Colbert's PAC Shtick Creates Mess (and Plenty of Publicity)

Well if it's what it takes to change the way things are done, more power to the Colbert PAC!

by Kenneth P. Vogel

Advocates of reducing the power of money in politics thought they had found a champion in the unlikely person of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, whose ongoing shtick about forming a political action committee brought more attention to their cause than all their press releases, testimony and legal briefs combined.


Stephen Colbert's PAC joke on the FEC seems to be backfiring. Like it or not, however, Colbert's shtick about forming a political action committee brought more attention to the cause of campaign finance reform than all the press releases, testimony and legal briefs of advocate groups combined. (AP Photo)
As part of his effort to highlight — and parody — the impact of a 2010 Supreme Court decision opening new avenues for corporate money in elections, the satirist plans to testify Thursday in front of the Federal Election Commission about a very real legal request he filed that would allow his planned Colbert Super PAC to push the envelope on corporate political spending.

But the joke seems to be backfiring.

Not only is the PAC joke causing headaches for those whose cause it seemed designed to help — and providing fodder for their opponents — it’s exposing Colbert to rigorous questioning from FEC lawyers and raising ethics questions for his lawyer.

“I think Colbert is trying to dramatize problems in the campaign finance world in the way that he dramatizes other things,” said longtime campaign finance reform advocate Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate for stricter campaign finance rules who is president of Democracy 21. “But nevertheless, the proposals here would potentially open gaping disclosure loopholes in the campaign finance laws.”

Wertheimer is so concerned about what Colbert is doing, in fact, that Democracy 21 has joined with the Campaign Legal Center, another advocacy group, to petition the FEC to reject his request because it could result in the “radical evisceration” of campaign finance rules.

If Colbert gets his way before the FEC, it could blur the lines between political money and media to an unprecedented extent.

For instance, it might enable Fox News pundit-politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee to use the network’s resources to boost their own political committees, assert Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center in their FEC filing. It concludes: “Mr. Colbert’s ultimate goals here may be comedic, but the commission should not play the straight man at the expense of the law.”

Colbert’s PAC bit started as a parody of the PAC started by former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to lay the foundation for his presidential campaign. But after lawyers for Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom expressed reservations about Colbert using their corporate resources — in the form of his eponymous late-night faux news show — to promote the PAC, the bit morphed into a riff on how corporations like Viacom can spend cash on politics, thanks to the 2010 high court decision in a case called Citizens United v. FEC.

“I believe the Citizens United decision was the right one. There should be unlimited corporate money, and I want some of it. I don’t want to be the one chump who doesn’t have any,” Colbert — playing the part of the blowhard conservative pundit he portrays on his nightly show — told POLITICO after personally delivering his advisory opinion request at the FEC’s downtown Washington offices last month.

Colbert was accompanied by a top campaign finance law advocate he’s enlisted to help with the request — Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman who founded the Campaign Legal Center, helped write the seminal 2002 campaign finance overhaul known as McCain-Feingold and served as the top lawyer for the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns of the lead sponsor, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Technically, the request Potter filed with the FEC asks whether Colbert would qualify for a so-called media exemption to campaign finance rules were he to use his show, its staff and its production equipment — which are considered corporate resources of Viacom, Comedy Central’s parent company— to produce and air Colbert Super PAC ads backing or opposing federal candidates.

The media exemption more traditionally allows newspapers, blogs, radio show hosts and other media outlets to support or oppose candidates in editorials and commentaries. Wertheimer’s group worries that if Colbert gets his way, more explicitly political groups would rush to try to take advantage of the provision to spend huge sums boosting or opposing candidates without publicly disclosing the expenditures.

If the FEC denies Colbert’s request, it would mean that any Viacom resources used boosting Colbert’s PAC would be considered in-kind contributions to the PAC and would have to be disclosed as such — potentially causing problems for Viacom, which has signaled it wants to stay out of PAC politics.

The FEC has a complicated, if subjective, test for determining whether an entity qualifies for the media exemption, and commission staff lawyers prepared three differing draft advisory opinions for the six commissioners to consider in response to Colbert’s request.

Two of the drafts grant Colbert wide use of the media exemption, while one concludes that any Comedy Central resources used to administer Colbert Super PAC or to produce ads that air only on other stations would have to be disclosed as corporate contributions to the PAC.

In weighing Colbert’s request, the FEC’s lawyers asked Colbert a series of specific and occasionally confrontational questions about his plans, including wondering what would happen if he dropped his super PAC shtick “because it was thought to be stale or no longer funny.”

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