Mitch McConnell is moving swiftly to consolidate political power — and cash.

Before he even takes the reins as Senate majority leader, McConnell and his allies are quietly trying to engineer a bold plan that would enable party leaders to rely more on major contributions to independent groups while also removing restrictions on the ability of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and other party committees to interact with candidates.


The outside cash would be raised by a pair of linked groups — a super PAC and 501(c)4 nonprofit — that could accept unlimited cash to boost key GOP Senate candidates, according to sources familiar with the plan. The inside cash would flow to the NRSC, which could operate more freely under an election law change McConnell began pushing this week.

The two-pronged campaign finance initiative, coming only a month after the GOP’s midterm triumph, reflects McConnell’s intense interest in the money side of politics and his desire to strengthen the hand of the Republican establishment against more ideologically rigid conservative outside groups. It also underscores the difficult plight facing Republicans in 2016, when the party must defend a whopping 24 seats to the Democrats’ 10.

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McConnell’s efforts are by no means guaranteed to succeed. In fact, they represent an early test of whether the Kentucky senator will be able to translate his increased power within Congress into a robust national political operation like the one presided over by the man he’s replacing as majority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid.

“He’s trying to create Mitch McConnell, Inc.,” said David Donnelly, executive director of a group called Every Voice, which — ironically — spends big money in politics to reduce the role of big money in politics. It spent $400,000 in the midterms attacking McConnell as beholden to wealthy donors.

Donnelly’s group, and other activists working to limit the influence of money in politics, are urging senators to reject the rule change, which McConnell is trying to attach to a massive spending bill. Reid strongly opposes the McConnell proposal and intends to fight it, according to his office. But Democrats also hinted at the possibility of a trade-off for a provision requiring senators to file their campaign finance reports in a way that would allow electronic searching, which most other federal political committees are already required to do.

The fate of both proposals could be decided by what the House includes in its spending package. But campaign-finance activists say the trade-off of e-filing for the McConnell coordination change is not in the public interest.

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“E-filing is something that should have been done 20 years ago — it’s like ‘welcome to the 1990s!’” said Donnelly, who asserted McConnell’s goal is not transparency, but consolidating power on the big-money right. “He’s recreating what Harry Reid had, except he’s strengthening it with a gaping hole in coordination rules.”

What Reid has is a robust party committee supporting his party’s Senate candidates — the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which significantly outraised the NRSC in 2014 — complemented by outside big-money outfits that Reid has blessed, and for which he has helped raise money. There’s the major donor-backed super PAC called Senate Majority PAC, which spent the most of all such groups in 2014, and a nonprofit group called Patriot Majority, which is registered under a section of the Tax Code — 501(c)4 — that allows it to shield its donors’ identities. Such outside groups are barred from coordinating their spending with candidates’ campaigns or their party committees, but the two groups are run by Reid’s close allies and usually seem to be able to find ways to act in harmony with the official party apparatus.

By contrast, Republicans have a confusing web of big-money groups that overlap with one other and often compete for cash and step on one another’s toes. The groups also have in some ways cut into the power and control once exercised by the party and its leaders like McConnell.

Some of the party’s biggest donors complained to McConnell after the midterms about being solicited by all manner of groups without knowing which they could trust. He dispatched his top political aide, Josh Holmes, to explore the possibility of creating a single big-money outfit focused on supporting the party’s Senate candidates. Holmes has been meeting with donors to gauge support, and has found them to be receptive, according to sources familiar with the planning. They say it’s now more than likely that a McConnell-blessed outside outfit will form to help the party headed into 2016 — it’s just a question of what it will look like and who will run it. One of the leading possibilities being discussed includes forming a linked super PAC-501(c)4 model that mimics the Democratic one.

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Another possibility talked about in GOP finance circles is running the outfit as an offshoot of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-conceived groups run by McConnell confidant Steven Law. It was among the biggest outside spenders supporting Republican Senate candidates in 2014. While Holmes has met with Rove and Law, according to the sources, the McConnell project is seen in some quarters as a threat to Crossroads.

Neither Holmes nor McConnell’s office would discuss the plans.

A political operative close to McConnell pointed out that Crossroads’ Law is an insider in McConnell world and suggested that Crossroads would be a part of whatever McConnell’s team does. But the operative also stressed the need for a new Senate-specific outside group in 2016, when many donors and groups like Crossroads will be at least partly focused on the presidential campaign.

McConnell is uniquely positioned to help create a strong and orderly GOP outside effort to help all the party’s Senate candidates, asserted the operative. “Every state has two senators, but not all senators are created equal. He has a different standing with donors than others,” said the operative. “If it’s a McConnell-backed operation, donors will have confidence that the money is being put to good use, and there will be extremely smart people running it.”

McConnell’s gravitation to campaign finance issues as among his first orders of business post-election seems motivated by equal parts shrewd political strategy and career-long crusade against campaign cash restrictions. McConnell has long argued that such rules, which he sees as unconstitutional infringements on free speech, have hurt the political process by weakening the parties and empowering outside groups like super PACs.

This summer, he told an audience of wealthy donors at the Koch brothers’ seminar that the day in 2002 that President George W. Bush signed into law the McCain-Feingold law barring the party committees from accepting unlimited so-called soft money checks was “the worst day of my political life.” McConnell sued unsuccessfully to overturn McCain-Feingold, and applauded when part of it was struck down by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which paved the way for super PACs.

Taken together, McConnell’s plans to bless a super PAC and to try to increase the effectiveness of the party committees should be thought of as a way for him to wrestle control away from more strident conservative outside groups, said Ray La Raja, an academic who specializes in studying the role of political parties.

“It’s hard for the party leadership to govern when all these groups within their own parties are trying to pick off their members,” said La Raja, an associate political science professor at the University of Massachusetts. “It gives ammunition to some of the most extreme elements of these parties to prevent party leaders from striking deals. McConnell is trying to get back power so he can actually govern. He’s very conservative, but he’s not an ideologue, and now even more conservative groups are trying to prevent him from cutting deals.”

It’s not dissimilar from an argument McConnell made himself during fights with tea party-oriented outside groups during the 2013 government shutdown and other fiscal skirmishes. Having a super PAC “will allow McConnell to say ‘I’ve got your back’” to his members when he asks them to buck the more rigid outside groups, said La Raja.

He further cast the proposed coordination change as another way to bolster the party’s effectiveness, and dismissed opposition to it from advocates for tighter rules as misguided. “The campaign finance reformers don’t understand there are trade-offs,” he said. “You can’t just unilaterally try to combat corruption without affecting other aspects of the system in bad ways. Transparency is going to suffer. And the system is going to become fragmented.”

For McConnell, though, it’s at least as much about trying to enhance free speech, asserted former Federal Election Commission Chairman Brad Smith, a leading adviser to conservatives on campaign finance issues who’s spoken to McConnell often about the issue. “I think Sen. McConnell very seriously believes in First Amendment rights, but he’s also a good practitioner. And good practitioners will use the tools available to them,” said Smith.