Via The Southern Illinoisan In the days leading up to a high profile vote in the Illinois House on a politically charged right-to-work law, Gov. Bruce Rauner doled out campaign contributions to Republican lawmakers. State Rep. Bob Pritchard, a DeKalb-area…
Read MoreVia NPR If Congress is all about sausage-making, Washington’s political-money industry has its own specialty: slicing the particular sausage that is campaign finance law, thinner and thinner. The meat of the law is in its definitions. What is a “contribution”?…
Read MoreVia US News & World Report Back before the days of campaign finance laws, there was a safe in the office of the Secretary of the Senate. And there was no secret about what function it served. “Somebody who was a…
Read MoreVia Time The mastermind behind the super PAC has no regrets. “My only regret is the backlash,” David Keating says with a wry smile. Keating is one of the most influential political activists you’ve never heard of. He was the…
Read MoreVia Reboot Illinois I’m not a big R&B fan, but as a good government watchdog I have to appreciate the O’Jays `74 classic, “For the Love of Money,” about the dangers of pursuing “the almighty dollar.” The song could serve…
Read MoreVia the National Journal Darin LaHood is raising money for his 2016 reelection campaign. That’s unremarkable: Just about every incumbent is stockpiling cash for next November. The difference is, LaHood isn’t an incumbent, and if he wants to have a…
Read MoreVia Represent.US Have you ever felt like the government doesn’t really care what you think? Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question:…
Read MoreVia The Chicago Sun Times I’m not a big R&B fan, but as a good government watchdog I have to appreciate the O’Jays 1974 classic “For the Love of Money,” about the dangers of pursuing “the almighty dollar.” The song…
Read MoreVia USA Today WASHINGTON — A group of Democrats introduced legislation Thursday to overhaul and streamline the way the nation’s 435 U.S. House districts are redrawn every decade to reflect population shifts determined by the U.S. Census. “What we see…
Read MoreVia The Wall Street Journal You hear it all the time: Are presidential campaigns getting longer, or do they just seem longer? A new report from the Center for Competitive Politics laid a measuring tape on campaigns from 1952 onward,…
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