The Rhode Island Democratic Party is criticizing Republican Congressional candidate Brendan Doherty today for accepting a $10,000 donation from Citizens Action, the PAC behind the Supreme Court case that struck down restrictions on independent political expenditures.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United does nothing but enlarge the voice of corporate America and give the special interests in Washington even more political power,” said Bill Fischer, spokesperson for the RI Democratic Party. “Mr. Doherty needs to explain why he thinks the Citizens United ruling is good for our country and why special interests should be permitted to continue spending millions of dollars to secretly influence elections.
“While Democrats in Washington are fighting for legislation that will at least disclose the big money influences fueling Super PAC expenditures, Republicans in Congress are standing with Citizens United to block transparency - the very Republicans Brendan Doherty will stand with if elected to Congress,” said Fischer.
Here, the Democrats continue with their central attack on Doherty: he's not the moderate you think he is, they argue.
Ian Prior, Doherty's campaign manager, tried to counter that argument. Doherty doesn't necessarily agree with everything Citizens United stands for, he says. And the Supreme Court decision? It is what it is, he says. You've got to respect the highest court in the land (though, Democratic Congressman David Cicilline's press secretary Nicole Kayner replies, Doherty doesn't seems to respect the decision on Obamacare - saying he would vote to repeal and replace the law).
When I pressed Prior on whether Doherty actually supports the Citizens United decision, he said the candidate "agrees that the decision is correct with respect to the First Amendment." But he said Doherty thinks there's room to clean up a political system that can be corrupted by money. He said, for instance, that the GOP candidate would be in favor of greater transparency when it comes to political donations.
But Doherty, he said, wouldn't back Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's DISCLOSE Act because the bill was a political stunt designed to make Republicans look bad.
A real solution, Prior said, must come out of bipartisan talks - working from the center out. Here, he invoked Doherty's central theme: he's a true moderate who will reach across the aisle to craft solutions to big problems. It is a noble notion - one that might even carry the Republican to victory in a Democratic-leaning district.
But I wonder if Doherty is missing a chance to demonstrate how he'd pursue bi-partisanship as it actually works in Washington these days. The wise men rarely put aside partisan differences to address the nation's big problems. Bi-partisanship, circa 2012, is a couple of members of one party, often politically vulnerable, bailing on their party to join a big block on the other side.
Whitehouse's proposal, if politically inflected like everything in Washington, was a modest, relatively straightforward piece of legislation that drew praise from at least two retired GOP senators. It could have passed with a few GOP defections. Why not say that a Congressman Doherty would be a defector if the bill got to the House? Why not demonstrate that he could work with other members of the Rhode Island delegation?
That might not go over well with Whitehouse's GOP opponent, Barry Hinckley, or the larger Rhode Island Republican Party. But they hardly seem the people to be pleasing at the moment.
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