The Senate amendment, which has a recent House counterpart, would give Congress and states the authority to regulate money spent in federal and state political campaigns.

Franken formally signed on to support the Senate amendment last week. It was proposed at the start of November by Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico.

“Minnesotans’ right to fair and transparent elections have been severely compromised since the Supreme Court held that American corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on elections ,” Franken told the Minnesota Independent in an email. “This constitutional amendment would authorize Congress to regulate the raising and spending of money in federal and state campaigns, which is why I strongly support it.”

The move comes as a slew of new Super PACs have raised millions of dollars in anticipation of next year’s presidential and congressional races.

Photo: Opponents of Proposition 8 in California protest. Source: Dannyman, Flickr

The Minnesota for Marriage coalition, a group that is is urging voters to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, has told the media and the Minnesota campaign finance board that if they have to disclose their donors, they will be subject to violence by supporters of marriage equality.

But a string of court cases across the country have shed serious doubt on those claims, with courts finding that conservative leaders were unable to provide credible evidence of threats or violence.

Avoiding disclosure in Minnesota

The Minnesota Family Council and the National Organization for Marriage lobbied the campaign finance board to loosen disclosure on campaign spending by arguing that their donors will be targeted if their names are disclosed.

“To require groups, non profits like the Minnesota Family Council, to disclose their donors and make their donors names public would have a significant chilling effect on free speech. Even in Minnesota already it’s gotten heated in some respects,” Tom Prichard, president of MFC, told the board in June. “The concern is harassment, property damage, a chilling effect. If I know I have to disclose my name, I’m not going to get involved with the Minnesota Family Council.”

Prichard said he had knowledge of violence against donors to the Prop 8 campaign in California.

“They went after their employment, by challenging their employers. There was vandalism on certain organizations. I can think of one individual that his business suffered because he had to disclose,” he said. “I don’t think our organization should have to disclose our donors, period. We just don’t believe we should be forced to.”

Conservative Catholic columnist for the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten, recently echoed the Minnesota Family Council’s claims.

“A block thrown through a home window. Cars vandalized. Hate-filled anonymous phone calls at home and work. Swastikas scrawled on houses of worship. Physical assaults. Dismissal from employment because of political views,” wrote Kersten. “[T]his is the sort of intimidation that Americans who support marriage as the union of a man and woman can face today. Persecution of opponents is becoming a tool of the trade for some gay-marriage activists, who—ironically—seem to view themselves as beacons of tolerance.”

She added, “Now, the groundwork for such intimidation is being laid in Minnesota.”

The groundwork is actually being laid for a lawsuit by NOM and the Minnesota for Marriage coalition against the state of Minnesota. When the campaign finance board rejected Minnesota for Marriage’s arguments that full disclosure of donors would put them at risk, the coalition announced that it would not follow the board’s disclosure rules.

But history shows that launching a lawsuit in Minnesota based on the possibility of violence against marriage amendment supporters would be an uphill battle.

Protect Marriage Washington falsified or exaggerated about threats

NOM’s claims were tested this fall in Washington state when Protect Marriage Washington (PMW), a group affiliated with NOM, lost its case in court. PMW wanted to overturn that state’s domestic partner laws through an initiative called R-71. The group was successful in gathering enough signatures to put the repeal on the ballot, but it did not want those signatures to be public arguing that “militant homosexual activist groups” would target them.

After a local paper did a feature with state legislator Elizabeth Scott, a feature that included her contact information and talked about her support for repealing the domestic partner law, she said she received death threats.

“Extremists issued multiple death threats to me and my children due to my being publicly questioned about my personal beliefs,” Scott told the Faith and Freedom Network. “I am greatly concerned for both the safety and the freedom of speech of those who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

The court found that Scott’s story did not stand up to scrutiny.

“However, other than speculation, Scott does not attribute to R-71 this death threat or any other incident that she claimed could be considered harassment,” the court wrote.

After the court decision, she wrote, “I guess when the First Amendment is eliminated, we drop back to the Second.”

Gary Randall, who runs the Faith and Freedom Network that spearheaded the effort to repeal the domestic partner law, also had his own complaints about death threats, which he later retracted.

