Rick Green Fumbles and Bumbles the Dark Money Question

Rick Green is doing something unusual. Wealthy individuals who run dark money schemes like Green’s Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance usually stay in hiding. Secrecy is the whole purpose of a dark money operation. Instead Green is running for Congress and thus having to answer questions about his furtive dark money front. It’s not going so well.

In a recent appearance on CBS with Jon Keller, the host of Keller at Large asked Green about Mass Fiscal’s hidden donors, proposing that critics say it isn’t fair to voters that they don’t know who is funding political organizations like Mass Fiscal.  Green responded:

Look, I go back, in the 1950s the Supreme Court rules on a case involving the NAACP, where the state of Alabama wanted to know all the donors of the NAACP, you know for their protection. Political speech is the most sacred part of the First Amendment and folks have, they should have a right, to be able to have their thoughts heard without having to worry about you know, what’s going to happen. Look, we have a public interest to know who’s giving money to our politicians okay? But when the government demands that private citizens turn over their records, that’s only for intimidation, no other reason.

The 1958 case of NAACP v. Alabama occurred shortly after the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, in a time when African Americans were routinely intimidated, brutalized and murdered for their activism. The bus boycott began when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a public bus and continued for thirteen months including protests lead by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, ending only when the Supreme Court found segregation on public buses to be unconstitutional. In NAACP v. Alabama, the state sought to order the NAACP to disclose the identities of its members. The Supreme Court recognized that civil rights activists had been intimidated by “economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility.” Thus it ruled that the state could not require the NAACP to turn over its membership records.

So unless you equate the wealthy white businessman Rick Green with the courageous civil rights activist Rosa Parks, you can dismiss Green’s reliance on NAACP v. Alabama.

Maybe Green realizes how ridiculous his defense is because in Candidates in Third District race offer sharp differences in the Boston Globe, he tried to redefine dark money:

And in promising to better fund infrastructure and fight the opioid epidemic, he touts fiscal conservative ideals. “The only dark money in government is the taxes you pay to the government,” he said Tuesday. “They go into a black hole never to be seen again.”

Not really. If anyone wants to know what the government spends on, they can start at the government’s website Budget of the U.S. Government. Or, try the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?

Voters should ask Rick Green about Mass Fiscal’s dark money operation every day of this campaign. Dark money is a threat to the continuing existence of our democracy. 

The Washington Post recently adopted a new slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” I agree.

[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things). I don’t write about education policy.]