After charges of favoring NRA, House Dems agree to exempt others from political ad disclosure

More groups exempt from ad rules under House deal

WASHINGTON — House Democrats agreed to exempt an unspecified number of large, well-known interest groups from proposed new disclosure requirements on political advertising on Thursday, seeking to quell charges they were giving special treatment to the powerful National Rifle Association.

The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said that under the last-minute change, “well-established organizations on the right and left” engaging in campaign activity, the NRA among them, would not be required to identify their top donors.

Top Democrats announced plans early in the day for the legislation to come to a vote on Friday, but later abandoned that timetable after the leadership met separately with members of the Congressional Black Caucus and moderates. Officials said the first group was unhappy with an exemption given the NRA, and the second worried about opposition by business groups likely to play a role in the fall campaign.

Under the bill, labor unions, corporations and nonprofit organizations that air political ads or conduct campaign activity would have to disclose their top five donors.

The bill also requires any individual or group paying for independent campaign activities to report any expenditure of at least $10,000 made more than 20 days before an election. Expenditures greater than $1,000 would have to be disclosed within 24 hours in the final 20 days of a campaign.

Van Hollen did not identify any of the groups that would be affected by the decision to exempt groups with 500,000 members or more from the key disclosure requirements.

The Sierra Club, an environmental group, said it was one, but a spokesman, David Willett, said the organization remains opposed to the bill because “we still feel a two-tiered system is unfair and undemocratic.” He said smaller grass-roots organizations would be disadvantaged because they lack the resources to cope with “the additional disclosure burdens.”

Additionally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican ally that represents businesses and plays a robust role in political campaigns, is strongly opposed to the legislation.

“It is unconstitutional, since it picks winners with respect to speech,” said Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government relations. He said the measure contains a loophole for unions, and he criticized it as a politically motivated attempt to shut down corporations’ ability to engage in political activity.

Josten noted that Van Hollen doubles as chairman of the Democratic campaign committee, and said the chief Senate sponsor, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, recently played a similar role on the other side of the Capitol.

The daylong maneuvering marked the latest shift in fortune for legislation launched after the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions may spent their own funds on campaign activity.

An initial effort to bring the bill to a vote in the House faltered last month when the NRA came out in opposition, claiming it was a threat to its freedom of speech.

While the gun owners’ organization frequently clashes with the Democratic leadership, it has dozens of allies among the party’s rank and file in the House, and congressional aides said the measure would have been doomed if the group lobbied against it.

Over the weekend, House Democrats agreed to an exemption from the disclosure requirements for the NRA and any other organization that has been in existence for a decade, has at least 1 million dues-paying members and does not use corporate or labor money to finance their campaign-related expenditures.

That, in turn, triggered a counterattack from the Alliance For Justice and other Democratic-aligned organizations.

Several Democratic aides said the exemption was written with the NRA in mind, but Van Hollen said in an interview the original million-membership level was picked to permit other organizations to avoid new disclosure rules.

He said AARP also would have been exempt, but added that other groups that claimed on their website to have more than 1 million members in fact have fewer.