“Randall testified that he received death threats via a blog site; however, when asked to demonstrate where in the copy of the blog posting he believed a threat of his or another’s life was made he could not do so without relying on assumptions,” the court wrote, adding that Randall “finally conceding that no actual death threat was made on the website”

The court noted that Randall was referring to the website, PinkPistols.org, which is a group for LGBT people who hold conceal and carry licenses.

“This website appears to advocate for homosexuals to be armed if desired to use only in self defense,” the court said in a footnote. “[Randall] has not supplied competent evidence to the contrary.”

As a matter of fact, the website no longer exists and according to the Wayback Machine hasn’t been updated since 2006, well before Washington’s enacting of the domestic partnership law.

Other witnesses provided testimony in the Washington case that the court found lacking. One witness testified that he was harassed when two women came up to him while he was gathering signatures for R-71 and one said “we have feelings too.” Another said he found three Post-It notes on his car with vulgar language. Still another felt harassed when a passing motorist made offensive gestures at him.

In the court’s conclusion, Judge Benjamin Settle wrote:

Applied here, the Court finds that Doe has only supplied evidence that hurts rather than helps its case. Doe has supplied minimal testimony from a few witnesses who, in their respective deposition testimony, stated either that police efforts to mitigate reported incidents was sufficient or unnecessary. Doe has supplied no evidence that police were or are now unable or unwilling to mitigate any claimed harassment or are now unable or unwilling to control the same, should disclosure be made.

The court did say that they’d demonstrated that there was some hostility to a same-sex marriage ban in the state, but not that it could lead to threats or violence, and that there had been no evidence that advocates had been harassed in the two years since the ballot question was introduced to Washington state voters.

California and Prop 8

In October, NOM and ProtectMarriage.com lost their bid to keep donors to the Proposition 8 campaign anonymous. The groups worked to pass Proposition 8, which repealed the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2008. NOM had argued that disclosing its donors would chill free speech and that widespread violence against Prop 8 supporters would put its donors at risk.

But the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Morrison England, a Bush appointee, found the evidence a bit thin.

[T]he vast majority of the incidents cited by Plaintiffs are arguably, as characterized by defendants, typical of any controversial campaign. For example, picketing, protesting, boycotting, distributing flyers, destroying yard signs and voicing dissent do not necessarily rise to the level of “harassment” or “reprisals,” especially in comparison to acts directed at groups in the past.

Moreover, a good portion of these actions are themselves forms of speech protected by the United States Constitution.

The court also rejected the idea that any activity directed at entities that backed Prop 8, such as the Mormon church, necessarily meant it was due to Prop 8.

“Plaintiffs have produced insufficient evidence that the more incendiary events on which they rely were connected to Proposition 8 or to gay marriage at all,” the judge wrote. “Rather, a number of these incidents were directed at the Mormon church, which, though a backer of California’s proposition, may also have been a target for any of a number of other reasons.”

And while NOM and other anti-gay marriage amendment backers said that the violence against them was widespread, the judge disagreed.

Accordingly, while Plaintiffs can point to a relatively few unsavory acts committed by extremists or criminals, these acts are so small in number, and in some instances their connection to plaintiffs’ supporters so attenuated, that they do not show a reasonable probability plaintiffs’ contributors will suffer the same fate. Given the grand scale of plaintiffs’ campaign and the massive (and national) support they garnered for their cause, plaintiffs’ limited evidence is simply insufficient to support a finding that disclosure of contributors’ names will lead to threats, harassment or reprisals.

The future in Minnesota
Government transparency advocates have been watching NOM’s actions in Minnesota very carefully. In addition to California, Washington, and Minnesota, NOM has also unsuccessfully challenged disclosure laws in Iowa, Maine, New York and Rhode Island.

“Proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage certainly are engaged in a heated debate,” wrote Common Cause Minnesota’s Mike Dean and Mark Ladov of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York Universtiy School of Law in a column for the Duluth News Tribune. “But it is insulting to claim transparency would leave major campaign donors vulnerable to the violent intimidation tactics civil-rights activists faced in the era of Bull Connor.”

Dean and Ladov pointed back to the outcry when Target Corporation gave money to a group supporting an anti-gay marriage candidate.

“[R]emember how these same groups howled about so-called ‘harassment’ when gay-rights advocates called for a boycott of Target over contributions supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. But that isn’t harassment. It’s a boycott — one of the time-honored ways in which ordinary people, without access to wealthy corporate treasuries, can organize for change and make sure their voices are heard in the political process.”

