Lest anyone think that the Democrats’ charge that conservative PACs are accepting shady “foreign money” is anything but a cynical and desperate attempt to stave off disaster, a reminder of things we’ve learned in the last few days:
1) Brad Woodhouse, who is engineering the campaign to hit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for not fully disclosing its donor list, and for using this mystery money to fund attack ads on Democrats in an election year, himself used to run a PAC that did not fully disclose its donor list, and that used this mystery money to fund attack ads on Republicans in an election year.
2) As Jonathan Adler noted here yesterday, the same Democrats who are complaining about PACs run by foreign-owned companies financing the Republicans have taken more than twice as much money from those groups.
House and Senate Democrats have received approximately $1.02 million this cycle from such PACs, according to an analysis compiled for The Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics. House and Senate GOP leaders have taken almost $510,000 from PACs on the same list.
The PACS are funded entirely by contributions from U.S. employees of subsidiaries of foreign companies. All of the contributions are made public under Federal Elections Commission rules, and the PACs affiliated with the subsidiaries of foreign corporations are governed by the same rules that American firms’ PACs or other PACs would face.
Now that’s what I call an October surprise.