with Mariana Alfaro
“This policy weakens federal tax laws, campaign finance laws, and longstanding efforts to prevent foreign interference in U.S. elections,” the lawmakers said in a letter sent Tuesday to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate Rules Committee that has oversight over federal elections, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) led three dozen of their colleagues who signed the letter.
“As secret campaign contributions continue to pour into federal elections, this IRS rule is a major step backwards for transparency and will allow dark money to continue to corrode our political system. The IRS needs every tool at its disposal to ensure that these organizations are complying with the law,” the senators said.
At issue is a Treasury Department rule, first rolled out in July 2018, that certain nonprofits no longer need to share donor identities and addresses with the IRS in confidential tax filings.
The White House received but did not return an email asking for Biden’s position on the policy debate.
But the Senate letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily 202, could put the president in a pickle.
Biden’s successful 2020 bid for the White House benefited from a record-breaking $145 million in dark-money donations to groups supporting him, compared to $28.4 million spent to help President Donald Trump, Bloomberg reported in January.
Democrats tend to denounce the influence of money in politics — notably the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that removed limits on corporate spending on campaign ads — more than Republicans do.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in campaigns, estimated last month dark-money expenditures in 2020 topped $1 billion — most of it benefiting Democrats, a first in presidential cycles.
Candidate Biden promised to “end dark money groups” and said he’d ensure “any entity of any kind that spends more than $10,000 on federal elections must … publicly disclose its donors.” He also vowed to propose legislation saying “any group that advocates for or against candidates for federal office in its ads of communications must disclose its contributors.”
“The decision was immediately heralded by free-speech advocates who have long sought to protect donors’ private information. But it was rebuked by those who want to reduce the role of money in politics, who claim it would make U.S. elections more susceptible to anonymous foreign donations.”
As Michelle and Jeff explained, wealthy donors could give unlimited funds to those nonprofits, which under the new rule would no longer have to report names and addresses to the IRS as a matter of course. (The agency would previously conceal that information in any public releases.)
Still, my colleagues wrote, “if the IRS is suspicious about a donation reported on a nonprofit’s tax filing, the agency can still ask the nonprofit to turn over records about that donor — including their name and address.”
A few months after the rule was first announced, the Senate voted 50-49 to overturn it, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) joining unanimous Democrats. GOP control of the House meant the effort stalled and never became law.
As Michelle reported at the time: “Some free-speech advocates have long expressed concerns that the names and addresses may be used by the government to politically target the donors, noting previous scandals that found the IRS targeted tea party and progressive groups. They also note the risk of donor information being released by accident, either by the IRS or by the nonprofits.”
In 2020, about five months before the election, the Trump administration finalized the rule.
“The change affects a wide swath of highly visible tax-exempt organizations across partisan lines, ranging from trade groups, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, to politically active nonprofits like the NRA, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and parts of the network aligned with Kansas billionaire Charles Koch.”
The Senate letter landed on the eve of Biden’s first speech to a joint session of Congress, a high-profile opportunity to lay out his priorities. It was unclear whether he would repeat his campaign promises to squelch dark-money political donations.
It also came at a curious moment for the relationship between corporations and political speech, with Republicans denouncing high-profile firms like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines for opposing new GOP-driven laws tightening restrictions on voting.
Some of those same entities are in Democratic sights, though for a different reason. Biden wants to fund his roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure package with higher taxes on the rich and corporations — two groups that benefit from the Trump-era rule.
What’s happening now
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Lunchtime reads from The Post
- "In his first 100 days, Biden fashions himself as a transformational leader amid crisis," by Ashley Parker: “The pandemic — which had killed half a million Americans by the beginning of his second month in office — provided an organizing principle for Biden’s presidency and a clear mission for him to manage. But the coronavirus also exposed deep-seated inequalities, from systemic racism to a fragile middle class, just one illness or missed paycheck away from free-fall.”
- Key quote: “Pre-covid, I never thought he would be an incremental president, but I thought he would be taking the next couple of big steps. Now, the situation has made him take leaps,” said Greg Schultz, a longtime Biden adviser who managed his 2020 presidential campaign during the primary, told Ashley. “Biden knows Americans don’t want you to shake things up just to shake things up, but Biden is now left with a world that has been shaken up — because of Trump and covid and the way Trump handled covid — so Biden is left, in some ways, with a country in pieces.”
