Presidential Campaign

Following Mitt Romney’s loss in November, our country’s pundit class wasted little time delivering a diagnosis: Republicans have a serious electoral problem with Hispanics and African-Americans.

As a representative to the Republican National Committee from the country’s only urban party committee, my exasperated response to this was, “Tell me something I don’t know.” In fact, I’ll do the pundits one better. Our problem isn’t limited to specific demographic groups—our problem extends to entire cities.

Last weekend, I joined The Faith and Politics Institute on their annual Congressional Civil Rights pilgrimage to Alabama. I’ve taken this trip several times, but its significance this year could not be more poignant. While we have come a long way and much progress has been made, the many battles fought forty eight years ago in Selma are still raging, but this time we’re not fighting in the streets, we’re fighting in the courts.

Last week, some of my colleagues and I took that fight to the steps of the Supreme Court to rally in support of the most effective Civil Rights legislation ever enacted by Congress, The Voting Rights Act.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which gave rise to outside groups that could accept unlimited contributions to influence elections, was not intended to eviscerate laws limiting the size of contributions to candidates and parties. But the data from the 2012 elections show that it has effectively done so.

In Citizens United, the court assumed that independent expenditures by outside groups — unlike contributions to candidates and parties — do not pose a threat of corrupting elected officials. Therefore, the court concluded that independent expenditures cannot be regulated.

A few blocks from the U.S. Supreme Court is the National Archives, housing original signed copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and landmark pieces of federal legislation – including the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In front of the entrance to the Archives stand two statues with inscriptions that read “What is Past is Prologue,” and “Study the Past.” We hope all nine justices of the Supreme Court will heed that wisdom as they hear arguments this week about the constitutionality of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.  

While Barack Obama is busy shredding the Constitution, Washington, D.C. insider Karl Rove is busy trying to destroy what is left of the Republican Party by launching a multi-million dollar Super PAC to usurp representative democracy, disenfranchise American voters, and concentrate even more power in Washington DC.
 
Rove and the professional “consultant class” think that only Washington D.C. insiders like them – not the American people – should get to decide who runs for public office.
 
That’s why he is launching the “Conservative Victory Project” – a Super PAC whose mandate is to wrestle local decision-making power away from the American people, so that only Washington DC insiders can hand-pick our candidates – against our will – again.

The conventionally wise have weighed in and declared — with equal parts delight and dismay — that the president’s second inaugural address was a robust defense of contemporary liberalism that heartened the left and caused the right to issue a resigned “We told you so”: Barack Obama the progressive finally emerged on Inauguration Day.
 
With the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson — once a George W. Bush speechwriter — calling Obama’s speech a “a raging bonfire of straw men” and the Post’s Dana Milbank describing the president as preaching to the choir with “a leftover campaign speech combined with an early draft of the State of the Union address,” you’d think that Obama had served up a point-by-point defense of his discretionary spending prerogatives while challenging Republican House Speaker John Boehner to a winner-take-all hand of head’s-up Texas hold ‘em to settle the federal budget.
 
But they’re both wrong.

Second inaugural addresses like second honeymoons typically lack the pizazz of the first go-round. There hasn’t been a memorable second address since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inauguration in 1937. Even the great communicator Ronald Reagan delivered a pedestrian second inaugural address.
Expectations for President Barack Obama’s second inauguration were not as sky-high as they were four years ago. This time, however, President Obama far exceeded expectations. He may not have delivered a speech for the ages. But he gave a powerful address that laid a foundation for his second term in office.

The goal of equal opportunity was a predominant theme of President Obama's second inaugural address at the Capitol yesterday. As in his first inaugural four years ago, the president harkened back to "the ideals of our forbearers," with particular reference to the unalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence. The allegiance to such ideals, he said, is what "makes us exceptional."

Noting that the patriots of 1776 "did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few," he asserted that "the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal--is the star guides us still." 

In recent years, Congress has greatly curbed monetary pork, notably earmarks. For example, after reforms were instituted to make earmarks more transparent, their number in legislation decreased from 13,997 (worth $27 billion) in 2005 to 2,658 (worth $13 billion) in 2007. But in-kind pork, such as presidential inaugural tickets, continues to thrive.

On the first day of the 113th Congress, Rep. Chris Van Hollen reintroduced the DISCLOSE Act, a bill aimed at shining a bright light on who is spending in our federal elections. This marks the third time the DISCLOSE Act has been introduced in Congress. The legislation would bring much-needed transparency to our federal elections, allowing voters to be better informed, and helping guard against improper relationships between political spenders and elected officials.