Neither the Kochs nor the Soroses, I’m guessing, would’ve anticipated spending a dollar on the Senate race in the Sunflower State at the outset of the election season; now, with just three weeks to go, both are spending money on the tight race between Republican Pat Roberts and independent Greg Orman.
The issue that has drawn both the Koch network and Jonathan Soros, the son of outspoken liberal billionaire George Soros, is campaign-finance reform.
American Commitment, a nonprofit project of the Koch network, which has vigorously defended the rights of its donors to give money anonymously, is on the air with an ad lauding Roberts for his opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment intended to override the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates of political giving from top-dollar political donors and from labor unions. (Democrats brought that amendment to the floor in September, but it was defeated with stalwart Republican opposition.)
Soros, who in 2012 founded a super PAC, Friends of Democracy, that supports candidates who favor campaign-finance reform, is hosting a New York fundraiser on Wednesday for Orman. He’s joined by Goldman Sachs’s Joe Gleberman and Gotham Capital Partners’ John Petry, a major backer of the city’s Success Academy charter-school network. Orman has proposed a number of restrictions on political donations and supports a constitutional amendment undoing the Citizens United decision.