- “When communities try to hold police accountable, law enforcement fights back,” by Nicole Dungca and Jenn Abelson: “When the Justice Department in 2012 began investigating Albuquerque police, it found a department unaccountable to the city it served. ... Federal authorities demanded a wide range of reforms from the city — including a new civilian oversight agency with greater authority. But many in Albuquerque fought change at every turn: The police union sued to block the new agency. ... The city council took four years to give the agency stronger subpoena power for its investigations. And veteran police officials pushed back against efforts to increase scrutiny of the department’s use of force. ... The struggle in New Mexico’s largest city illustrates the challenge of asking civilians to check police powers. Police nationwide have frequently defied efforts to impose civilian oversight and, in turn, undermined the ability of communities to hold law enforcement accountable, according to a Washington Post review of audits, misconduct complaints, emails, lawsuits and interviews with dozens of current and former officials.”
- “Fresh off election falsehoods, Republicans serve up a whopper about Biden,” Ashley Parker reports: “To White House aides, the wholly fictional Biden-will-ban-hamburgers story line was in part an amusing flare-up perpetuated by Republicans who have struggled to find ways to successfully attack the president. They joked privately that White House press secretary Jen Psaki should start her daily press briefing by eating a burger. But the not-quite-red-meat attack also offers a case study in how a falsehood can rapidly metastasize among Republicans — pushed not only by the party’s fringe but also by more mainstream voices."
- “A quarter of women say they are financially worse off a year into pandemic, Post-ABC poll finds,” by Heather Long and Emily Guskin: “In follow-up interviews, several women told The Post they were forced to leave jobs to care for children, or they had to take lower-paying jobs that gave them more flexibility. A few women also cited rising costs of rent and food, which caused some to fall behind on bills even if they were able to keep their jobs.”
… and beyond
- “A new Democratic playbook,” by the Assembly’s Barry Yeoman: “When Ricky Hurtado launched his state legislative campaign in November 2019, the kickoff party signaled a new kind of Democratic politics for North Carolina. For starters, there was the menu: trays of pupusas and Mexican sweet bread, washed down with pale ale and fruity Jarritos sodas. ... [Hurtado] was hoping to unseat Republican Rep. Stephen Ross in Alamance County’s House District 63. But for those at the kickoff, the stakes felt higher than a single legislative seat. Hurtado’s parents had fled El Salvador’s civil war in 1980. ... [He was] justice-minded and policy-driven. If his candidacy seemed like a threat to conservatives who prefer their border walls tall and strong, it also threatened moderate Democrats who like their politicians white, Tar Heel-born, and ideologically cautious. ... Almost a year later, Hurtado edged out the incumbent … to become the first Latinx Democrat elected to the state legislature. He did so even as his party lost House seats overall.”
- “Facebook stopped employees from reading an internal report about its role in the insurrection. You can read it here,” by BuzzFeed News’s Ryan Mac, Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko: “Titled ‘Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement,’ the report is one of the most important analyses of how the insurrectionist effort to overturn a free and fair US presidential election spread across the world’s largest social network — and how Facebook missed critical warning signs.”
The 2020 Census
The country’s population grew at its slowest pace since the 1930s, according to the 2020 Census.
- “The first numbers to come out of the 2020 Census show the U.S. population on April 1, 2020 — Census Day — was 331.5 million people, an increase of just 7.4 percent between 2010 and 2020. It is the second-slowest rate of expansion since the government began taking a census in 1790. In the 1930s, the decade with the slowest population growth, the rate was 7.3 percent,” Tara Bahrampour, Harry Stevens and Adrian Blanco report.
- “Unlike the slowdown of the Great Depression, which was a blip followed by a boom, the slowdown this time is part of a longer-term trend, tied to the aging of the country’s White population, decreased fertility rates and lagging immigration.”
The data resulted in fewer seat shifts than anticipated.
- Texas and Florida gained two and one seats, respectively, while Rhode Island held on to its second seat. Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon also gained one seat each. The Census was, overall, a win for the South and the West.
- The margins were close — New York lost a seat by just 89 people. Minnesota held on to one by just 26 people.
- “This is the closest I’ve ever seen,” Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a political consulting firm specializing in redistricting, election administration, and the analysis and presentation of census and political data, told Bahrampour, Stevens and Blanco. “It shows you how just little, tiny things can make a difference. ... When you’ve got so many seats shifting around, 1 percent’s not going to cut it.”
