All posts tagged "Common Cause"

Congress quietly drained hundreds of millions of dollars from a largely unused presidential campaign fund to provide a jolt of cash to the United States Secret Service and election security grants, Raw Story has confirmed.

The massive raid of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund was included late last week in Congress’ latest government funding package, which President Joe Biden signed into law.

Raw Story could not confirm which member, or members, of Congress are responsible for inserting language in the middle of the 1,012-page bill that tapped the fund to the tune of $375 million....

The Federal Election Commission recently fined Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene $12,000 after determining the Georgia congresswoman personally violated an election law after illegally fundraising for a conservative super PAC.

But Greene’s campaign donors — not Greene herself — are footing the bill, according to an image of the payment check that Raw Story obtained from the FEC.

The check for the full $12,000 comes from Greene for Congress Inc., the congresswoman’s donor-fueled campaign committee. ...

Members of Congress keep messing up — over and over and over again — in failing to abide by an 11-year-old financial disclosure and conflicts-of-interest law.

And the habitual lack of compliance with the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act — dozens of lawmakers have violated its disclosure provisions during the past three years, often offering tortured excuses — is eroding the public’s trust, one of the law’s original authors tells Raw Story.

“I mean, come on. ‘The dog ate my homework,’ aren’t we a little more grown up than that?” said former Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA). “If we're capable of voting on whether or not to raise or lower taxes or send people to war, I think we can report when we make an investment.”...

An unused government fund intended to pay for presidential elections got a $4.7 million cash infusion in the weeks before this year’s Tax Day in April, the month when the fund is expected to get its largest deposit of the year.

The Presidential Election Campaign Fund — a once-popular resource for White House aspirants that hasn’t been used regularly in 15 years — is funded by a $3 check box that taxpayers encounter when filing their annual tax returns.

Even though less than 4 percent of taxpayers checked the box in recent years, the fund continues to grow, now reaching $434.9 million as of March 31, according to U.S. Treasury records reviewed by Raw Story....