Source: Gfpeck, Flickr

A bill recently introduced by congressmen from Pennsylvania and Illinois could have a far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 union workers on Aug. 1.

Members of Minnesota and North Dakota’s congressional delegations have repeatedly warned that the company’s lockout could help undermine the congressional consensus around protections for the sugar industry.

“There are members of Congress whose natural constituency is agriculture; some who see themselves as champions of business, and others who fight for workers,” Sen. Al Franken wrote in late August. “Knowing that the program has worked so well for so many years for the hardworking growers who produce such a large percentage of our nation’s sugar beets and for the dedicated workers and skilled management, who turn those beets into the highest quality sugar in the world, has played no small role in creating this consensus.”

Big Sugar has maintained support from Congress by continuously lining the campaign coffers of both Republicans and Democrats, although there is also a tangible discontent among industries that use sugar products, who find domestic prices to be too high. Those upset with American Crystal Sugar’s labor practices could join with these discontented industries to repeal the protections.

Enter Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Penn., and Danny Davis, D-Ill., who teamed up to introduce a bill that would protect the other sweet-tooth industries: candy companies that lie within their districts.

“We’ve heard from his constituents that the price of sugar is affecting business, it’s affecting jobs,” says Pitts spokesperson Andrew Wimer, who adds that Davis, the Chicago Democrat co-sponsoring the legislation, cites examples of factories that have shut their doors because of the high price of sugar.

The Free Market Sugar Act would repeal the sugar loan program and amend the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act (known as the Farm Bill), perhaps the most important piece of legislation impacting U.S. sugar interests. Written every five years, the Farm Bill helps sugar growers with farm subsidies (which some dismiss as “corporate welfare”) and a series of quotas that tightly control the supply of imported sugar, a benefit to the handful of American sugar producers who pocket around $1 billion in excess profits a year, and a detriment to candy companies that buy U.S. sugar at prices two to three times higher than the global market rate.

Federal legislation also calls for the sugar program to be operated on a no-cost basis, a provision some sugar insiders project will remain for years to come.

“In general, [the Free Market Sugar Act] seeks to reform the sugar program so that the government is not controlling how much sugar is produced and imported,” says Wimer. ”It loosens the controls on production and importation, so that the U.S. price for sugar can be more closely aligned with the world price.”

In addition to amending the sugar price support program, the bill pushes for more transparency in the sugar industry, and an overhaul of how it does business. If enacted, the bill would replace quota import provisions with a tariff rate quota. “Right now the USDA is tightly controlling how much raw cane sugar comes into the U.S.,” says Wimer. “Instead of blanket eliminating quotas, we are modifying it so it’s not as unfair to the current market.”

Pitts and Davis have also recently announced the formation of the Congressional Sugar Reform Caucus, a bipartisan group that also includes Sens. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Jean Shaheen, D-N.H.

The Minnesota Independent’s Jon Collins contributed to this report.

A video clip featuring some of Beck’s words was uploaded Monday by the Santorum campaign:

The campaign also offered the following transcript of Beck:

I don’t endorse candidates, I don’t get involved in politics, I don’t make donations to any politician. Rick Santorum is a friend of mine, but I choose my friends carefully and I would never tell you someone was a friend of mine if I didn’t have great respect for them. I will tell you this. People ask me all the time, ‘who is out there?’ I tell them the same thing, I don’t trust any of them, but if I had to trust the reins of power with one person that is currently in this field and, because I think the next president has got to be Abraham Lincoln, he has got to be somebody who knows exactly who he is, knows exactly where he stands and is willing to, in the end, turn those reins of power back over. The temptation and the pressure is going to be absolutely enormous. If there is one guy out there that is the next George Washington, the only guy that I could think of is Rick Santorum. I would ask that you would take a look at him.

To place the Santorum-promoted piece in context, visit The Right Scoop blog, where a nearly 17 minute clip has been posted of the same exchange.

“We think all of the candidates suck,” Beck said after Santorum joined him by phone.

Beck added that there are only two candidates, in his opinion, that don’t have “scary policies.” Those two being Santorum and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

“So, what do we need to do to get you and Michele Bachmann to be the president? Vice-president? I don’t care — you can switch chairs whenever you want. You can work it out. What do we do?” asked Beck.

Santorum’s response was his website address and a request for campaign donations.

