End Legal Bribery

1) Overturn Citizens United: (2025 SJR38 and AJR42) – Join the national movement to help overturn the disastrous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which stated that corporations and other groups can spend unlimited amounts of money to support (or trash) specific candidates. Twenty-three states are already on board for amending the U.S. Constitution to proclaim that corporations aren’t persons and money isn’t speech. Let’s bring Wisconsin on board, too. Contact your legislators and urge them to champion the joint resolution that places a question on the next fall statewide ballot to ask the people if Congress should propose an amendment to overturn Citizens United v. F.E.C.  And urge your community to pass a resolution in favor of this constitutional amendment, as 180 communities in Wisconsin have already done. Read more about these local efforts here.

2) Campaign Contribution Limits: (2023 Senate Bill 604/Assembly Bill 733) – The disastrous rewrite of Wisconsin’s campaign finance law in 2015 tore down the ceiling on how much (rich) individuals could give to PACs, political parties, and legislative campaign committees (LCCs); doubled the amount of money that (rich) people could give directly to candidates; and roughly doubled the amount that PACs could give to candidates.

SB604 and AB733 would do the following:

• Limit individual contributions to PACs, legislative campaign committees, and political parties to no more than $10,000, with the exception of a candidate contributing his or her personal funds to his or her own candidate committee.
• Prohibit political parties and legislative campaign committees from establishing a segregated fund to use for general purposes, eliminating the segregated fund shell game that has allowed these groups to avoid donation limits.
• Decrease the individual and candidate committee contribution limit from $20,000 to $10,000 for statewide candidates (governor, lieutenant governor, Wisconsin Supreme Court, secretary of state, state treasurer, attorney general, and superintendent of public instruction). The current limit is ludicrously high, and it’s totally out of whack with federal limits. For instance, the most you can give to a candidate for President of the United States is $2,700. We need to impose a much lower ceiling on individual gifts so that everyone can participate and have their voices heard. And at a bare minimum, Wisconsin should revert to its old limit, which was half as high.
• Reduce the donation limits on political action committee contributions to candidates by half. Before, the most a PAC could give a candidate for governor was $43,128. Now a PAC can give $86,000 to such a candidate.

Contact and tell your legislators to champion legislation like 2023 SB 604 and AB733, which would reestablish pre-2015 contribution limits and reduce the influence of PACs.

3) Closing the PAC Loophole: (2023 Senate Bill 603/Assembly Bill 635) – This proposal closes a loophole in the legal definition of a PAC that groups use to bypass donation limits. The 2015 rewrite contained a loophole that allows some national PACs to avoid registering with the state of Wisconsin and to refrain from disclosing their donors. Before, any PAC that was spending money in Wisconsin during an election had to register with the state and disclose its donors. But the 2015 law said that PACs that don’t spend more than 50% of their total spending in Wisconsin don’t have to register with the state. So big national PACs, like the Wal-Mart PAC or the NRA PAC, no longer have to register and reveal their donors. The proposed bill would close that loophole by defining a PAC as a committee that spends more than $1,000 in Wisconsin in a 12-month period on expenditures for express advocacy or any other aforementioned purposes. Contact and tell your legislators to support legislation like 2023 SB603 and AB635 that would require all PACs spending $1,000 or more in Wisconsin to register and disclose their donors.

4) Coordination Control: (2023 Senate Bill 602/Assembly Bill 636) – The 2015 election law permits coordination between candidates and “issue advocacy” groups. This makes a mockery of the limits on individual donations and on the requirement that donations be disclosed. This proposal places the same financial limits on coordinated expenditures between candidates and groups as are currently in place for direct contributions. Allowing unchecked coordinated campaign expenditures circumvents campaign donation limits, invites corruption, as well as fosters immense special interest influence.

