The Center for Public Integrity

Another $10 million donation is expected to arrive within days from casino owner Sheldon Adelson to the outside group that’s provided life support to Newt Gingrich’s beleaguered presidential campaign, say fundraisers with ties to the multibillionaire.

The $10 million infusion from Adelson would bring total donations from Adelson and family to the pro-Gingrich super PAC “Winning Our Future” to a stunning $21 million, far more than any super PAC donor has given to date.

The funds are expected to arrive in the next week to 10 days and help fuel a multimillion-dollar television advertising blast prior to super Tuesday, March 6, when 10 states conduct GOP primaries.

One fundraiser, who has spoken with Adelson in the last week, told iWatch News that the wealthy supporter of Jewish causes indicated to him that he is still committed to keeping Gingrich in the race.

It is unclear whether the pro-Gingrich PAC’s ads will attack frontrunners former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum or burnish Gingrich’s conservative image and record — or both.

Rick Tyler, a senior advisor to the super PAC, declined to comment about any further donations coming from Adelson. Tyler told iWatch News that he was “optimistic” that the super PAC would be able to run an advertising campaign prior to super Tuesday, but “to be effective, we would need a significant infusion of cash.”

Ron Reese, a spokesman for Adelson declined to comment, but noted that speculation and rumors have been rampant about additional funding. Close associates of Adelson in Las Vegas remain tight lipped about any plans to send millions more to Winning Our Future. Adelson owns the Las Vegas Sands and is worth an estimated $21.5 billion. He is currently in Israel attending his son’s bar mitzvah.

The Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News is offering a variety of ways to follow the money this election cycle, particularly the flood of funds that have come in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizen United decision. 

• Get breaking news from iWatch staff on Twitter at @iWatch and follow politics reporters Michael Beckel at @mjbeckel, Aaron Mehta at @AaronMehta, and engagement editor Cole Goins at @colegoins. 
• Check out our Tumblr blog, maintained with the Center for Responsive Politics, to keep an eye on the flow of money in the 2012 elections. 
• And read substantive investigations into the presidential candidates and the elite donors to “super PACs” backing them at the Consider the Source project. 

With the GOP presidential nomination heading full bore toward the convention and key Democratic operatives scrambling to herd high-dollar donations to their super PACs, the race for outside money is all systems go.

When the city of Pontiac, Mich., ordered the closing of its fire department in December, Councilman Kermit Williams found out in the morning paper. This was just one in a series of radical realignments for the city, whose elected government has been replaced by one person with unprecedented power over nearly every aspect of city policy.

Public Act 4, a law Michigan passed in March 2011, has cut elected officials like Williams out of the process. It allows Gov. Rick Snyder to give emergency managers unilateral powers over the municipalities and school districts they run.

“They couldn’t get elected if they tried,” said Williams.

Appointed managers can nullify labor contracts, sell public utilities and dismiss elected officials. Michigan cities Benton Harbor, Ecorse, Flint, Pontiac, and two school districts are under emergency management. Detroit, the state’s largest city, is under financial review by the state.

Update Feb. 15, 1:02pm: A Michigan judge suspended the state review of Detroit's finances, citing violations by the state-appointed team of the Open Meetings Act for public officials. The state's attorneys are expected to appeal the decision.

Michigan is one of 23 states where the GOP has control of both houses and the governor’s mansion since the 2010 election. With the help of free-market think tanks, the state legislature used its one-party rule to pass a flurry of legislation aimed at the state’s prolonged great recession marked by auto industry flight and compounded by the 2007 housing market crash.

At least four Cabinet members appear ready and willing to answer President Barack Obama’s call to help fill the coffers of Democratic outside spending groups, which have to date been badly outgunned by better-funded Republican organizations.

After previously denouncing the so-called “super PACs” as a "threat to democracy," Obama signed off last week on a move to allow top campaign aides and high-level White House officials to raise money.

Some of those going to bat for the president have long histories of raising money for their own political careers, and even bundling money for Obama’s campaign four years ago.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk have all indicated they would be open to participation in activities designed to help the nascent Democratic super PACs, like “Priorities USA Action,” raise money.

“Arne has spoken at campaign-related events in the past on his personal time,” Education spokesman Justin Hamilton told iWatch News. “While he doesn't yet have any invitations to future events, any that he might attend will be done in strict compliance with the law.”

A similar willingness was also expressed by Interior spokesman Adam Fetcher, whose boss raised more than $13.5 million for his own U.S. Senate campaigns before Obama asked him to become Secretary of the Interior in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

“Any invitation for the Secretary to speak at campaign events will be considered in the same way we evaluate all scheduling requests, which includes making sure that all appearances fully comply with rules governing political activity,” Fetcher told iWatch News.

Anonymous political speech. Foreign money in U.S. elections. The proliferation of super PACs. How grave a threat do any of things pose to American democracy? Not much, according to a panel of conservative attorneys, who gathered Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

The high-profile legal minds on the CPAC panel largely agreed that the changes to the campaign finance landscape are grounds for celebration.

Thanks to the Citizens United decision, we’ve seen “more voices, more competition, and more accountability,” said panelist Benjamin Barr, a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Without SpeechNow.org, the Republican nomination would have been sewed up weeks ago,” added Brad Smith, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who co-founded the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit that promotes First Amendment political rights. “And in 2010, we would have had fewer competitive races.”

In the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money from their treasuries on ads and other activities to influence the election or defeat of federal candidates so long as they are not coordinating with the candidates’ campaigns.

A few months later, in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, used the Supreme Court’s reasoning and decided that limits on individual contributions to groups that make independent expenditures are unconstitutional.

Five Democratic super PACs are reaching out to party mega-donors, in a fledgling effort seeking $1 million to $10 million contributions, now that President Barack Obama has blessed the outside spending group working to get him re-elected.

Discussions among the five super PACs are under way about setting up a joint fundraising committee, said Bill Burton, a former deputy White House press secretary and co-founder of Priorities USA Action, which was launched last spring to help Obama win a second term.

“We’re in serious talks,” Burton told iWatch News, but added that a final decision hasn’t been made about establishing a joint fundraising mechanism. Either way, “there are a lot of people in the progressive donor community who have not yet gotten involved who are likely to be involved.”

Other top Democratic fundraisers say that a joint fundraising entity is likely and stress that the White House’s abrupt shift on super PACs — which came Monday in a conference call to leading donors and fundraisers with campaign manager Jim Messina — could help prod large donors to write seven-figure checks.

Democratic fundraisers are hoping that several major donors such as Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Chicago media executive Fred Eychaner, both of whom have already written large checks to Priorities USA Action, will pony up considerably more to a joint committee.

Katzenberg has donated $2 million to Priorities USA Action, the super PAC that Burton and ex-White House aide Sean Sweeney created, and Eychaner, an old friend of Obama’s, has chipped in $500,000 to the same PAC.