John Boehner is Under Federal Investigation for Campaign Finance Violations

The FEC has announced that they are investigating Speaker of the House John Boehner for accepting dozens of illegal donations from the coal, energy, and gambling industries.

According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The Federal Election Commission is examining whether dozens of political action committees and individuals contributed more than the legally allowed amount to House Speaker John Boehner during last year’s election cycle.

Letters the Federal Election Committee sent Monday to Friends of John Boehner indicated that donors including coal, energy, and gambling interests, exceeded contribution limits to Boehner’s committee by more than $150,000.
Among the groups that were allegedly overgenerous to Boehner were Coalpac and Minepac, which represent the mining industry, as well as political committees representing the Exelon, Constellation and Luminant power companies, and the Ceasars and Penn National gambling enterprises.

“Although the commission may take further legal action concerning the acceptance of excessive contributions, your prompt action to refund the excessive amount will be taken into consideration,” the letters say.

Boehner’s ties with special interest groups, and his eagerness to brazenly take their money is well known, but the Speaker may have pushed things way too far in 2012. Speaker Boehner seems to have dodged an SEC investigation into his financial involvement with the companies that would benefit from the Keystone XL pipeline, but it appears that lure of Citizens United fueled conservative cash was too much for the Speaker to resist last year.

Rep. Boehner was the House’s top fundraiser last year. This was a matter of political survival. The unpopular within his own party speaker raised more than $22 million, which he used to solidify his position by buying loyalty through donations to House Republican reelection campaigns. 

Similar allegations against Boehner surfaced in June, when an FEC complaint was filed against him for accepting $2.5 million in illegal donations from the Venezuelan government run Chevron. It turns out that Boehner’s illegal activities go way beyond Keystone XL and Chevron. 

Speaker Boehner’s has been getting away with these kinds of illegal activities for decades, but the walls may finally be closing in on one of the worst Speakers in American political history.

A big victory for openly gay former Republican presidential candidate Fred Karger, who has been pushing for this for several months: the Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board voted unanimously this week to investigate the National Organization for Marriage, or NOM, whom Karger accuses of flaunting state law by refusing to disclose its donors during the fight to unseat several Iowa Supreme Court justices who voted in favor of marriage equality.

From the Des Moines Register:

Karger said the D.C.-based group spent $635,000 in 2010 and about $100,000 in 2012 to try to oust four of the justices who were part of a unanimous 2009 decision that allowed same-sex marriage in Iowa.

“We caught them,” Karger told reporters after today’s meeting. “I’m so grateful to the ethics commission.”

Karger, who is openly gay, said it’s important to send a message to the National Organization for Marriage to follow the law because it will likely be a player in Iowa again, seeking to oust Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, a champion of same-sex marriage rights, and the other three justices who authored the marriage ruling four years ago.

According to the Register, Karger supplied an email from September 2012 in which NOM solicited cash donations to oust the high court justices.  NOM has said that donors’ names do not have to be disclosed if donations were solicited via phone or email.  Megan Tooker, the executive director of the state ethics board, said that NOM’s claim was “absolutely wrong.”

“To be clear, we haven’t found that NOM did anything wrong,” Tooker told the Register. “All we did today is find that it warranted further investigation, so the board will be able to use its subpoena power and get enough information to decide whether or not donors should have been disclosed.”

In 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court voted unanimously to establish marriage equality in the state through a case known as Varnum v. Brien, making Iowa the first non-coastal state to allow same-sex couples to wed.  In 2010, anti-marriage equality advocates, supported by NOM, successfully recalled three of the judges from the Varnum majority during their retention elections.  In 2012, another of the judges, David Wiggins, won his retention vote.

Despite continuous pressure from anti-LGBT forces, Democrats in the state, led in large part by Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, have held fast in support of marriage equality in Iowa.