Biden and Lobbyists

 Eric Lipton and Kenneth P. Vogel at NYT:

The alarm bells sounded immediately among some progressives when President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. released the list of advisers this week who will help him with the transition at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the $5 trillion federal budget and shapes regulations on everything from labor standards to air pollution.

Mr. Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm whose secretive list of clients includes financial services, technology and pharmaceutical companies.

“This puts us at a state of high alarm,” said Jeff Hauser, who runs a liberal group called the Revolving Door Project, which has been pressuring the Biden administration to stay away from not only lobbyists but also individuals coming out of the business world whom Mr. Hauser and other activists call “corporatists.”

His concerns are an early manifestation of a percolating and broader clash between the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the more establishment members of Mr. Biden’s core team over the role of corporate executives, lobbyists and consultants in the incoming administration.

CEOs Talk About Threats to Democracy

Tom Krisher and Paul Wiseman at AP: 

 Only a few of America’s CEOs have made public statements about President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his election loss, but in private, many are alarmed and talking about what collective action would be necessay if they see an imminent threat to democracy.

On Nov. 6, more than two dozen CEOs of major U.S. corporations took part in a video conference to discuss what to do if Trump refuses to leave office or takes other steps to stay in power beyond the scheduled Jan. 20 inauguration of former Vice President Joe Biden. On Saturday Biden was declared the election winner by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

During the conference, which lasted more than an hour, the CEOs agreed Trump had the right to pursue legal challenges alleging voter fraud.

But if Trump tries to undo the legal process or disrupts a peaceful transition to Biden, the CEOs discussed making public statements and pressuring GOP legislators in their states who may try to redirect Electoral College votes from Biden to Trump, said Yale Management Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who convened the meeting.

“They’re all fine with him taking an appeal to the court, to a judicial process. They didn’t want to deny him that. But that doesn’t stop the transition,” said Sonnenfeld. “They said if that makes people feel better, it doesn’t hurt anything to let that grind through.”

On Saturday, the day after the video meeting, the Business Roundtable, a group that represents the most powerful companies in America, including Walmart, Apple, Starbucks and General Electric, put out a statement congratulating Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris. It largely reflected the conversation from Friday’s video meeting, saying the group respects Trump’s right to seek recounts and call for investigations where evidence exists.

Litigation and Religion

 For Tuesday:

• Cigler, ch. 13, 15
• Drutman, ch. 10.

Citizen Suits

• Clean Water Act
• Safe Drinking Water Act
• Clean Air Act 1970
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act

 POLICY CAUSES POLITICS

• The Environmental Bar
• The targets of regulation hire lawyers, too

Litigation

• The Cost of Litigation & the Contingent Fee System
• Test Cases
• The Becket Fund and Sympathetic Plaintiffs

America and religion:  comparative data

The connection between religion and political advocacy dates back to the start, with the fight against slavery

• Slave revolts: Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner
• John Brown
• Stephen A. Douglas objected: "It is true that they describe themselves as ministers of the gospel, but they claim to speak in the name of the Almighty on a political question pending in the Congress of the United States. It is an attempt to establish in this country the doctrine that a body of men, organized and known among the people as clergymen, have a peculiar right to determine the will of God in relation to legislative action. It is an attempt to establish a theocracy to take charge of our politics and our legislation. It is an attempt to make the legislative power of this country subordinate to the Church."

The Civil War left US religion even more decentralized:  some Protestant denominations (e.g., Baptists) broke into Northern and Southern wings.

The Social Gospel Movement and ... The American Economics Association

Prohibition, Evangelicals, and the Scopes Case

The Civil Rights Movement and SCLC

"I have observed with profound sorrow the role that many religious leaders have played in urging passage of this bill, because I cannot make their activities jibe with my concept of the proper place of religious leaders in our national life … This is the second time in my lifetime an effort has been made by the clergy to make a moral question of a political issue. The other was prohibition.  We know something of the results of that." -- Senator Richard Russell, arguing against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congressional Record, June 10, 1964, p. 13309.

The Religious Right in the 1980s and The Johnson Amendment

Current status

• Major religious groups
• Non-Catholic Christian denominations

Documentary on The Federalist Society

 

Nonprofits, Ideology and Litigation

 For Thursday, Cigler, ch. 5

Researching Nonprofits

• Limitations of public information
• Candid
• Guidestar and Form 990
• SourceWatch (liberals investigating conservatives) and Capital Research Center (conservatives investigating liberals)

Think Tanks and Foundations on the Right

• A local tank and: Birthright citizenship
• Heritage
• The Bradley Foundation  and its 2016 Form 990 ... COVID Activities

Think Tanks and Foundations on the Left

• Progressive Infrastructure Map (we also discussed on 10/13)
• Center for American Progress

