The disreputable practice of forcing voters and taxpayers to pay for political and ideological causes they disagree with is finally under attack.
The most blatant part of this abuse ended in June, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) ended the Obama-era policy that diverted about $3 billion in third-party settlements to left-wing causes. A DOJ statement noted that:
“When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people— not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Unfortunately, in recent years the Department of Justice has sometimes required or encouraged defendants to make these payments to third parties as a condition of settlement. With this directive, we are ending this practice and ensuring that settlement funds are only used to compensate victims, redress harm, and punish and deter unlawful conduct.”
Under the last Administration, the Department repeatedly required settling parties to pay settlement funds to third party community organizations that were not directly involved in the litigation or harmed by the defendant’s conduct. Pursuant to the Attorney General’s memorandum, this practice will immediately stop.”
A Competitive Enterprise Institute study by Hans Bader noted that “By enabling government officials to reward and financially strengthen their political allies, diversions of settlement funds created a political imbalance that undermined democracy. State attorneys general have also diverted government settlement funds to political allies. ‘With control over big money flows,’ [the CATO Institute’s Walter] Olson noted in 2015, ‘smart AGs can populate a political landscape with grateful allies.’ The Obama administration similarly ‘came under justified criticism for using the mortgage settlement to funnel tens of millions of dollars’ to predominantly ‘left-leaning community-organizing groups.’
“As [CEI] noted in 2011, the Obama administration sued many banks for discrimination (including banks accused of “racially disparate impact” for using commonplace, colorblind lending policies), and then diverted settlement funds to left-wing groups allied with it: Fearing bad publicity from being accused of ‘racism’, banks have paid out millions in settlements after being sued by the Justice Department, even though they would probably prevail before most judges if they aggressively fought such charges (although doing so would probably cost them millions in legal fees). A Michigan judge called one proposed settlement ‘extortion.’ These settlements provide cash for ‘politically favored ‘community groups’ allied with the Obama Administration, and the [Wall Street] Journal’s Mary Kissel predicts that ‘many’ of the loans mandated by these settlements ‘will eventually go bad.’”
The forced contributions weren’t restricted to the federal government. A salient example comes from Maine, as reported by Mainewire in 2012. “Efficiency Maine, the quasi-governmental agency that pushes to increase the use of ‘alternative energy,’ has used taxpayer funds to buy advertising on Maine Insights, the ultra-liberal website…that regularly advocates for extreme liberal positions and causes …[the website] also regularly features interviews and profiles of prominent Democrat leaders…[it] does not publish profiles of Republicans, but criticizes them regularly.
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One prominent current arena in which taxpayer dollars are misused for partisan political purposes is in public-financed state universities. A significant number of these institutions have a track record of both advocating for left-wing candidates and causes while harassing and censoring moderate and conservative students and faculty. This becomes particularly acute during presidential election years.
Peter Wood, in a 2012 Chronicle of Higher Education article, reported: “A senior [Ohio State] English professor invited his colleagues to open their classrooms…to organizers in the Obama campaign. They would first encourage students to register to vote and then, if the instructors were willing, encourage students to volunteer for the Obama campaign…My hunch that there is more to this is based on what happened in 2008, when the Obama campaign rather openly pitched the idea that colleges and universities should award academic credit to students who volunteered for the campaign. I blew the whistle on an instance of that at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which abruptly canceled a campaign-for-credit offer by some academics at the college. But it turned out that the same thing was going on at other universities.”
Advocating for a particular leftist cause or candidate is only half the problem. The other part concerns the censorship of centrists and conservative students, who are frequently confined to small “free speech zones” while left-wing ideas are openly advocated within classrooms.
There is movement on this front, as well. Andrew Blake reported in the March 6 Washington Times that “Florida lawmakers have passed a bill that eliminates “free speech zones” at public universities and allows schools to be sued for restricting campus protests, a practice predominately employed against conservative students. The Florida Excellence in Higher Education Act of 2018 passed in the House and Senate by votes of 84-28 and 33-5, respectively, sending it to Governor Rick Scott’s desk where it awaits his approval… Last-minute efforts waged by Democrats in both the House and Senate on Monday failed to strip Mr. Rommel’s language from the bill.”
Not content with inappropriately using taxpayer dollars for partisan politics at home, Fox News reports that “Republican lawmakers in Washington started asking questions about whether U.S. tax dollars also were being used to fund Soros projects in the small, conservative-led country of Macedonia. Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., led a group of House lawmakers in writing to Ambassador Jess Baily — an Obama appointee — demanding answers. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also expressed concerns about USAID money going to Soros’ Open Society Foundations as part of a broader concern that the U.S. Embassy has been taking sides in party politics.”