dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Wisconsin Dem Rakes in Money From Corporate-Funded PACs While Raging Against Corporate Money

Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes this year has raked in thousands from corporation-funded political action committees, according to election finance records, even though he pledged to forgo campaign donations from registered corporate PACs.

Barnes, the state's lieutenant governor, said on April 12 that he hasn't taken "one dime in Corporate PAC $$." But he has accepted at least $15,000 in donations from leadership PACs funded by the Boeing Company PAC, Pfizer Inc. PAC, the Lockheed Martin Corporation Employees' PAC, and other corporate-connected committees—a campaign finance loophole that allows him to benefit from industry cash while still claiming to reject it.

In the first three months of 2022, Barnes accepted donations from at least five leadership PACs that receive corporate funding, including the Nutmeg PAC, the BRIDGE PAC, and the Congressional Black Caucus. During the same time, these groups took in money from corporate PACs linked to Raytheon, Novo Nordisk, Exxon Mobil, and Capital One, among others.

The donations could detract from a key pledge of Barnes's candidacy, as he seeks to portray his campaign as "roots"-driven and contrast himself with Republican senator Ron Johnson, who Barnes claims is beholden to corporate interests. The funding came after Barnes was reported to have taken corporate PAC money during his previous campaigns for state office, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Registered "corporate PACs" are entities connected to a business that are only allowed to raise money from company employees and stockholders. But leadership PACs—which are connected to individual politicians—often accept money from these groups and steer it to other candidates, including ones who have promised to eschew corporate money.

Barnes first announced during his campaign launch last July that he was "not taking donations from corporate PACs," and he has continued to tout this promise as a contrast with Johnson.

"This campaign is [grass]roots," said Barnes on Twitter last month. "We're going to prove you can't buy a Senate seat and that you don't need corporate PAC money to win."

Barnes raised $1.7 million in the first quarter of 2022, lagging behind his two main primary opponents, hedge fund heir Alex Lasry and Wisconsin treasurer Sarah Godlewski, according to Federal Election Commission records. Lasry, who raised $3.9 million, and Godlewski, who raised $2.1 million, both poured a significant amount of their own money into their campaigns. Republican incumbent Johnson raised $5.9 million.

Barnes's weak fundraising numbers suggest he has struggled to bring in donations, even as polling has shown him with an early lead in the Democratic primary.

Democrats are fighting to oust Johnson in what is expected to be one of the most hotly contested Senate races of this year's midterms.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/wisconsin-dem-rakes-in-money-from-corporate-funded-pacs-while-raging-against-corporate-money/

>>17312480

COHEN: What’s your view of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the Bush-era federal law that offers a special shield to gun manufacturers to protect them from liability for the damage caused by gun violence? Would a legislative repeal of it violate the Second Amendment? And do you get a sense from recent litigation against gun manufacturers — I am thinking of the Sandy Hook case, for example — that this avenue might represent the best chance now to reduce gun violence by holding gunmakers accountable for some of it?

MILLER: I do not think a legislative repeal of PLCAA would violate the Second Amendment. I do think the Second Amendment presumes that there will be some kind of commercial market in weapons, but nothing about the Second Amendment says that market must be unregulated. Indeed, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Court itself said “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on … laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” Right now, under PLCAA, firearms are among a handful of commercial products that are essentially immunized from tort rules that could force manufacturers and distributors to make them safer and less prone to misuse.

It’s possible that, if PLCAA were repealed, the Court would hold — as it has in the First Amendment context with defamation of public figures — that the Second Amendment sets the lower boundary for tort rules involving weapons. It’s possible, but that would give Second Amendment rights a kind of preeminence claimed by few other constitutional guarantees. The Sandy Hook case provides a very small crack to penetrate the PLCAA immunity shield, and perhaps that will be enough to make gun manufacturers change their sales practices. However, I’m not certain that it will provide the full set of incentives — already present with other kinds of commercial products: from batteries, to cars, to prescription medication — to make a potentially beneficial product less prone to misuse.

COHEN: Five years after he retired, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, said the idea that there was a personal right to bear arms embedded in the Second Amendment was a fraud. The Second Amendment, he told an interviewer in 1991, “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” That was 31 years ago. Since then, a conservative Supreme Court has ruled there is such an individual right to bear arms, a ruling that has spawned rollbacks of gun regulations across the country. To a lot of people, Burger’s comments are a sort of Rorschach test about the Second Amendment in general and gun regulation in particular. Where do you stand on it?

MILLER: This is not a simple question. To call the personal right interpretation of the Second Amendment a “fraud” presumes a certain kind of originalist constitutional methodology. It presumes that the Second Amendment means what the Founders intended or, alternatively, what the Founding generation understood the words to mean around 1791. Few, if any, of the Founders are talking about firearms for personal self-defense against criminals during the time the Second Amendment was ratified — the debate was focused on fear of a standing army and how to organize the militia. Recent research by linguists, using big data sets of 18th-century documents unavailable when the Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, has pretty convincingly shown that the term “bear arms” was overwhelmingly used in a collective or military sense and almost never used in the modern sense of “carry weapons.”