaign cash restrictions. They’ve been whittled away by recent federal court rulings, most notably the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.


House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi blasted the provision, saying it would “drown out the voices of the American people and massively expand the role of big money in our elections.” And advocates for reducing the role of money in politics immediately called on President Barack Obama to reject the rider, which one leading advocate, Fred Wertheimer, decried as “ written for millionaires and billionaires.”

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But the rider also would provide a huge boost to the national parties — which some campaign-finance scholars see as having the potential to improve governance by reducing political polarization.

The Democratic and Republican Party committees have seen their clout plummet in recent years as power and cash have migrated to outside groups empowered by Citizens United and related decisions that allowed independent groups to raise and spend unlimited cash on ads boosting favorite candidates or savaging their opponents.

By contrast, the maximum contributions the national party committees can accept have ticked upward only slightly every two years to account for inflation. In 2014, a donor could give $32,400 per year to each of the national party committees — the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

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So, for example, a wealthy liberal could donate a maximum of $97,200 combined to the three national Democratic Party committees. If they wanted to give more to a national effort, they’d have to turn to one of the many liberal super PACs — such as Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action or the Harry Reid-linked Senate Majority PAC — that are allowed to accept unlimited checks but are barred from coordinating with the party committees or their candidates.

But under the rider, that same donor each year could give the $97,200 to the three main committees, plus that same amount to as many as an additional seven accounts — described as “separate, segregated” funds — set up within the committees:

• one account set up by the DNC to fund its presidential nominating conventions.

• one account each set up by the DNC, DSCC and DCCC to buy, construct or improve the committees’ headquarters — including any building-related expenses incurred in the last two years.

• one account each set up by the DNC, DSCC and DCCC to fund election recounts, challenges and other legal proceedings.

Republicans, of course, would be able to set up the same such accounts.

While calculations of the rider’s impact differed in the hours after it was revealed, it appeared that a single donor would be able to give at least $388,800 per year to the various national committee accounts, and possibly as much as $777,600, depending on how the language was interpreted.

Because the limits are for each year, that means a single wealthy donor during a two-year election cycle could potentially give a total of nearly $1.56 million to all the various party committee funds if the rider is signed into law. Of course, that depends on how it’s interpreted by election lawyers and the Federal Election Commission.

The rider caps at $20 million the amount the RNC and DNC could spend through their separate segregated convention accounts on any given convention.

The convention piece of the provision is at least partly a response to a bill Obama signed this year that eliminated public funding of the presidential nominating conventions.

“Parties are now strapped without the public funds, so what this would allow them to do is turn to huge contributors who have a vested interest in the outcome of the election to pay for this,” said David Donnelly, executive director of a group called Every Voice that works to reduce the role of money in politics. “It is a further chipping away of the contribution limits that were set for parties and a further shift towards large contributions, rather than raising a large number of contributions from regular Americans,” Donnelly said, blaming Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, a longtime opponent of campaign-finance restrictions.

McConnell’s office said the rider was not added at his behest. And it appeared near the very end of the 1,600-page bill, which Senate Democrats had been negotiating with Republicans.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has indicated that the House could vote as early as Thursday on the spending bill, which would fund the government through next September.

McConnell, who will assume the role of Senate majority leader when the new Congress is sworn in next year, had been pushing to attach a different rider that would have empowered the party committees by removing restrictions on their ability to interact with candidates.

That provision, which was opposed by the man McConnell is replacing as majority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, does not appear to have made it into the spending bill.

And Reid’s office told POLITICO he would not oppose the expanded contribution limits.

Ray La Raja, a University of Massachusetts professor who specializes in studying the role of political parties, said the rider would allow party committees to pry back some power and control from outside groups. “It gives the formal party organization and its leaders more resources to bring data files and other campaign infrastructure back in house, and that will give them more leverage. And it allows them to compete for talent, and that means something. Right now, the best talent goes to these outside groups.”

Plus, unlike much of the cash raised by outside groups, all contributions to parties are publicly disclosed, pointed out David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes many campaign-cash restrictions as infringements on free speech. The rider “will ease the burden of fundraising for parties and allow them to speak more freely in upcoming elections,” he said. “Let the parties speak and let the voters decide.”

Lisa Gilbert, director of the congressional arm of the advocacy group Public Citizen, called the rider “embarrassing” and asserted that empowering the parties wouldn’t address concerns about the growing role of money in politics.

“The answer to out-of-control and unlimited outside spending by the super-rich and giant corporations isn’t to enable out-of-control and virtually unlimited contributions to parties — and, inevitably, candidates — but to get outside spending under control,” she said.

If anything, she said, the deal would take the system back to the days of party soft money, when corporations and unions could donate unlimited sums to the party committees.

“Increasing these limits would only enable more dollars to pour into a system already flooded with cash and would encourage higher independent expenditures in the money arms race to counter them,” she said.