The Center for Public Integrity

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 This was just one in a series of radical realignments for the city, whose elected government has been replaced by one person with unprecedented power over nearly every aspect of city policy.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.

A mysterious corporate donor to an outside spending group supporting Mitt Romney’s campaign for president isn’t a corporation at all, but a former executive of Romney’s old employer, Bain & Co., and his wife, according to records.

Super PAC “Restore Our Future” reported a $250,000 donation from a firm called Glenbrook LLC on its disclosure report released Jan. 31. On Tuesday, the group amended its filing, dropping Glenbrook and replacing it with the names Jesse and Melinda Rogers.

Both are listed as having made $125,000 contributions. Jesse Rogers works in "investment management" at Altamont Capital Management. Melinda Rogers’ occupation is listed as "homemaker."

Rogers is a former executive of Bain & Co., the management consulting firm that Romney helmed during the early 1990s. Rogers worked for 16 years at Bain where he founded and led the firm’s private equity group until 2000.

Between 2004 and 2011, Rogers and his wife donated $88,000 to Romney's presidential campaigns and state and federal level political action committees, according to records. During the past year, Rogers also gave $28,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and $2,500 to failed GOP presidential candidate former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Rogers also contributed the legal maximum of $2,500 to Romney's presidential campaign last year, as did Melinda and their daughter Jennifer.

Neither Rogers nor a representative of Restore Our Future could immediately be reached for comment.

If this story has a familiar ring to it, that's because it's happened before.

Of all the investments made by the super-wealthy partners at Bain Capital, perhaps none have a greater potential return than the one they have made in Mitt Romney.

Current and former Bain executives and their relatives have given about $4.7 million to organizations dedicated to making Romney the next president of the United States, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

And they haven’t just come around lately.

Some Bain associates have been filling Romney’s campaign coffers since 2004 when the former Massachusetts governor had early aspirations to become president, and long before he officially embarked on a run.

Since then, they have given to political committees in early primary states — some without contribution limits — to both of Romney’s presidential campaigns and to federal “leadership PACs” controlled by the candidate.

Most dramatically, they gave at least $3.1 million in 2011 to “Restore Our Future,” a “super PAC” not controlled by Romney, which has used the contributions to launch ads attacking candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

The state-level contributions have at times gone to local officials, like South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who received $62,500 from Romney-connected state and federal PACs, and who endorsed him in the South Carolina primary.

But a greater percentage of funds raised at the state level went to promoting Romney’s presidential runs, something that has prompted legal challenges by Democratic groups.

The Center examined contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics, CQMoneyline, the Federal Election Commission and state campaign finance regulators. (Contributions made from 2004 to 2007 to the South Carolina PAC were not available.)

Conservative complaints about a liberal bias in the media do not hold up, at least not when it comes to the free-spending groups known as “super PACs.”

News companies and their executives donated more than $350,000 to conservative super PACs in 2011, according to financial disclosure forms filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission.

The donations included $100,000 from St. Paul-based Hubbard Broadcasting to the American Crossroads super PAC, which was created by Bush White House strategist Karl Rove. Hubbard is a family-owned media company with a dozen local TV stations, 21 radio stations — including D.C.’s leading news channel WTOP — and a national cable channel.

The broadcaster did not respond to inquiries about the donation.

This appears to be the first time Executive Chairman Stanley S. Hubbard has made a political donation directly from corporate coffers. But the 77-year-old businessman and his wife Karen have already donated $210,759 to Republican candidates, parties and political action committees this election cycle, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of FEC filings.

Outside groups that funded numerous attack ads in the GOP primaries collected $49.2 million in donations in 2011, with huge contributions coming from billionaires, corporations and labor unions, something that would have been illegal were it not for pivotal court decisions in early 2010.

The top recipient among these so-called “super PACS” was Restore Our Future, which raised $30.2 million to assist the candidacy of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — that’s more than what was raised by the official campaign committees of any of Romney’s GOP opponents.

The Center for Public Integrity reviewed Federal Election Commission documents filed by super PACs that spent money to support or defeat a presidential candidate in one of the primaries. When considering all super PACs in 2011, total contributions were almost $100 million.

Restore Our Future, which has close ties to the Romney camp, has spent at least $17.5 million so far this campaign, nearly $11 million in Florida, where Romney won handily Tuesday night.

The $49 million total does not include the $10 million in donations that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife gave to a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, which were made in January and will be disclosed in a few weeks.