Can’t buy me love, no, money can’t buy me love The Beatles Money can’t buy me love
This is actually an extension to the article that I posted yesterday, about how dark money groups had spent large on a marketing firm to find a way to offset the more popular portions of the For The People Act, and didn’t get it’s money worth.
The real nut of the problem is this. The For The People Act would ban so called dark money from political campaigns. For those unfamiliar, dark money is money that doesn’t have to be directly disclosed to the Federal Elections Commission. It is normally funneled into PAC’s and Super PACS, with no disclosure of the origin of those funds.
Thanks to journalist Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, the focus of the study subscribed by the far right dark money groups, there criteria was fairly narrow. They honestly don’t give a shit about most of the provisions in the act, but what they do care about is having the congress outlaw their influence in American elections. And as such, they wanted a messaging strategy to allow them to publicly counter those clauses that outlawed dark money.
And they didn’t get it. The company they hired turned themselves inside out trying to find a palatable countering message to the wicked evils of dark money. And they couldn’t find it. Every damn time that they presented the most popular aspects of the For The People Act, especially the ones involving getting dark money out of politics? Even conservatives loved it!
This wasn’t what those rich, arrogant Republican shitpokes wanted to hear, but at least they bowed to the reality of it. If national polling couldn’t be turned against the For The People Act couldn’t be obtained, then they would have to revert to action inside the beltway, read congress, to stop the act. And being rich, arrogant Republicans shitpokes, they pulled a typical dick move that will only make things worse.
As far as any critical legislation passing the Senate, circumstances have made Blue Dog Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia the critical vote. And Manchin has been playing his newfound importance to the bone. Earlier today, there was a piddly ass protest in West Virginia, with Manchin constituents protesting for Manchin to vote against the For The People Act in the Senate. There’s just one small problem. They weren’t constituents. They weren’t Manchin constituents. The vast majority were paid shills bussed across the border by GOP dark money interests to hold the protest to put pressure on Manchin.
Look, Joe Manchin has a prickly ego. One of the reasons that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has to treat Manchin with such kid gloves is that he is very resistant to having pressure put on him from his own caucus. And if Manchin is resistant to pressure being put to him from the left, nothing is more guaranteed to piss him off that faux pressure from the left being applied to him by far right dark money groups.
Manchin has already been waffling on the issue of filibuster reform for the passage of critical voting and civil rights issues. And nothing is going to make him more likely to turn a sympathetic ear to the party than the Republicans trying to put pressure on him under false pretenses. Don’t touch that dial.
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Honestly, Murf, the smart play for these “dark money overlords” has long been to invest in the Dems. The problem is that they are distrusted by even some of the Blue Dogs and are out of step on how to find a way in. Sinema is a possibility for them but they’ll need more than her to make it work.
More to the point, the Dems have proved they don’t need their money along with what comes with it. The Dems are not in the market for what they offer.