Controversy has engulfed #Wyoming’s state legislature after a conservative activist was photographed👉 handing checks to Republican lawmakers on the state house floor,
in an incident that has highlighted intra-conservative divisions and the role of money in the Cowboy state’s politics.
The political storm started on 9 February, when Karlee Provenza, a Democratic lawmaker,
took a photo showing Rebecca #Bextel, a conservative activist and committeewoman for the Teton county Republican party,
handing a check to Darin #McCann,
a Republican representative, on the legislative floor.
Marlene #Brady, another Republican representative, stands in the photo’s background, a similar piece of paper pinched between her fingers.
“You have a person from the richest county in the country coming down to Cheyenne to hand out checks on the house floor,” Provenza said. “I have never seen something so egregious.”
#paytoplay #MoneyIsNotSpeech
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/wyoming-republican-lawmakers-checks-house-floor?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Senior Democrats have called for an investigation into a share-buying spree by two fossil fuel billionaires with close ties to the Trump administration,
after a Guardian investigation raisedquestions about potential wrongdoing.
Robert Pender and Michael Sabel,
the founders and co-chairs of Venture Global, a liquefied natural gas (LNG) company headquartered in Virginia,
bought more than a million shares worth almost $12m each in March.
The trades took place just days after a meeting with senior White House officials, who then issued a key regulatory permit that helped expand the company’s business in Europe.
Ron Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate finance committee and a member of the energy and natural resources committee,
said the transactions should be investigated, drawing parallels with previous Trump administration controversies.
“Corrupt pay-to-play schemes are at the heart of everything the Trump administration does,” Wyden said.
“There is no doubt in my mind that these new LNG transactions should be investigated so the American people know the full extent of Trump’s corruption and abuse of office.”
Wyden said investigators uncovered in 2020 that Trump’s energy secretary had inappropriately pressured a Ukrainian state-owned natural gas company
to benefit campaign donors, and added that neither Trump nor his energy team faced accountability for those abuses.
Senator Chris Van Hollen echoed those concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
“The Trump administration’s blatant use of cronyism and pay-to-play politics knows no limit.
It’s clear that they’re padding the pockets of billionaires at the expense of working Americans,”
said Van Hollen, senator for Maryland, member of the Senate banking committee and ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Securities and Exchange Commission and justice department.
“These investments absolutely merit further investigation.”
Van Hollen and Wyden’s intervention comes days after
Jeff Merkley, senior Democratic member of the Senate appropriations and budget committees, told the Guardian that
the stock trades should be investigated for potential wrongdoing.
“Dirty oil-and-gas bucks are fueling the Trump administration, which should outrage all of us.
This latest reporting portrays a pattern of pay-to-play donations and favorable actions by the administration,” Merkley said.
“The timing of the stock trades certainly merits investigation for potential conflicts of interest and insider trading.”
All parties involved have denied wrongdoing.
Sabel was among about 20 people who attended an event in April 2024 at Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago,
when the US president reportedly requested $1bn in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry in return for favorable legislation.
Venture Global was among the “top donors” to Trump’s inauguration, donating $1m, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Individuals connected to Venture Global spent $860,000 on lobbying on Capitol Hill in 2024,
and another $810,000 so far this year, according to OpenSecrets, a non-profit campaign finance watchdog.
This is more than 12-fold the previous high of $70,000 in 2019.
“This is why we need to get money out of politics,” said Ro Khanna,
Democratic representative for California and member of the House oversight and accountability committee,
who is leading efforts with the representative Summer Lee to ban Super Pacs.
#MoneyIsNotSpeech #CorporationsAreNotPeople
#EndCitizensUnited
Common sense and history show that
donors will often use political parties as conduits
to evade limits on individual contributions,
increasing the risk of quid pro quo corruption.