- “Brace said the fact that the data was so ‘dramatically different’ from the estimates was probably due to the coronavirus pandemic, which delayed and complicated the count, and the Trump administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the survey and exclude undocumented people from being counted in apportionment. ‘All of that is causing things to go rather haywire,’ he said.”
- “Census Bureau demographers said the initial population counts from the 2020 Census were ‘generally aligned with benchmark data’ and added that their analysis should not be taken as ‘an assessment of the accuracy or reasonableness of the 2020 Census results.’ They said further assessments would follow.”
- California lost a district for the first time ever, the Sacramento Bee points out. Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia also lost one seat.
- A surprise for some? Arizona did not gain a seat. “Many political observers and demographers had expected the state to gain a seat,” the Arizona Republic reports. The state’s population increased 12 percent, but it wasn’t enough to earn the Grand Canyon State a 10th House seat.
- “If the 2020 election had been held under these new counts, Biden would have won with 303 EVs (instead of 306),” Dave Wasserman, Cook Political Report editor and a redistricting expert, tweeted. “Under most projections, he would have won with just 302 votes, so Census result is a tiny bit better for Dems than expected.”
What’s next? A contentious redistricting cycle.
- “The loss of one seat in New York could strip a district from one of the eight Republican House members,” ABC News’s Kendall Karson writes. “In Ohio and Pennsylvania, two battlegrounds with open Senate seats next year, both are losing a seat — leading some members, who could see their district disappear or become far redder in the mapmaking process, to consider or pursue statewide bids.”
- “The contentious [redistricting] process is also likely to be one of the most challenging in recent history, even with at least six states reforming the redistricting process ahead of the cycle, including some that shifted the responsibility for drawing maps to nonpartisan commissions — seeking to insulate the process from politics.”
D.C.’s population growth, visualized
The Census confirmed what many of us have experienced: D.C.’s explosive growth continued over the past decade. “Since 2010, Washington’s population has grown 14.6 percent — nearly double the national rate – jumping from about 602,000 to 689,545,” Meagan Flynn writes. This makes D.C. “officially larger in population than Vermont, in addition to Wyoming, and it aligns with the narrative D.C. leaders have pushed about the city’s vibrant economic growth as they make the case for D.C. statehood.”
Quote of the day
“My dad got executed just trying to save his own life. … He got executed,” said Khalil Ferebee, the son of Andrew Brown Jr., a Black man fatally shot by sheriff’s deputies in Elizabeth City, N.C. Video of the shooting, which hasn't been publicly released, shows Brown was unarmed and complying when he was killed, according to his family.
The first 100 days
Top House Democrats are pushing the White House to make an expanded child tax credit and other benefits permanent in Biden’s "American Families Plan."
- “The latest push came Tuesday from Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), the chairman of the tax-focused House Ways and Means Committee. Neal unveiled a new draft proposal that would authorize a universal, paid family leave program while making permanent many of the tax benefits implemented as part of the recently adopted $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus,” Tony Romm reports.
- “The Democrats’ approach marks a break with Biden, who is only expected to endorse an extension of the augmented child tax credit for five years as part of his upcoming proposal, known as the American Families Plan. The president’s total package is estimated to include $1.8 trillion in new spending and tax benefits, which Biden is set to unveil during his first address to Congress on Wednesday evening.”
Biden wants $80 billion over the next 10 years to beef up the IRS audits of high-earners as part of the new spending plan.
- “The additional money and enforcement power will accompany new disclosure requirements for people who own businesses that are not organized as corporations and for other wealthy people who could be hiding income from the government,” the Times’s Jim Tankersley reports. “The Biden administration will portray those efforts — coupled with new taxes it is proposing on corporations and the rich — as a way to level the tax playing field between typical American workers and very high-earners who employ sophisticated efforts to minimize or avoid taxation.”
- “The $80 billion in proposed funding would be an increase of two-thirds over the agency’s entire funding levels for the past decade,” Tankersley writes.
- Biden intends to use the money to help pay for his second $1.8 trillion infrastructure plan, covering things like child care and family leave. “White House officials learned during the process of drafting the American Families Plan that they could raise significantly more money from the plan than they initially anticipated, two people familiar with the matter said,” reports The Post's Jeff Stein.
Biden plans on ordering a $15 minimum wage for federal contractors today.
- The president will sign an executive order today “that will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all federal contractors by 2022, while eliminating a lower minimum wage for tipped contractors,” Eli Rosenberg and Tyler Pager report. “The move will bring the minimum wage for contractors up from the current $10.95, under rules set during the Obama administration.”
