Are Foreigners Buying the Election?

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allowed unlimited amounts of money to be injected into American elections. The contributions of Sheldon Adelson and his family are now raising very troubling questions about the wisdom of that decision.

Adelson gave $5 million to Gingrich's Super PAC, Winning Our Future, allowing Gingrich to pull an upset in the South Carolina primary by hitting Mitt Romney with a barrage of negative TV ads filled with every dirty trick in the book. Later Adelson's wife, Miriam, gave another $5 million. After Adelson bought the desired result in South Carolina, Romney's Wall-Street-financed Super PACs returned fire and destroyed Gingrich in Florida, outgunning his TV ads in some markets by as much as 40 to 1.

Adelson is a billionaire who made his money in Las Vegas casinos. It is somehow fitting that Gingrich, the man with the most questionable morals in the Republican party, is bankrolled by a man whose billions are just as morally questionable.

Now it turns out that of the $2 million Winning Our Future received in 2011, half came from Miriam Adelson's daughters and son-in-law, Sivan Ochshorn, Yasmin Lukatz and Oren Lukatz. The daughters are from Miriam's first marriage to a Tel Aviv physician.

Citizens United allowed American citizens and corporations to donate unlimited amounts of money. It's still illegal for foreigners and foreign corporations to give money to American elections.

But reading about Miriam Adelson's daughters makes me wonder if they're real Americans. By real I don't mean that they live in a small town, like NASCAR, and drive a pickup truck. No, I mean real Americans in the sense that they were born and raised in the USA and owe their allegiance to the United States Constitution. According to the Post article:

Little is known about Lukatz, who began making contributions to Republicans in 2007 and is listed in federal reports by campaigns as a homemaker or an executive at the Venetian. According to Haaretz.com, Yasmin Lukatz returned to Israel “to do for military service as an officer in the Israeli Air Force. Afterward she attended Tel Aviv University, studying law and business administration. 

Yasmin’s husband, Oren Lukatz, did not make any campaign contributions to federal candidates or committees until late 2010, records show. But since then, he has made nearly $400,000 in donations, including the recent PAC gift. 

His Twitter bio says that he was “born and raised in Israel, educated in Europe and in the United States.”

Oren also served as an officer in the Israeli military. Given their parentage and history, I wonder whether these people have American, Israeli, or dual American-Israeli citizenship. If it's the first, everything's fine. If the second, they're clearly violating the law. But if it's the last, are they real Americans?

Many people have dual citizenship, as it may be thrust upon them as children automatically by birth or by marriage. But by definition, anyone who has citizenship in more than one country has divided loyalties, and cannot be considered a real American.

When you're naturalized as an American you must take the following oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

So, are Ochshorn and the Lukatzes Americans by convenience only? Are their loyalties really to Israel, and not the United States? If so, their donations to Gingrich's Super PAC would be legal by only the thinnest of technicalities, by the legal fiction that they are Americans.

If you're going to vote or get involved with American politics your allegiance to the United States should be explicitly stated, and you should take an oath to renounce your citizenship in any other country.

I'm not just picking on Israel. The same should apply to people with dual American-Mexican, American-Canadian, American-Australian or American-British citizenship. You can't be half American.

And this exposes the real problem with Citizens United. The most obvious reason is that corporations cannot be citizens. They cannot take oaths. They cannot vote. They cannot be held responsible for their actions. They cannot hold office. They cannot be imprisoned. They cannot serve in the military. They can be bought from or sold to foreigners in a flash. And often we can't even find out who really owns or controls them.

One of the shell companies that contributed to Romney's Super PAC existed for only four months, but that was long enough to donate a million bucks. It appears this company was set up by a Romney crony at Bain (its address was listed in the same building as Bain).

Given how simple it is to form shell companies and the lax requirements for certain Super PAC disclosures, there's no way to be sure that foreign companies and governments aren't buying American elections. If we can't find out who's really donating to a Super PAC, it's impossible to eliminate the appearance of corruption, and therefore impossible to eliminate the existence of corruption.