Taken at face value, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s latest fundraising pitch to supporters is either impossible, illegal, or a scam.
In an email his campaign blasted out on Tuesday, Cruz wrote: “I just got off the phone with a few very generous supporters who — after our big win in Iowa last night — have pledged huge support for my campaign.”
The donors “have agreed to match all online donations to my campaign made through the links below,” he said. The page he linked to allowed supporters to give up to $5,400 ($2,700 for the primary election; $2,700 for the general election) and, for a 48-hour period, have their donations matched dollar for dollar.
The email did not say exactly how that would work.
Email sent out Tuesday from ted@tedcruz.org.
The operative rule is that individual donations to campaigns are legally capped. “If this money is going to his campaign, any one of those donors can only give a maximum of $2,700 [per cycle] including any money they have given before,” said Fred Wertheimer, a campaign finance expert at Democracy 21.
Many of Cruz’s most “generous donors” have presumably already hit that limit, which is called “maxing out.”
“I don’t know what he’s doing or how he’s doing it, but the only way that I could imagine he could be doing it that’s legal is if he’s got a bunch of not maxed-out donors who are willing to match the contributions of others until they themselves max out at $2,700,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, deputy executive director of the Campaign Legal Center.
Richard Skinner, a policy analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, speculated that the Cruz campaign could perhaps have lined up a conference call with “like a hundred contributors who have not maxed out.” In that scenario, if each one could still give $1,000 and remain below the cap, they could match $100,000 in donations — but that would be all, and Cruz didn’t say there was a limit beyond which donations would no longer be matched.
Rick Tyler, a Cruz campaign spokesperson, said that he was only “vaguely familiar” with the program, but “you have to get multiple people to agree to do it.”
He then emailed me the following statement: “I am not going to get into specifics about the performance of our match program. Suffice is to say it meets compliance standards for reporting. We have enough donors to match new contributions under the program. This program has been widely used successfully by many campaigns.” He pointed me toward similar email campaigns, including one just the other day from fellow Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee actually offers a triple match.
But if Cruz is telling the truth about the match being covered with only “a few very generous donors” he spoke to on the phone, the only way that could work would be if his campaign is either ignoring the campaign donation limit — or the donors are giving the “matching funds” money to a Cruz-affiliated Super PAC.
Neither of those would be remotely legal.
After recent Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United and SpeechNow — and with the Federal Election Commission almost totally paralyzed by its three Republican members — there isn’t much operative campaign finance law left on the books. Super PACs, for instance, are allowed to accept unlimited contributions as long as they don’t coordinate directly with campaigns. But it seems that every campaign, with the exception of that of Bernie Sanders, is constantly finding new ways to weasel around that restriction.
One of the few rules still standing, however, is that $2,700 limit to campaign giving. Another is that federal candidates are not allowed to solicit more than $5,000 in Super PAC contributions from any one person.
“If it is not a large pool of donors, if it is truly just a few generous supporters, it does appear that taking him at his word … his strategy runs afoul of the law one way or the other,” Krumholtz said.
The rule about solicitation is outlined in an FEC advisory opinion from 2011. According to the federal statute in question, which dates back to the McCain-Feingold soft money ban of 2002, “a candidate, individual holding Federal office, agent of a candidate or an individual holding Federal office … shall not … solicit, receive, direct, transfer, or spend funds in connection with an election for Federal office, including funds for any Federal election activity, unless the funds are subject to the limitations, prohibitions, and reporting requirements of this Act.”
And there’s no wiggle room. “To direct,” according to federal regulations, “means to guide, directly or indirectly, a person who has expressed an intent to make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value, by identifying a candidate, political committee or organization, for the receipt of such funds, or things of value.”
To solicit “means to ask, request, or recommend, explicitly or implicitly, that another person make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value.”
According to Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center, “If the matching contributions by Senator Cruz’s ‘very generous supporters’ are going to a Super PAC and exceed $5,000 by any one supporter, Cruz is violating the federal law that prohibits candidates from soliciting or directing soft money to Super PACs.”
And it’s hard to imagine Cruz denying he played a part. “The problem there would be that he was on the phone call, strategically planning this campaign,” said Krumholtz. “How do you walk that back?”
