Meet the man taking aim at campaign finance regulations

The man who paved the way for super-PACs is taking aim at the rest of campaign finance regulation.

David Keating was the mastermind behind the 2010 case SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission that led to the ruling that individuals can spend unlimited amounts of money on political speech, triggering a floodgate of outside group spending. 

{mosads}Now, as head of the conservative, anti-regulation Center for Competitive Politics (CCP), he’s aiming to blow more holes in the damaged shell of campaign finance law.

“We don’t think the government has any role in ultimately regulating campaigns. That’s the time for people to speak out without interference from the people in power, so a lot of the regulations need to be scaled back,” Keating told The Hill in an interview last week. 

A former executive director of the fiscally conservative Club for Growth, he is pushing to increase or eliminate spending limits entirely and completely do away with disclosure requirements. The CCP is the only organization with a sole focus on deregulating campaign finance.  

The gray-bearded Keating, who joined the group in 2012, comes off as more of a professor than a politician. But his soft voice belies the passion of a true believer arguing for what he terms “the separation of campaign and state.”

His efforts over the last decade have helped remake the state of campaigning. Super-PACs have become a necessary part of any presidential campaign. The groups now dominate the election season, spending almost as much as the candidates themselves in some races.

But Keating isn’t satisfied. The CCP is currently involved with nine court cases around the country, many of them supporting smaller conservative organizations that don’t want to disclose their donor lists. 

Their current clients include groups in Delaware and Colorado, and they just won a Nevada case as well. The CCP is also involved with lobbying around new Internal Revenue Service rules regarding what groups count as charities.

“We really don’t think the IRS should be in the business of regulating speech. They’re totally incompetent,” Keating said. 

The CCP itself, unsurprisingly, refuses to disclose its donors. That has led to its own lawsuit; it’s suing California over a state law that requires them to disclose its donors to the state in order to get charitable status.

Keating said he has long been fascinated by the First Amendment, but his time at the Club for Growth struggling to deal with complicated FEC requirements spurred him to read more Supreme Court cases on the matter.

“It was very difficult to figure out what you had to do back then, and the Club got sued by the FEC, and that was clearly because of political pressure,” he claimed.

He eventually came to believe that he could design a group that would force the courts to strike down limits on outside group spending for organizations involved in political communication. The resulting organization, Speechnow.org, sued the FEC and won in a decision that, along with the Citizens United case, paved the way for the modern campaign finance climate.

“It’s revolutionized it in many ways. From the point of view of someone who’s worked at a group like Club for Growth, the big problem before was people used 527 groups before super-PACs came along, and that was really artificial,” he said. “There are some people that think that’s wrong, that we shouldn’t be able to pool our money in order to speak to other Americans. I think that’s crazy — that’s the essence of the First Amendment.”

Keating made a point throughout the interview to frame his points in First Amendment terms and show that deregulation wouldn’t just benefit conservatives.

While arguing against donor limits, he gestured to a poster for 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy featuring a dove and the word “peace,” pointing out the Minnesota senator’s campaign was underwritten by a handful of wealthy donors.

In arguing against donor disclosure, he cited the 1950s Supreme Court decision that the state of Alabama couldn’t force the NAACP to disclose its supporters.

“The same thing is true today. People want to organize against what government policy may be, and if you force them to disclose their names to the people in power, some people won’t be willing to do that,” he argued. 

“If you work for a company owned by a Mormon and you support a gay rights group, are you going to want your boss to know that? Probably not. If you work in a place like Harvard and you’re giving money to [Texas GOP Sen.] Ted Cruz or someone, that’s probably not going to do much for your tenure track.”

Keating admitted that, for all of the organization’s successes in recent years, the courts are unlikely to toss out all contribution limits. So, the group is also seeking to increase limits in many states as well.

But his biggest target right now is disclosure requirements, which he sees as trying to stymie free speech.

“The purpose of disclosure often is not to try and inform voters, it’s to shut down speech, and that’s what’s motivating a lot of the push for disclosure,” Keating argued.