What Is Karl Rove Afraid of?

Last week the Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving a Minnesota law that requires disclosure of corporate spending. The suit was filed by Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, the Taxpayer's League and a travel agency. This is one of the few reasonable decisions made by this court in a very long time.

The law is the same one that revealed Target donated money to a conservative organization called MNForward to support Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota. Several groups protested Target's donation -- which have usually been to worthy non-partisan causes -- because of Emmer's anti-gay stance.

The basis of MCCL's claim is that if people can find out who is anonymously donating money to political causes the privacy of the contributors will be violated and they will be harassed and intimidated. They trot out the protests and threats of boycotts against Target as evidence of this.

MCCL is an anti-abortion group. And anti-abortion groups know a thing or two about privacy violation, harassment and intimidation. Anti-abortion groups stage protests in front of abortion clinics, haranguing and video-taping women who enter the clinics -- even if those women are going there for prenatal checkups for babies they're planning to keep. Anti-abortion groups stand on street corners displaying disgusting giant posters of dead babies, and drive trucks with mobile billboards of the same dead babies haranguing passers-by with loudspeakers (I was exposed to this during the 2008 Republican National Convention). They harass doctors, following them home, staging protests outside their houses, calling them at all hours of the night. They post "wanted" posters of doctors who perform abortions in public places, giving their home and work addresses. Such doctors have been assassinated by nut-jobs afterwards, but that isn't the fault of the person who posted the wanted poster, now is it?

It is particularly galling that organizations that regularly violate the privacy of women in their most vulnerable moments should demand privacy for the fatcats who bankroll their program of intimidation and harassment.

CEOs now regularly make contributions to political campaigns and "non-profit action groups" without announcing it to their shareholders. At a minimum there should be a national law that requires corporations to disclose all corporate and union campaign contributions to all shareholders and union members, who as owners of the corporation or members of the union have the right to know when their company or union is being used to back one political cause or another. Better would be a law that requires immediate disclosure of all such donations to a national database that can be searched by the public. A law that requires approval of such expenditures by shareholders or union members is out of line: that's what elections to the board of directors or union leadership are for.

Unions are already publicly acknowledging their roles -- unions like AFSCME (#1 in independent election expenditures last week), NEA (#5) and SEIU (#4) are spending a lot of money this election cycle. But corporations are hiding behind the Chamber of Commerce (#2) and Karl Rove's shadow Republican National Committe (#3). But there are hundreds of organizations like MNForward in other states that are receiving secret corporate donations. Corporations are in all likelihood vastly outspending unions because they are so much bigger and wealthier. But of course we can't know for sure because they cower behind the curtain of anonymity.

Finally, there's been a stink about foreign donations to the US Chamber of Commerce, which of course is illegal. The right is insisting that there's no proof that the law is being broken. Of course, without any disclosure laws it's hard to come by proof. Which brings up the right's age-old argument, which they usually trot out when arguing that evidence found by illegal searches by cops should be used in trials: if you haven't done anything wrong, why are you afraid to let us search your car?

This is generally not seen to be hypocritical by the right. Why? The guy whose car the cops search illegally is usually some low-life Chicano, black dude or stupid white trash in a broken-down 82 Eldorado, who the cops are convinced is a drug user or dealer, while the contributors to Rove's war-chest and the Tea Party front organizations are guys like the Koch brothers (whose company paid the largest fine ever -- at that time -- for illegally discharging millions of gallons of oil into ponds, streams, lakes and bays) or Don Blankenship (the Massey Energy CEO who bought his own Virginia Supreme Court judge for a paltry $3 million).

If Karl Rove hasn't done anything wrong, why is he afraid to tell us who's giving him all that money?