Cruz could be counting on the fact that the FEC won’t rouse itself even for such a blatant violation.
“There’s no enforcement of the campaign finance laws — all the campaigns and political operatives know that,” said Wertheimer. “There are three Republican commissioners at the FEC who block enforcement of the laws. So it’s the Wild West without a sheriff.
“As long as you think there is going to be no enforcement of the law, it’s just up to each political operative or campaign to decide what they want to do,” Wertheimer said. “It’s a voluntary system, the way the FEC treats it.”
Of course, there’s one other possibility: that the whole thing is just a fake marketing gimmick, a scam.
The web page the campaign email linked to, with a box for $5,400 checked.
That would be news to billionaire Robert Mercer, the New York hedge funder who originally met Cruz at a meeting of the Club for Growth, a prominent D.C. special interest group, then gave $11 million to Keep the Promise, a Cruz Super PAC.
Another billionaire, energy investor Toby Negegebauer, gave $10 million to one of Cruz’s Super PACs. Farris and Dan Wilks, two billionaire brothers who were enriched by the Texas fracking industry, gave $15 million to a Cruz Super PAC.
As for Cruz’s pledge that he has never received money from D.C. lobbyists, that’s also demonstrably false. A number of lobbyists have given to his campaign for a total of $5,700, according to Opensecrets.org.
They include James Hyland, the president of the Pennsylvania Avenue Group, which instructs visitors to its website: “Even if you are unsure if you need our lobbying assistance, make an appointment to discuss your options.”
There’s also Ed Rogers, chairman of the lobbying powerhouse BGR Group; Andrew Biar, the founder of Strategic Public Affairs; Jewell Patek, owner of Patek & Associates; and Joseph Mondello, principal of the Mondello Group, who was recently arrested after a worker who failed to fix his computer told police that Mondello became enraged, told him, “You’re not leaving until you fix this,” then pulled out a gun and said, “I’m going to kill you slowly.”
Overall, however, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has received far and away the most donations from lobbyists, with Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as her nearest competitors.
Ted Cruz, like all the rest of the Rethugnican candidates, except for Trump are all bought and paid for by AIPAC/isrealhell/ neo-con/ zionist scumbags.
Cruz especially panders to the right wing xtian extremists aka warvangelicals much like any other of the frauds, charlatans and pick pockets known as televangelists.
Cruz is more likely to be as well regarded as Ted Hagard, Pat Robertson and John Hagee, all xtian war mongers screaming for Muslim blood.
Rubio is bought and paid for by the zionists. A closet homosexual who took part in gay orgies where copious amount of cocaine were served up.
Ben Carson appears to be mentally close to breakdown. Utters complete nonsense, babbles incessantly about continuing the war on drugs.
Jebby the Toad Bush is a criminal, involved in drug trafficking and money laundering for the cartels back in the 1980s, was witnessed by Barry Seal as he and brother George were both involved in cocaine trafficking. Barry Seal was, a short time later, assassinated by two gunmen in New Orleans, who after captured explained they had orders from the highest level to kill Seal.
Chris Christie is also another criminal involved in corruption in his state of New Jersey but what does one expect of politicians from the Garden State? Another drug warrior who supports more failed policies of Washedupton, D.C.
Trump is being led over a cliff. Being set up for the final fall, he could possibly end up like Paul Wellestone, murdered on orders from someone within the Bush administration, who, along with his wife and daughter were murdered in a plane accident, probably brought down by a pulse weapon.
He needs to make sure his plane is thoroughly inspected before each flight.
All Rethugnican candidates are not worth even considertion for anything except dog catcher and even then they would be suspect.
Hilary and Bernie are both losers as well. Hillary especially is totally corrupted and untrustworthy of anything. Supported Bill even when he was using a jewish (Epstein),pimp’s private jet to an island in the Caribbean where girls as young as 12 were forced into prostitution.
Most of Washington is corrupted. Many involved in pedophilia. Some take part in satanic rituals. Even the Pentagram is not immune. Satanic rituals have taken place inside the five sided monument to Lucifer.
This time around, how about no one for president.
The image alone struck me! Just watched an episode of a tv series called “Leverage” the Robbin Hood Con guys steal a country with a picture like this of their preferred “Winner”….1 big difference, they had the “stage” sense to have their candidates palm “upturned and reaching”! Cruz? Down turned and ‘grasping’!