The US supreme court is set on Tuesday to hear arguments in a Republican-led challenge on free speech grounds to federal limits on spending by political parties in coordination with electoral candidates in a case involving JD Vance. Donald Trump’s administration has thrown its support behind the challenge, brought by plaintiffs including two Republican committees and the vice-president, who was running for the US Senate in Ohio when the case began. The case centers on whether federal limits on coordinated campaign spending violate the constitution’s first amendment protection against government abridgment of freedom of speech. The challengers have appealed a lower court’s ruling that upheld restrictions on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates they support, formally known as "coordinated party expenditure limits". Because the Federal Election Commission under Trump has declined to defend the provision of federal law at issue, the court appointed lawyer Roman Martinez to do so. The justices also permitted three Democratic groups to intervene to defend the lower court’s decision. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/09/supreme-court-jd-vance-campaign-spending-limits?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Attached: 1 image #PearlsBeforeSwine put it quite clearly. #MoneyIsNotSpeech #CorporationsAreNotPeople
📢 ANNOUNCEMENT:
I will instamute any account that blames anyone but rich wytepipo for this #Fascist #Election travesty
Talk all day abt #Racism #CorporateMedia #ForeignInterference #VoterSuppression #MoneyIsNotSpeech #ChristianNationalism #MAGA #Sexism
Just don't blame people for feeling powerless when So FUCKING Much 💵💰💵 has gone into making them feel powerless
Campaign operatives and donors have long deployed creative accounting to mask the flow of money into politics.
But in the decade and a half since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision paved the way for unlimited spending on political advertising,
it has become particularly difficult to follow the big-money flow in the weeks before Election Day,
despite the majority opinion’s assertions that “prompt disclosure” of political spending would enable voters “to make informed decisions.”
“Now it’s sort of undeniable that the court was wrong with those predictions,” said Ian Vandewalker, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive nonprofit that works to reduce the influence of big money in politics.
Mr. Vandewalker published an analysis this week of the increase in difficult-to-trace funding to super PACs.
“The ability to hide funding for those types of things is attractive for people who want to engage in dirty tricks,” he said in an interview.
If done effectively, operatives can hide the provenance of this money until after the election is called
— or perhaps forever.
Here is how:
Major donors give to so-called dark-money organizations, usually nonprofit groups that are not obligated to disclose their donors.
Those groups then give the money to super PACs, which are technically required to disclose their donors.
But the trail goes cold when those super PACs list dark-money organizations, instead of individual donors.
#darkmoney #MoneyIsNotSpeech
#overturncitizensunited
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/us/politics/dark-money-presidential-campaign.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
An international #fascist movement
— led by Russia, Hungary, and China
— is on the march worldwide, and 🎯America is in its crosshairs.
Case in point: Ohio Republican Senator and maximally rich dude J.D. Vance,
who dresses up his Trump/Putin toadyism in elegant garb
In an article for the m Financial Times, Vance recently wrote:
“We owe it to our European partners to be honest:
Our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end.
Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. ...
And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over.”
⭐️The watershed moment in American history that led to this was when five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in #CitizensUnited (and three other decisions) that 🔥bribing US politicians is no longer bribery or political corruption 🔥
but, instead, is merely
“First Amendment-protected free speech.”
The cash that rightwing billionaires, foreign governments, and corporations are stuffing into corrupt politicians’ pockets isn’t 💰“money,”
the rightwing majority on the Court ruled:
it’s First Amendment protected “free speech.”
Those corporations aren’t (to paraphrase John Marshall) lifeless, soulless creations of the law:
they are, Republicans on the Court said,
🥺“persons” with a constitutional right to free speech.
👉All this made us ripe for the picking by foreign governments that see the very ongoing existence of American democracy as a threat to the legitimacy of their own oligarchies.
To the point of Vance and Greene, Justice John Paul Stevens,
in his Citizens United dissent,
warned us that his five conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court had not only 💥thrown the door open to American billionaires and corporations corrupting our politicians 💥and political process:
they also, he wrote,
🔥rolled out the welcome mat to foreign governments.🔥
“If taken seriously, our colleagues’ assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the Government’s ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions.
“Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”
#MoneyIsNotSpeech
#CorporationsAreNotPeople
https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-trump-americas-new-tokyo-rose-331?r=3b1sh&triedRedirect=true
@tootiredtothink @dashrb @RealJournalism
#MoneyIsNotSpeech
#CorporationsAreNotPeople
https://c.im/@cdarwin/109338515775957151
Attached: 1 image #PearlsBeforeSwine put it quite clearly. #MoneyIsNotSpeech #CorporationsAreNotPeople
Chuck Darwin
Chuck Darwin
PeachMcD