Legal Groups

• Networking
• Analysis
• Litigation

The Legal Network of the Right

• The Federalist Society
• FedSoc and SCOTUS
• Jay Michaelson at The Daily Beast “Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the president has outsourced his selection of judges,” McGahn said at a Federalist Society event last year. “That is completely false. I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school, still am, so frankly it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”
• FEDERALIST SOCIETY FUNDING 
• JCN
• Becket Fu
• ACLJ and Jay Sekuilow

On the Left

• Constitutional Accountability Ctr
• ACLU
• Alliance for Justice network

Citizen Suits

• Clean Water Act
• Safe Drinking Water Act
• Clean Air Act 1970
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act

 POLICY CAUSES POLITICS

• The Environmental Bar
• The targets of regulation hire lawyers, too

Litigation

• The Cost of Litigation & the Contingent Fee System
• Test Cases
• Sympathetic Plaintiffs

Pro-Trump Super PACs in 2020

At Politico, Natasha Korecki and colleagues have a long piece on the 2020 campaign.  This excerpt deals with super PACs.

In early July, [Sheldon] Adelson contacted Republican strategist and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove. Adelson was Trump’s most generous giver, but he was uncomfortable with the existing pro-Trump super PACs. He wanted help in creating a new outfit he could feel confident in.

By that point, the pro-Trump America First Action super PAC had been raising money for two years. But there were widespread doubts about the group in the donor community. Big givers saw it as a dumping ground for ex-White House officials like former press secretary-turned-“Dancing with the Stars” contestant Sean Spicer.

That month, Steve Hantler, an adviser to Republican mega-donor Bernie Marcus, contacted veteran Republican strategist Chris LaCivita. Would he be interested in putting a super PAC together?

LaCivita, the architect of the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth takedown of John Kerry, signed on. Organizers had also spoken with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had been eager for an alternative super PAC to emerge, though the talks quickly stalled and major donors would have strongly objected to his appointment.

Word of the nascent super PAC encouraged Trump advisers, who were longing for air cover. But as the summer wore on, the Trump campaign grew antsy. Where was this much-anticipated organization? It didn’t help that Trump had antagonized Adelson during an early August phone call in which he falsely accused the mega-donor of not doing enough to help him, possibly delaying matters further.

The outfit, Preserve America, would finally get off the ground in early September with millions of dollars in funding from Adelson and Marcus. By then, the Trump campaign had gone a full month getting clobbered by Biden on the airwaves.

The Trump team’s summer blackout may have been costly: Exit polls showed that more than 70 percent of voters decided on whom to vote for before September.

California Ballot Measures

 Jeremy B. White at Politico:

The myth of lockstep liberal California took a hit this election.

Voters in the deep-blue state rejected a progressive push to reinstate affirmative action, sided with technology companies over organized labor and rejected rent control. They are poised to reject a business tax that had been a decadeslong priority for labor unions and Democratic leaders.

President Donald Trump regularly portrays California as a land of complete liberal excess, and Democrat Joe Biden currently has 65 percent of California's vote. Yet decisions on ballot measures this week reflect a state that remains unpredictable, flashing a libertarian streak with a tinge of fiscal moderation within its Democratic moorings.

“We’re not going to go for everything that’s progressive," said Mindy Romero, head of the University of Southern California's Center for Inclusive Democracy. “We think of ourselves as such a progressive state, and I’ve always said we’re a blue state but really we’re many shades of blue."

Results as of Friday afternoon SUBJECT TO CHANGE!

Proposition Title			Yes Votes	%	No Votes	%
Yes	14	Bonds to Continue Stem Cell Research	6,216,139	51.0%	5,964,961	49.0%
No	15	Property Tax to Fund Schools, Government Services	5,979,003	48.3%	6,405,666	51.7%
No	16	Affirmative Action in Government Decisions	5,366,655	43.9%	6,854,393	56.1%
Yes	17	Restores Right to Vote After Prison Term	7,289,248	59.0%	5,059,072	41.0%
No	18	17-year-old Primary Voting Rights	5,549,073	44.8%	6,825,260	55.2%
Yes	19	Changes Certain Property Tax Rules	6,233,543	51.4%	5,896,647	48.6%
No	20	Parole Restrictions for Certain Offenses	4,556,754	37.7%	7,529,008	62.3%
No	21	Expands Governments’ Authority to Rent Control	4,922,437	40.3%	7,300,324	59.7%
Yes	22	App-Based Drivers and Employee Benefits	7,178,076	58.4%	5,116,019	41.6%
No	23	State Requirements for Kidney Dialysis Clinics	4,400,274	36.0%	7,812,042	64.0%
Yes	24	Amends Consumer Privacy Laws	6,778,632	56.0%	5,317,765	44.0%
No	25	Eliminates Money Bail System	5,349,338	44.4%	6,688,378	55.6%