The article should have led with the fact of Ted not being as wired up and plugged in as Hillary is, yet. Bernie Sanders doesn’t need to do any artful smears – Hillary’s track record of taking influence peddling dollars speaks volumes while Ted Cruz and his rock ribbed individual Conservative rhetoric is as big of a mask as Hillary’s Progressive stances. Left and Right Wing of the same Kleptocracy.
Maybe Cruz can do a “Clinton” maneuver.
He could “give a speech” and the “payment” for the speech
might coincidentally (wink) be the same amount as what the
suckers, er, I mean supporters, gave him.
After all, there are SO MANY coincidences which just
magically “happen” in Washington between what the corrupt
corporatists desire and what “happens” after they give money
to the democrats and republicans.
It is like magic
because these “coincidences” are practically predictable.
give a speech, write a ghostwriten book that magicly becomes a bestseller, buy a cheap piece of property and a year later sell it to a donor for multiple times the original cost. all legal ways to transfer funds to a candidate.
The Democratic-Republican axis of constituencies are, in the end, going to want a contest between Clinton and Cruz I predict. Hillary Clinton is using a strategy of divide and conquer of the Democratic subconstituencies to defuse the Sanders’ threat, and in this I think she will succeed. Ultimately her intent is to be, along with the rest of the Clinton dynasty, servatrix of Wall Street against both the “bewildered herd” that are the masses and the less ideologically perdurable/sustainable–she believes/maintains–strategies of the Tea Party Republicans.
Ted Cruz, for his part, seems to be using a strategy taken antithetically from Denis de Rougement or some other worthy scholar of all that is good and beautiful in the Western religio-humanistic tradition and doing with it something reversely based on the following:
“If we shut our eyes after gazing at a white statue we shall have the image of a black. In the some way, the eclipse of the myth conjured up the exact opposite of Tristan. If Don Juan, historically speaking, is no invention of the eighteenth century, the period nevertheless played in relation to this character the very part assigned in Manichean doctrine to Lucifer as regards Creation. The period gave shape to Tirso de Molina’s (Don Juan) Tenorio, and endowed the hero of that play with two thoroughly typical features–noirceur and rascality. Nothing could be more directly the reverse of the twin virtues of chivalrous love–candour and courtesy!…
…The repression of the myth by an all-embracing irony and the applauded triumph of ‘felons’ soon excited some curious reactions. Amid so much pliancy, so much intellectual and sensual refinement, so much satiation, one most profound human need was left ungratified–the need of suffering. If the body social encourages this need, it grows enfeebled, as is shown by the waning Middle Ages; but if the body social remains unconscious of this need or imagines that the need can be ridiculed, it quickly dries up and grows enervated. Thereupon the mind proceeds to invent in the guise of cruelty the sufferings it has forbidden the heart to undergo. Kindness is a stranger to those who have not suffered: their fancies lose all vital touch and all capacity for being in sympathy…”–Denis de Rougemont, ‘Love in the Western World’
Ted Cruz may very well be the paragon–best reflecting and educating in the ‘ethos’–of an evermore precarious American age, which in its ever increasing urgency for security and strength (empirically individual and suppositionally statal) misapprises the lasting value and instrumentality of what may be described as a psycho-political strategy of ‘immurement’ and ‘inurement': of erecting (against), protecting, fortifying, conditioning, accustoming, the mind, the body, the state against anything that would cause it to feel weak, insecure, disprotected, even unsure, and, in so doing, repressing or even vacating the psyche (all that it touches and encounters) of the sympathetic urge in emulation of a sort of imagined Übermensch: never vacillating, never susceptible to error (or rather the consequences of it), never infirm (at least in the literal sense), never injured (at least emotionally), but forever embodying and enacting the danger and harm (the spiritual injury; the psychological loss, for those who once had it) of having let irretrievably atrophy the capacity for sympathetic human comprehension and, by extension, the discernment of honesty to oneself as well as others; so that all that remains is a labyrinth of lies, even if it seem a dais of power.