- The White House said it didn’t “believe that the change would cost jobs, citing an analysis by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Rather, the administration officials said they believed it would increase worker productivity and lower other costs involved in supervising and training workers.”
Biden’s 100-day stock market performance is better than any of his predecessors, going back to at least Dwight Eisenhower.
- “How long that cozy relationship will last is about to be determined, as investors have to digest a slew of potential obstacles from tax policy, regulations associated with Biden’s ambitious climate agenda, and the threat of overheating in an economy already on fire,” CNBC’s Jeff Cox writes. “But so far, investors have shown no hesitance in making huge bets on corporate America.”
As of Day 98 of his presidency, Biden has made 67 false or misleading statements, per The Post’s Fact Checker.
- By his first 100 days, Trump had made 511 such statements. The Biden era, thus, “has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard,” Glenn Kessler, Blanco and Tyler Remmel write.
Biden’s first 100 days look remarkably different from Obama’s.
- “The early days of Joe Biden's presidency reveal a man who remembers the Obama presidency, and who doesn't necessarily want to repeat it,” NBC News’s Sahil Kapur writes. “While conservative deficit hawks reined in Obama, Biden has brushed them off, arguing that now is the time to spend big. While Obama was hesitant to brag about his achievements, Biden's team regularly takes credit for the receding pandemic — and voters give him high marks. ‘It’s called learning from the past,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) told Kapur. “Not repeating your mistakes.’ ”
Hot on the left
No, officials are not handing out Vice President Harris’s picture book to migrant kids at the border, despite what some Republicans claim. “The New York Post reported that a children’s picture book written by Harris was being handed out in ‘welcome kits’ to young migrants at a shelter in Long Beach, Calif.,” Salvador Rizzo reports. “Long Beach city officials told The Post that Harris’s book is not being handed out in welcome kits. A single copy of the book was donated during a citywide donation drive, officials said.” The NY Post published a Reuters picture of that book, but in the story had “no attribution for the claim that Harris’s book was being distributed in welcome kits. [The Washington Post] repeatedly emailed the reporter, Laura Italiano, to ask how she arrived at that conclusion but received no response.” Online, some noted that the conservative anger over the book was similar to the reaction to false reports that Biden would drastically limit Americans' meat intake.
From “Joe Biden is making it illegal to eat hamburgers” to “Kamala Harris’ book is being mass distributed to indoctrinate kids,” keeping up with the straight-up disinformation emanating from the bowels of the GOP and right-wing media machine is a full-time job of whack-a-mole.
— Lucy Caldwell (@lucymcaldwell) April 27, 2021
Hot on the right
“As House Republicans continue their retreat in Orlando on Tuesday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is making waves for an interview in which she did not rule out a 2024 presidential bid and suggested some senators in her party won’t be viable presidential candidates because of their role in challenging the 2020 results,” John Wagner reports. In an interview with the NY Post, Cheney didn't rule out a run and "said her party has ‘a huge number of interesting candidates’ for the 2024 presidential race … She added, ‘I do think that some of our candidates who led the charge, particularly the senators who led the unconstitutional charge, not to certify the election, you know, in my view that’s disqualifying.’ Though she didn’t offer names, that description would apply to a couple of ambitious Republicans, including Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.).”
Republicans jumped on the buzzy interview:
I can only assume this means that Lincoln Project Liz is planning a primary challenge to Joe Biden for the Dem nomination because God knows she’d be lucky to break 5% running in the 2024 Republican primary. https://t.co/mxD8mbkur2
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 26, 2021
I’m not ruling it out either😂. Come on, this is silly. NO ONE who opposes Trump & Trumpism has a prayer to be the GOP nominee in 2024. No one. Not Liz Cheney. Not Kasich. Not Romney. No one. It’s now the Trumpy party. And you gotta be really Trumpy to win. Period. https://t.co/naokbiQLr6
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) April 26, 2021
This week in Washington
Biden will deliver remarks on the coronavirus response today at 1:15 p.m.
Harris will participate in a “virtual roundtable” at 4 p.m. with representatives of Guatemalan community-based organizations as part of efforts to stem the flow of migrants from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
In closing
Seth Meyers examined Republicans' efforts to stall the investigation of the Jan. 6 attack:
And, in a must-read for D.C. homeowners, The Post's real estate and graphics team examined how the area's housing market fared in 2020 by Zip code.TL;DR, the region's housing market had another strong year, especially considering what happened in other parts of the country. Read more here.