Republicans in the Senate blocked a bill Thursday that would require dark money groups to reveal their major donors.
The DISCLOSE Act, which would force super PACs and other organizations to report those who contributed more than $10,000 in an election cycle, was introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) earlier this year, and although it was co-sponsored by 49 Democratic and independent senators, it lacked the Republican support necessary to avoid a filibuster, failing in a 49-49 vote.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who moved to bring the bill to the floor, said the goal of the legislation was to add transparency to campaign financing.
“The DISCLOSE Act operates off a simple premise: A healthy democracy is a transparent democracy, one where billionaires and megacorporations don’t get a free pass to exploit loopholes in campaign finance law in order to spend billions in anonymous contributions. That is the antithesis of democracy,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Wednesday.
Democrats forced a vote in part to get Republicans on the record opposing the bill before the midterm elections. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has long opposed campaign finance reform and said on the floor Wednesday that the DISCLOSE Act encourages government overreach by giving bureaucrats “even more power to police political speech and activism of private citizens.”
Whitehouse criticized GOP opposition, accusing the Republicans of trying to keep voters in the dark about who backs their candidates.
“I’m finally hearing opposition to my DISCLOSE Act from Republican leadership. I suppose it takes a while to patch together a defense for the unlimited, anonymous political spending that brought us climate denial, voter suppression, and a captive Court,” he tweeted. “Here’s the bottom line — if you spend more than $10,000 to influence an election, that information should be public. Voters deserve to know. It’s a popular, commonsense step to bring transparency and accountability to politics.”
President Joe Biden on Tuesday spoke in support of the act that, in addition to disclosing who donates more than $10,000, would also ban foreign actors from contributing to elections through dark money loopholes.
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“Ultimately, this comes down to public trust,” he said. “Dark money erodes public trust.”
Activists who seek to influence elections can hide behind political action committees and other groups to conceal the source of money that winds up supporting candidates, sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars. A version of this legislation also failed in 2010 following the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court case that narrowly ruled political spending to be a protected form of free speech.