You know, for awhile I thought Hillary might get the nomination, but I think the last debate did her in. The first half of the thing was her whining and stomping her foot like a child saying that money doesn’t corrupt politics, glass steagle needed to be repealed, and that no one needs to worry about the campaign finance system. The media can say what they want, but I can’t stand Hillary and it was cringe worthy. It was like in a ufc fight when the person falls down and their opponent rains hammer fists on their forehead. She’s been put in a position, once again, where she has to differentiate herself by being opposition to the changes to the system that people want. Making a prediction Barrack Obama was the last establishment chosen president.
If Hillary Clinton doesn’t get the democrat nomination,
it will not be because of that weak “debate.”
The money/power which controls the democrats and republicans
has shown that it will destroy whole nations for its
greed and delusions. It will take something much worse than
a pathetic excuse for a “debate” to stop Clinton and
if she doesn’t get the nomination, they will find a way
to bring in someone else (Biden?) to rescue the
corporate corruption they depend upon for power.
Sanders has also said he would support whoever gets
the nomination.
To underestimate the avarice and sadism of the powerful
is to ask to be abused again.
Now you know why she is even running. Just to pardon herself. At least she runs for herself and not only as a place holder for corporate banksters like the rest of them except Cruz who is running to finally get his US citizenship as Canadian Jesus and a guy above him named Goldman Sachs, told him.
The so-called campaign is like magician show everybody applauds and cheers while they all know it is a lie but they like a feel of shock and awe, and thrill of awesomeness, a mental hi after they run out of meds.
Welcome to pharmaceutical democracy.
Iowa was a coin tossing FRAUD, NH is coming up the same, and so on as before for almost 240 years now.
Ask yourself a Reaganesque question :
Are you better off now than four years ago or eight years ago or two decades ago? if you are, by all means, vote for a hand that feeds you but this is not democracy, this is a feudal serfdom when you ignore subversion of the US constitution and all the unalienable rights, devastation of millions American people without jobs and homes, indebted by the Wall Street just to feed oligarchic pigs and US imperial hubris with all that torture, murder paid by your taxpayer money. Go ahead knock yourself out.
Over 150 millions proud American patriots, true defender of democracy, refused to be cheering spectators of the political stage and already restrained themselves from legitimating the electoral farce with their signature and participation in nothing short of public blessing of a figure head anointed by the ruling elite. Remember if you vote, you are in minority of courtiers of the US regime and you joined those who do everything that they can to prevent any meaningful change for betterment of the majority of Americans, no matter what they utter. But hey, you are OK so don’t worry, until you are not and you will join the rest as millions of others, who thought like you, did until the pain reached them as well.
If you are not better off and you want a change you can believe it, you must face reality, abandon irrational hope of Sisyphus and refuse to vote since our vote is being compromised, manipulated, stolen as numerous hard evidences indicate, and hence the only moral thing to do, a civic duty to perform is to refuse to participate in the sham, an political extortion racket, If not for any other reason but for preservation of our own dignity and dignity of other voters. We must restrain from voting for this important, purely technical reason since stolen vote renders expression of our sovereign will a futile, soul corrupting exercise of being forced to accept stolen election results again and again while helplessly witnessing the country slipping into an abyss.
We, American citizen do not need a right to meaningless vote, we need and demand a right to rule.
Are we the people or are we props in oligarchs play? Everyone of us must answer this question.
Unfortunately, this time as well, millions of irrational, desperate and helpless in their daily lives electoral zombies, under a spell of exciting political masquerade, will align themselves with an anointed winner of a popularity/beauty contest, in a delusional feat of transference of a fraction of elite’s power to themselves just for a second of a thrill, and will continue to authorize their own suicide mission, since even baseless, continually disproved, hope of any, even minute, chance of influence of the political realm via means of begging is the last thing that dies.
Below excepts from:
https://contrarianopinion.wordpress.com/notes-on-buddy-politics/
“The act of voting in the current political system is nothing but morally corrupting tool that extorts from us an approval for the meaningless political puppets of the calcified regime, in a surrealistic act of utter futility aimed just to break us down, to break our sense of dignity, our individual will and self-determination since no true choice is ever being offered to us and never will.
Idea of political boycott and alternative political process is the only viable idea to express our political views that are absent from official candidates’ agendas and from the ballots. Let’s not be afraid, it was already successfully done in the past. It works.”
