Campaign Finance

Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, said it's not unusual people like Yang get paid to speak in front of audiences, but they usually stop accepting payments once they decide to run for federal office. "Because receiving compensation for paid speaking raises questions under campaign finance laws regarding corporate contributions," Ryan said, "most candidates steer clear of these activities."

“The ‘PERMISSIBLE FUNDS’ memo entries indicates to the FEC that the committee understands the rules and that the contribution is permissible because the LLC contribution is attributed to an individual,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, a vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause. “An LLC with a single natural person member that does not elect to be taxed as a corporation is treated as an individual under campaign finance law — i.e., that LLC is permitted to contribute to candidates, party committees and JFC’s like Trump Victory, subject to the individual contribution limits,” he added.

Today, Common Cause urged President Donald Trump and the Senate to quickly nominate and confirm new commissioners to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to avert a crisis that would leave the agency largely powerless to enforce campaign finance laws without a quorum. The resignation of Vice Chairman Matthew S. Petersen, effective at the end of the month, will leave the FEC with only three commissioners, one short of the minimum required for the FEC to act and well short of the six required by statute. With the 2020 election cycle well underway, the letter urges the president to treat the situation as an emergency and fill the vacancies expediently.  

The FEC “will now pretty much grind to a halt,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause. “This is a big deal that the FEC is now going to be without a quorum.”

“Nobody is spending $2.5 million out of the goodness of their hearts,” said David Vance, a spokesman for Common Cause, a nonprofit group that advocates for campaign finance reform. “That kind of money is spent to get the attention of legislators and to get results.”

On the other side of the political divide over Koch, Beth Rotman of the government watchdog group Common Cause said the Kochs and their network of like-minded wealthy donors “undermined so many important American values over the past several decades as part of the Kochs’ attempted corporate takeover of American politics.”