Tag: Mark Begich

The Story: In this busy election season, the campaign for Governor of Alaska deserves some special attention. The hapless incumbent Governor, Bill Walker, who was...

ANCHORAGE (KTUU) — Have super PACs led to political corruption? One side of a legal case set to be argued Thursday in Anchorage says they have, and the complainants — three Alaskans represented by a lawyer from Boston-based nonprofit Equal Citizens — says the state’s campaign finance watchdog should enforce state law to reign in super PACs. The Equal Citizens case is challenging a decision by the Alaska Public Offices Commission to adopt federal law allowing super PACs — called independent expenditure groups in Alaska — to raise and spend unlimited sums on behalf of political candidates. Bill Walker and Democrat Mark Begich. While most have raised little money, Dunleavy for Alaska is backed by a small group of wealthy donors. The founder of Equal Citizens, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, has been fighting the basis for the commission ruling — the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United — for most of the decade. And now there’s the court case in Anchorage. The case could go to the Alaska Supreme Court after Peterson rules. But that wouldn’t be necessary to win the case against the Alaska Public Offices Commission, he said, because it was a lower court interpretation of Citizens United that led to the rejection of donation limits — an interpretation that Harrow said was too broad. They will testify that the founders of the United States were concerned about the corruptive effect of money in elections, Harrow said — and not just bribery, which the Supreme Court agreed should be illegal.