A bill that U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) is pushing would certainly have come in handy for the public today. In fact, it would have been helpful for Murray herself.
An independent expenditure group called the American Action Network began running a hard-hitting anti-Murray ad today. (We reported on the ad and ran it in this morning’s Fizz.)
All day, I’ve been trying to track down the list of people who funded the $750,000 ad buy. The problem is, independent expenditure campaigns don’t have to report their contributors until the end of the quarter in which they made the spend. If they just bought the ad this week, that means we’ll have to wait until mid October to find out who’s got Rossi’s back on this one. All we know about the American Action Network is that it’s run by a group of longtime GOP operatives and bigwigs, including former Republican US Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN). But who’s paying for it?
Murray is co-sponsoring a bill that would (inadvertently) address the IE disclosure problem. The bill—a response to the controversial Citizen’s United US Supreme Court ruling, which said that corporate bank accounts can directly fund IEs (previously, IEs could only accept contributions from individuals and PACs)—would require the main funders of IEs to identify themselves in the ad itself. If that law were in place today, we’d know exactly who’s stumping for Rossi with an ad that accuses Murray of walking all over the little guys (with her famous tennis shoes). All it says on the ad now is “Paid for by the American Action Network.”
It’d be pretty ironic if the contributors to the anit-Murray ad turned out to be big guys like Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp or insurance company United Health Group—three of former Sen. Coleman’s top all-time contributors.
