Live Q&As

First, to make sure others are up to speed: President Obama's campaign announced last night that he was throwing in the towel on his somewhat-distant relationship with a super PAC, called Priorities USA Action, that was formed to help him but had terrible results raising money (unlike Obama's campaign itself, by the way). 

Various campagn leaders and advisers, including Jim Messina and David Axelrod, have portrayed the decision as one of pragmatism--Axelrod said on MSNBC this morning that Republican groups were effectively "pointing guns" at the campaign.

It appears that a lot of events came together in recent weeks to push them in this direction, particularly the overwhelming dominance of super PACs in the GOP primaries and their ability to raise far more money than Democratic equivalents.

This is one of the most vexing issues to get a handle on with super PACs, and even the legal professionals disagree on the details.

To sum up: what most of us would think of as "coordination" often does not count as such under rules administered by the Federal Election Commission. They can coordinate on scheduling and other such logistics, and some conservative attorneys argue it goes further--that the only thing that matters is that the candidate and campaign aren't deciding on ad details and that sort of thing.

For example, candidates can raise money for super PACs, but they can't explicitly ask for more than the $2,500 individual contribution limit under FEC guidelines. 

And yes, this is precisely as idiotic as it sounds.

By the way, Mitt Romney has appeared at fundraisers for a super PAC called Restore Our Future, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have also lent their names to fundraising efforts by friendly super PACs. The Obama team says they will stop short of direct fundraising appeals, and Obama himself will not appear at Priorities events, though his  underlings will.

You know what? I have trouble too, and I'm supposed to write about this stuff!

Your examples are essentially apples and oranges. Let's step back: The FEC oversees election laws, which include limits on contributions, spending reports, coordination rules with outside groups, etc.

The IRS, of course, enforces tax laws. 527s and 501(c) designations are IRS terms, and refer to the status of groups under the tax code. Super PAC, by contrast, is a slang term for an FEC designation officially called (take a deep breath) independent expenditure-only committees. 

Super PACs were born in 2010 after decisions in Citizens United, SpeechNow and other cases basically stripped away many previous limits on outside spending. They are overseen by the FEC, and must report their spending and donors publicly (though often with a nice handy lag time).  Some super PACs, as it happens, are also 527s as far as the tax code is concerned. 

Most 501(c) nonprofit groups, by contrast, do NOT have to report their donors because their "primary purpose" is not elections or politics, but instead "social welfare" or one of many other designations. The latter is a big fat loophole for secret money that I wrote about in a story published today:

http://wapo.st/wVY2mX

That whole thing just made me a bit dizzy.

There's no doubt some Obama supporters, especially on the progressive left, may be angry about this. The whole money-in-politics issue is a matter of deep importance to a small but vocal segment of the Democratic base, though frankly it's not clear it ever moves many votes. 

The question is how much this reverberates into negative results at the polls or in contributions to the campaign. It's probably worth remembering that the campaign reformers howled in 2008 when Obama decided to skip public matching funds to raise as much money as possible. We're all aware how that turned out.

Campaign officials are also beating the drum on this whole "we will not tie one hand behind our back" argument, which may have resonance for many supporters who otherwise don't like the idea. 

First, just to get a technical misunderstanding out of the way that is very common: the Supreme Court did not actually approve or create super PACs, per se. In Citizens United, the court ruled 5-4 that corporations (and by unspoken extension unions) could spend unlimited funds on elections as long as they didn't coordinate with campaigns. Then in a case called SpeechNow, an appellate court--drawing in part on Citizens United--struck down limits on contributions to advocacy groups. Then the FEC, taking heed of those two rulings, determined that certain kinds of groups--now known as super PACs--could marry those two ideas together, taking unlimited funds from almost anyone and then spend that money on elections.

I think the change is pretty clear in the GOP primaries, where super PACs have outspent the actual campaigns. Look at Newt Gingrich: Does anyone believe he was not helped, perhaps kept alive, by $11 million in super PAC money from a friendly casino magnate and his family?

Much of it comes down to an inordinate amount of influence for a quite small number of people. For example,A quarter of the money raised by Mitt Romney and his super PAC came from just 41 people: http://wapo.st/xJY9Cp

Hmm. Well, our stories and everyone else's I've seen have led with the fact that he's reversing course on this issue, so I'm not sure how that point is being ignored. It's pretty much the whole reason we're writing about it!

There's always a bit of magic arts to political spending, of course, in the sense that it's hard to definitively prove these kinds of impacts. That said, it's hard to look at South Carolina and Florida and not conclude that super PAC money had at least some impact on the outcomes. 

Excellent question! I think there's no doubt we will see this, and in fact we've already seen glimmers of this in the primaries. (My favorite so far were pink leaflets handed out by a Democratic super PAC in South Carolina extolling Romney's support for gays and lesbians.)

AFSCME, the public sector union, also paid for $1 million in ads in Florida attacking Romney for his ties to a firm convicted of Medicare fraud--in a GOP primary!

This is a great question, and one that I ask a variety of attorneys and others myself. After all, Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire helping Newt Gingrich, spent tens of millions on an advocacy group in 2008. Rich guys in particular have usually had an outlet for their money in politics if they desired.

The general conclusion seems to be, pardon the cliche, a perfect storm. Basically the Citizens United decision, and others both before and after it, have cleared the decks entirely and have removed many of the hazy doubts that probably depressed spending in the past. Remember that most of the liberal 527 groups behind hundreds of millions of dollars in spending in 2004 were in fact hit with massive fines after the fact because they broke the rules. At this point most of those rules no longer exist.

I think the impact on the general could also be profound the way things are shaping up. Remember, a huge amount of the $240 million+ that the conservative American Crossroads group plans to spend will be doled out in congressional races, not the presidential contest (though they will probabyl revolve around Obama, so it's sort of a wash in that sense). 

I would also say the Obama campaign has clearly concluded it won't just be an issue in the primaries.