By disclosing a dinner date with the head of a conservative super PAC, did Republican gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock cost himself a crap-load of free television advertisements?
In this brave new world of post-Citizens United campaign finance regulations, that could well be the case.
During a press conference Brock called Wednesday morning in Berlin to discuss his health care proposals, reporters’ questions eventually shifted from the topic at hand to Brock’s impressions of Vermonters First, a new, Republican-oriented super PAC.
His answers, at first, were unsurprising: that he’d seen the group’s latest commercial slamming single-payer health care reform but hadn’t formed a real opinion about it; that he knows its sole donor, Lenore Broughton but not terribly well; and that he has “mixed feelings” about whether it would be helpful for such a super PAC to run ads supporting his campaign.
But then he said something quite surprising: Asked when he last spoke with Tayt Brooks, the political operative behind Vermonters First, Brock said he’d spoken with Brooks the day before. Asked what the two had talked about, Brock clammed right up.
“I won’t discuss what I’ve discussed with him personally, but I can tell you this: It had nothing to do with what’s happening with Vermonters First. That is a taboo subject with us,” he said.
Pressed on whether they’d spoken about his own campaign, Brock said, “We really didn’t talk about the campaign, no. We did not talk about the campaign.”
He’d be wise not to. Though a series of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions has muddied the waters of campaign finance regulations, one thing is perfectly clear: Political candidates who coordinate with so-called “independent expenditure” groups risk triggering more onerous limits on the groups’ ability to raise and spend money on their behalf. That is, a super PAC like Vermonters First can take a $100,000 check and use it to cut ads supporting Brock’s campaign — but if they coordinate with Brock on such expenditures, they are suddenly bound by Vermont’s comparatively strict contribution and spending limits.
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Don’t worry, the Supreme Court will soon go to work and expand on Citizen’s United and then a candidate and his prevaricating partisans can have dinner and discuss something other than the weather.
I just received a mailing from the Republican Super PAC offering to get me an absentee Ballot. For a Political Party that has been in the forefront of Photo ID laws it seems hypocritical to me to solicit control of Absentee ballots by a secretly funded Republican Super-PAC. According to the paperwork this PAC is sending these letters to the elderly and overseas military, I intend to file a complaint with the Secretary of States Office. It may not stop this mailing but it is time to do everything possible to get Republicans out of the fixing election business.