Posted May 24, 2010 by David G. Vance

Talk about “Hypocrisy”!!: CCP's Secret Funding Unrefuted by Poorly Researched Diatribe

The Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) is clearly quite sensitive about anyone pointing out that they reveal nothing whatsoever about their sources of funding.  Nonetheless they cannot deny the facts, try as they may to obscure them.  While throwing up a lot of smoke and in essence shouting "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", they got their facts wrong in attacking the Campaign Legal Center for pointing out the fact that CCP is anonymously funded.

In our twelve page memo outlining campaign finance litigation from Maine to California, CCP was mentioned only briefly as a well funded organization that revealed nothing about its funding and that was involved in a number of suits challenging existing campaign finance laws.  But as the screed issued in response to our background memo clearly shows, CCP does not have any plausible denial or substantive response.  They did not refute any of the facts presented.  Yes, CCP does in fact file 990s as required by law, but it appears only the IRS will ever know where their funding comes from.   By contrast, the Campaign Legal Center has always listed our funders on our website.  It is hypocritical to say the least for CCP, which keeps their donors secret, to complain about the identity of the Legal Center's donors disclosed on our website.  We remain grateful for the generous support of the foundations that make our work possible.

In their rush to attack the Campaign Legal Center for pointing out that they refuse to reveal their funding sources, CCP also managed to read the Legal Center’s form 990 spectacularly wrong - by a factor of nearly 10.  Had they read the correct lines in our publicly available tax forms, they would have found we spent about $90,000 total over four years rather than "$847,149 from 2005-2008 to lobby Congress and administration officials" as they stated. The correct total amounts to an average of $22,930.50 a year to fight the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by lobbyists, earmarkers, and others seeking to preserve and profit from the corruption of money in politics in modern Washington.

But at the end of the day, if CCP is going to remain so thin-skinned about anyone pointing out that they are anonymously funded, perhaps they should consider revealing what interests are paying their bills.