For instance, if I’m running for governor, and I have a billionaire friend, I’m going to tell that friend that I don’t even want his $20,000 direct donation, which my campaign committee would have to disclose. No, I’ve got a better idea. I’d tell my friend to give a $2 million donation to some bogus “issue advocacy” group with a benign name, like Badgers for Eternal Victory (BEV). And I’d then tell BEV what ads to run and where to run them, so it would be just as if my billionaire friend gave my campaign the $2 million, which is 100 times the legal limit. And the kicker is, no one would ever know about it because BEV doesn’t have to disclose the donation.

While the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled, in a corrupt and pathetically reasoned decision, that the First Amendment prohibits the State of Wisconsin from banning coordination between candidates and “issue advocacy” groups, there is no reason why the State of Wisconsin can’t limit the amount of money that individuals can give to those “issue advocacy” groups if those groups are engaging in electioneering. 2023 SB602 and AB636 would impose such limits.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court did, however, impose a ban on coordination between candidates and express advocacy groups (those that say “vote for” or “vote against” a candidate). But in the 2015 rewrite of our campaign finance, the legislature defined coordination in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to prove such coordination. For instance, it says that the candidate or the candidate’s agent must “specifically request” that the express advocacy group do something, and the group itself must “explicitly assent” to the request. So the candidate could discuss strategy with the express advocacy group, and strongly suggest that the group do something for the candidate, and all that’s OK under existing law. It all can be done with an elbow and a wink.

SB602 and AB636 would broaden and clarify the definition of coordination to prohibit collusion. Contact and tell your legislators to support legislation like 2023 SB602 and AB636 which would ban candidates from coordinating with outside groups.

5) No Corporate Campaign Bribes: (2023 Senate Bill 601/Assembly Bill 663) – The 2015 campaign finance law, for the first time in more than 100 years, also allowed corporations and other entities to give directly to political parties and legislative campaign committees. Already, big businesses and other groups have taken advantage of this open door for bribery. This proposal amends Wisconsin State Statutes to prohibit a corporation, cooperative association, labor organization, or federally recognized American Indian Tribe from making contributions to segregated funds established and administered by a political party or legislative campaign committee. This closes the segregated fund shell game loophole used to funnel additional money to committees. Contact and tell your legislators to champion legislation like 2023 SB601 and AB663 that would ban all such donations.

6) Contribution Sunshine: (2023 Senate Bill 600/Assembly Bill 662) – The 2015 campaign finance law erased the requirement that candidate committees list the name of their donors’ employers. Furthermore, current law only requires the reporting of the donor’s occupation at the $200 and up level. This makes it much more difficult for the media and the public to know whether employees of a specific company are all giving to a candidate in the expectation that their candidate will do the company a favor if that candidate wins. This proposal requires any committee that receives campaign finance contributions of more than $100 cumulatively from an individual to report that individual’s place of employment and occupation, if any. Contact and tell your legislators to support legislation like 2023 SB600 and AB662 that would require all candidate committees to list the employer of anyone who gives more than $100.

Empower Small Donors – To give voters of modest means the ability to have their voices heard in the campaign finance arena, the state of Connecticut and cities like New York and Seattle are empowering their small donors. In New York City, for instance, anyone who gives $175 to the municipal candidate of their choice has their donation multiplied by six times by public funds. In Seattle, citizens are given four $25 vouchers to spend on local candidates.

We can do the same in Wisconsin by matching small donations to participating candidates. For donations up to $50, there would be a $4 match for every $1 donated. And for donations over $50 and up to $100, there would be a $3 match for every $1 donated.

Call your state legislators and encourage them to champion a bill to empower small donors in Wisconsin.

Full Public Financing of Elections – Ideally, the answer to the problems of political corruption and the drowning out of most citizens’ voices is to provide full public financing for all elections, top to bottom, while at the same time imposing limits on outside spending and requiring full disclosure by those outside groups. Our elections should not be auctions where the richest people can buy the candidates. And billionaires should not be able to buy candidates as they do horses for the Kentucky Derby. Democracy requires a clean, open, and level playing field, and other democracies have solved this problem by providing full public financing of elections. We can too.

Call your legislators and encourage them to adopt a reasonable bill modeled after 2011 AB642 or 2013 AB353. Remind them that public financing is still constitutional.