International Business Times: The Supreme Court Case That Let Clinton Hijack Party Fundraising
Brazile inherited the DNC chair position from Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who handed the Clinton campaign keys to the party fundraising apparatus through a joint fundraising group called the Hillary Victory Fund: an agreement between the Clinton campaign, the DNC and 32 state parties to raise campaign funds together. The power of that agreement, which effectively allowed Clinton to avoid campaign limits by funneling donations through state parties, was a direct result of a split 2014 Supreme Court decision in which the court’s Chief Justice John Roberts called worries about such arrangments “hypothetical” and “divorced from reality.”
But campaign finance experts say the scenario, far from being hypothetical, may be the new political reality.
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Those transfers were made possible by an exception in contribution limit rules that allows state and national parties to transfer money between each other without being subject to limits, Adav Noti, an attorney who argued the case on the side of the FEC, told IBT.
“It’s a combination of that exception and the McCutcheon decision which has enabled this,” said Noti, who is now the senior director for trial litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center. “One of the things that Congress should consider is whether that exception for intra-party transfers still makes sense in the post-McCutcheon era.”