I wonder if it might not be a shell game, where he matches one donation to another, so that two people who think their donations will be matched by some deep pocket actually just get matched to each other. He can drive up donations because people think that they can donate to say 100 bucks to Cruz but only pay in 50, thus they feel like big donors. Of course the come on is just a lie, but that’s just the air that Cruz breathes anyway.
Ted’s an even bigger sleaze-ball than Hillary, and that ain’t easy…
Will they also give us a TRUSted if we donate?
I’m a little surprised the word “bundling” doesn’t come into this more. A search on “FEC bundling” pulls up a number of different aspects on campaign contributors, and lobbyists.
http://pac.org/news/pac/fec-raises-contribution-limits-2015-2016
Looks like Ted is sailing very close to the wind.
Doesn’t Ted Cruz in that picture look like one of those holy roller preachers when they do a blessing and the people fall down on the ground? Yes, you should not forget about Jill Stein. Don’t include her with the other rabble. She clearly belongs in the same camp with Bernie, of people who are doing what their conscience tells them.
“But it seems that every campaign, with the exception of that of Bernie Sanders, is constantly finding new ways to weasel around that restriction.”
Some specifics would be appreciated here. Do you mean every candidate affiliated with the Democratic and Republican Parties, or EVERY national campaign? Because if it’s the latter, I’d like to see some proof from you before you go about accusing Jill Stein of this.
I know it’s easy for many journalists to forget that there are actually four political parties who get their presidential candidates on a majority of state ballots (the other two being the Libertarian and Green Parties), but this fact is important to remember for decent, honest election coverage, something that is sorely lacking in this country at the corporate mainstream level.
Otherwise, good news article. However, it would be nice if TI could write a news article or two about the controversy and lawsuit involving the Commission on Presidential Debates’ criteria for debate inclusion.
This article makes me think of the Steven Colbert Super PAC. We are not coordinating John Stewart!!!
One could argue that if the Super PAC told him Ted Cruze that they would match the individual campaign dollars and he then sends that message out (as part of his campaign) to try to get people to make individual donations then that would qualify as coordination between the super pac and the campaign. It is a stupid law, but it does seem at prima facie that Cruze is breaking it. Will this law ever get enforced though?
This highlights one of the central ongoing problems with the U.S. democratic system of government, which relies heavily on the ‘separation of powers’ concept – i.e. independent judicial, legislative and executive branches of government.
The great threat of the neocons was their efforts, led by Cheney and Rove and sockpuppet Bush, to undermine this system by creating a ‘unitary executive’, a ‘permanent Republican majority’ in Congress, and turning the Supreme Court into a political body, rather than one focused on independent Constitutional interpretation.
If we look at how Bush and the Republicans stole the election in 2000 (yes, Gore won, by both popular vote and electoral vote, he clearly won Florida), then at how Bush placed Roberts and Alioto on the Court, and then how that Court passed Citizens United to allow these superPACs to operate with no scrutiny, and then at the Congressional refusal to overturn that decision – well, that’s political coordination between the legislative, executive and judicial branches, a complete undermining of the separation of powers clause in the Constitution.
As such, there is a good legal argument that Roberts and Alioto are illegitimate members of the Court, selected as they were by an unelected President, and that American democracy is in a real crisis as a result. Kicking them off the Court is legally justified under Constitutional rules – every decision they’ve weighed in on has questionable legitimacy, and Citizens United is the poster child for that conclusion.
The place where that argument breaks down is that it is only a good legal argument if it can be won in court. Which, by its own argument, it can’t. Too bad, though.
If memory serves correct, a Supreme Court member can be impeached by the House and tried by the Senate.
It would be an unlikely event, but not impossible.
What if those large donars make lots of little donations to many different super PAC’s? i mean is the 5000 dolar limit based on one person donating to any and all super PAC’s? or is it one person to one PAC? if its the latter, he could just have his doners set up thousands of small Super PAC’s.
There is no limit on the Super PAC contribution. There is only a limit on the campaign contribution.
There are always legal ways around any campaign finance laws.
The Super PAC does not have to ‘coordinate’ with the campaign (which implies two way communications), it simply issues instructions to the campaign.
The campaign finance laws, unfortunately, were written under the mistaken assumption that the candidate was somehow involved in managing their own campaign.