The ad features a number of farmers, one of whom says the EPA wants to regulate methane coming from cattle.

“For thousands of years, 60 million buffalo roamed these prairies in Iowa,” one farmer says. “Who regulated them?”

EPA regional spokesman David Bryan told our sister site, The Iowa Independent Monday that “there’s no truth to that at all.”

“There are a number of regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and different types of ambient air quality standards, but trying to say we’re putting a tax on emissions from cows is just a little ridiculous,” Bryan said.

Another claim in the ad, that the EPA wants to regulate dust on farms, is also a myth. Bryan said every five years the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to evaluate air standards, but EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson made it clear in a note to Congress that there is no intention to regulate dust on farms.

“You can’t plow a field without dust, you can’t drive down a gravel road without dust,” a farmer says in Cain’s ad. “My dog makes dust.”

The EPA focuses on regulating coarse particulates, Bryan said, such as dust from construction, demolition and industrial sites.

“We center our monitoring of air mostly on urban areas where it affects the most people,” he said. “We’re going to leave the dust standards where they are.”

Dean Kleckner, former head of the Iowa Farm Bureau and the American Farm Bureau, endorses Cain in the ad, saying, “He reminds me of Ronald Reagan, and I knew Ronald Reagan.”

“Over-regulation is killing the American farmer,” Kleckner says. “I think Herman Cain is the answer. Running a farm is a business and Herman Cain is a proven CEO.”

Bryan said the EPA has worked to counter the false claims that the EPA wants to regulate methane and dust, but not everyone is getting the message.

“What further method do we have other than you folks to say we don’t intend on doing this?” Bryan said.

Source: Sen. Lee Bright's Facebook page.

Rep. Michele Bachmann announced Tuesday that her presidential campaign chairman in South Carolina, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, is state Sen. Lee Bright, who has made comments about secession and introduced a bill to study whether the state should start printing its own currency.

“Michele Bachmann is the candidate who doesn’t just give lip service to conservative principles but actively lives them out every day,” Bright said in a statement. “She is the conservative who has been consistent in her record and her rhetoric.”

Bright introduced his bill to study the creation of a new South Carolina currency earlier this session. The resolution argues that the right to print currency can flow from the state’s constitutional police powers.

“[M]any widely recognized experts predict the inevitable destruction of the Federal Reserve System’s currency through hyperinflation in the foreseeable future,” the resolution reads. ”[I]n the event of hyperinflation, depression, or other economic calamity related to the breakdown of the Federal Reserve System, for which the state is not prepared, the state’s governmental finances and private economy will be thrown into chaos, with gravely detrimental effects upon the lives, health, and property of South Carolina’s citizens, and with consequences fatal to the preservation of good order throughout the state.”

If passed, the legislation would appoint a subcommittee to come up with a plan for an alternative currency.

“South Carolina can avoid or at least mitigate many of the economic, social, and political shocks to be expected to arise from hyperinflation, depression, or other economic calamity related to the breakdown of the Federal Reserve System only through the timely adoption of an alternative sound currency that the state’s government and citizens may employ without delay in the event of the destruction of the Federal Reserve System’s currency,” according to the resolution.

It was last year that Bright played a major role in helping to pass a non-binding, but contentious, affirmation of South Carolina’s sovereignty under the U.S. Constitution.

“If at first you don’t secede, try again,” Bright joked to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal after the sovereignty bill’s passage. ”I think all of our rights are under assault, but assault on the 9th and 10th amendments is the most egregious.”

With just 10 days to go before the deadline for the congressional “super committee” to make a deal, members remain hung up on tax and entitlement reform even as automatic across-the-board cuts loom.

At the moment, Republicans and Democrats are divided by their respective plans, with each offering a mixture of spending cuts and tax revenue increases. Republicans have offered a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction package with roughly $750 billion in spending cuts over the next decade and a $300 billion tax proposal mostly comprised of deduction eliminations. Democrats have offered to trim $2 trillion, with their proposal calling for an almost equal mix of spending cuts and tax increases. The committee was assigned to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit savings.

Attention now has turned to other courses of action available to the committee to try and avoid the “trigger mechanism,” a fail-safe that would result in deep military and across-the-board cuts if the deal isn’t made.

Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the panel’s Republican co-chair, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that super committee may punt some of the decisions about deficit reduction to individual committees — “a two-step process,” as he described it. In that scenario, the super committee would set the amount of increased tax revenue to be met, and individual congressional committees would then draft legislation to meet it.

The chairmen of the relevant committees—the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee—have said that they would accept that arrangement, according to reporting this morning from the New York Times.

But even if no deal is agreed to and the “trigger” is pulled, there’s still reason to believe the heavy cuts it calls for will be avoided.

The trigger’s cuts do not go into effect until January, 2013, so Congress would have a year to legislate their reversal. That would likely “launch a heavy lobbying effort on K Street, where defense firms in particular would be eager to prevent automatic cuts,” according to The Hill. Senator Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) addressed the possibility on “Fox News Sunday,” saying, “In the very, very unfortunate event that we don’t [make a deal] I think it’s very likely that Congress would reconsider the configuration.”

President Obama has told the committee that it needs to “bite the bullet,” and has floated the possibility that he may block any attempt to create a workaround from next week’s Thanksgiving deadline.

The “No Surprises” campaign promises that Bachmann won’t have any surprises in her policy positions, unlike her competitors for the Republican presidential nomination. The campaign is part of Bachmann’s attempt to position herself as the most ideological conservative in the race.

“Elections should be simple—we shouldn’t have to settle for a candidate or compromise on issues,” said Bachmann’s campaign manager Keith Nahigian in an email to supporters on Sunday. “With Michele Bachmann—we don’t have to. With Michele Bachmann, there are no surprises. This morning our campaign launched a new website, No Surprises 2012, which highlights Michele’s opponents double-talk and inconsistent stances on the issues that matter most to you and me.”

The campaign has launched a new website to go along with the video. The website seems to be targeting Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.

In his email, Nahigian added, “There is no question that this election will decide the future of our great nation. We cannot afford a candidate who will flip-flop on the issues and ‘say one thing but do another.’ As the proven Tea Party leader against the Obama agenda, Michele is the true consistent conservative in this race, and the only one who will protect our constitutional conservative principles.”

Gov. Scott Walker; Source: Gateway Technical College, Flickr

Starting Tuesday, Wisconsin Democrats and labor groups will start an effort to gather more than 550,000 signatures by mid-January on a petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker.

Walker earned the ire of unions when he pushed a law eliminating collective bargaining rights for public workers earlier this year. Democrats are also planning to recall Republican state legislators, although they haven’t announced their targets, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The fight is increasingly contentious, with some Democrats fearing that Republicans might gather signatures on Walker petitions only to destroy them, and the Republican Party setting up an online “integrity center,” according to the Journal-Sentinel.

“The site allows Walker backers to submit photos, videos and complaints to the Republican Party. The purpose of the site is to protect voters who “suspect foul play by Wisconsin Democrats or big government union bosses,” said a statement from Stephan Thompson, the party’s executive director.”

The recent labor union defeat of a similar anti-collective bargaining law in Ohio energized labor forces, Bloomberg reports. A number of large rallies are planned across the state in coming weeks.

Recent polls have shown the state split on the recall effort. Walker has been rocked by a corruption investigation involving top staff members.

No Democrat candidates have yet entered the race, although the Daily Mail reports that a number of politicians are jockeying for the slot behind the scenes—possible candidates include former Sen. David Obey and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.

Source: A still of Sen. Amy Klobuchar from the ad.

In ads that will run on cable throughout the week, digital rights activist groups criticize Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar for support of the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, which they say would throttle internet freedom to protect profits for entertainment companies.

On its website, Demand Progress, a progressive group, says they have one goal for the ad: “We need to embarrass a key lawmaker to set an example for others, and make it clear that it’s not okay to shill for the entertainment industry.”

The ad targets the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, which would “makes unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty of up to 5 years in prison,” according to Open Congress.

The ad is named “Bieber is Right” in reference to teen pop star Justin Bieber’s comments criticizing Klobuchar for the bill. It asks: “Why is Sen. Klobuchar’s top legislative priority an internet censorship bill that would risk putting ordinary internet users and even Justin Bieber behind bars?”

It’s also paid for by Fight for the Future, a technology rights group, and contains much footage from Occupy Wall Street rallies in Minnesota. Many other groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, have opposed the legislation.

The act is supported by a host of entertainment and media companies, many of which gave generously to Democratic candidates, according to Open Congress.