President Barack Obama's two nominees to the Federal Election Commission must wait a little longer for the Senate Rules and Administration Committee to vote on their nominations.

Only Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., appeared at this morning's scheduled meeting, announcing that the committee had failed to reach a quorum, and therefore, couldn't conduct a vote.

But Schumer, the committee's chairman, added during brief remarks that a vote on the FEC nominees — Democrat Ann Ravel and Republican Lee Goodman — could come as "early as tomorrow."

Rules Committee staff explained that senators could conduct a vote on Goodman and Ravel without scheduling another formal meeting, instead gathering together during a break in action when the full Senate meets in session. The Rules Committee's recommendation would be forwarded to the full Senate, which would conduct a final appointment vote.

Senators are largely preoccupied today with developments regarding Syria. Obama is scheduled to visit Capitol Hill today and meet personally with many senators.

Campaign finance reformer advocates have repeatedly criticized the election agency for gridlock under Obama's watch, and many hope the new blood on the commission will bolster its willingness to act. In July, the Rules Committee conducted a largely uneventful confirmation hearing for Ravel and Goodman.

For her part, Ravel has been serving as the chairwoman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission since 2011, when she was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat.

She has won praise from watchdogs for her aggressive fight to unveil the donors who steered $11 million into ballot measures in the state through a series of nonprofit organizations — transactions her office called the biggest case of "campaign money laundering in California history."

Meanwhile, Goodman is an attorney at law firm LeClairRyan. In court, he has argued that the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling should allow the existing ban on direct corporate contributions to federal candidates to be overturned. He was also a member of the Bush-Cheney recount team in 2000.

The U.S. Senate must confirm Obama's two nominees, who have been nominated at a time when all five current FEC commissioners are serving despite their terms having expired. The commission's sixth seat is currently vacant, following the resignation of Democrat Cynthia Bauerly in February.

Ravel has been nominated to replace Bauerly, while Goodman would replace current FEC Vice Chairman Don McGahn, a Republican.

GRUNDY, Va. — The digital clock on the sign for the Buchanan General Hospital read 7:57 a.m. when Dr. Gregory Fino pulled into the parking lot in a red Porsche Cayenne. He walked past muddy trucks and beat-up sedans with bumper stickers that read “Friends of Coal” or “The Heartbeat of America” and entered a brick clinic building.

Inside, on a chilly morning last February, miners filled one of the waiting rooms and spilled into the hallway. There were about 15, many accompanied by family members, and each had an 8 a.m. appointment. Some had come from West Virginia or Kentucky to this small town in the southwestern tip of Virginia.

They were all here for the same reason: They had filed for black lung benefits, and now they had to undergo an exam by a doctor of the coal company’s choosing. For these men, like so many others, the companies had chosen Fino.

For decades, Fino has been one of the go-to doctors for coal companies. Like others in this group, Fino travels regularly to examine groups of miners. Every couple of months, he drives from Pittsburgh to Grundy and examines an average of 20 to 22 miners over two days, he estimated recently.

In 2012, he examined 204 miners, all of them on behalf of coal companies, he said. He also reviews evidence and provides reports about miners he hasn’t examined. Asked why he virtually always performs his work for coal companies, not miners, he said: “You’d have to ask the claimant’s side. I’ll say it like it is.”

Fino declined to say what he charges. Other doctors have testified in recent years that they charge up to $2,500 per exam, including preparation of a written report, and as much as $700 an hour to review records or testify in depositions. The Labor Department would not disclose how much it pays doctors to examine miners.

Fino has drawn enmity from miners and their lawyers. The National Mining Association enlisted him to critique scientific studies linking coal dust to diseases such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis, even when the classic form of black lung wasn’t present. Fino questioned such a connection and concluded there was no evidence that coal dust could cause disabling cases of these illnesses. The Labor Department, rebutting his statements, finalized a rule in 2000 recognizing these diseases as manifestations of black lung.

In 1999, the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure discovered that Fino was conducting exams in a motel room in Pikeville without a license to practice in the state. Fino said recently he thought he had a valid license. When he applied for one, the board asked him to withdraw the application or face a formal complaint.

Fino is not on the list of doctors certified to examine miners on the Labor Department’s behalf, but other doctors who testify regularly for coal companies are. A miner could unwittingly choose to be examined by one of these physicians. Dr. George Zaldivar, for example, frequently testifies for coal companies but may appear to be a convenient choice to miners living near his practice in Charleston, W.Va. Zaldivar did not respond to messages requesting an interview.

Dr. Lawrence Repsher, who also has testified regularly for coal companies, is also on this list. In 2009, he examined a miner in an Arkansas motel room but didn’t have a license to practice in the state, the Center for Public Integrity found. Asked about the exam, Labor Department officials said they weren’t aware of it. Repsher, who told the Center that he retired a few months ago, said he didn’t recall the case or whether he was ever licensed in Arkansas, but acknowledged that he had occasionally performed exams in motel rooms.

Fino said there was nothing inappropriate about conducting exams in motel rooms, such as at the Landmark Inn he used. Barred from Kentucky, though, he moved just across the border to the rural hospital on Slate Creek in this small Appalachian mining community.

After initially objecting to a reporter’s presence at one of the exams in February, Fino called the law firm that had retained him, returned and said, “I have nothing to hide.”

9:11 a.m.

Retired miner Roger Potter heard his name called. A short but sturdily built man with a mustache and wispy brown hair streaked gray, Potter had worked underground for more than 35 years. Now 68, he was struggling to breathe, and he hoped to avoid going on oxygen for as long as possible.

An X-ray of his chest taken in September 2012 showed widespread scarring, according to two radiologists. Their readings supported the opinion of the doctor who examined Potter for the Labor Department: He had the advanced form of disease known as complicated coal workers’ pneumoconiosis.

In the waiting room, he had no illusions about what was going to happen. “They said he’d probably turn me down,” he said of Fino, expressing a sentiment echoed throughout the waiting room all morning. “He turns everybody down.”

Fino told the Center his own records show that, of the miners he has examined during 2012 and the first half of 2013, he’s found about 20 percent disabled at least in part because of black lung. If these opinions aren’t showing up in court records, he said, it is because lawyers don’t submit them — something he can’t control.

When Potter was called back, Fino, 61, with a ring of short gray hair, sat behind a desk in a small office. He went through the form Potter had filled out, asking him questions and tapping at an Apple laptop.

“Do you smoke?” Fino asked — a crucial question, as cigarettes are a favorite alternative explanation for many doctors testifying for coal companies.

“No,” Potter said.

“Did you ever smoke?”

“No.”

“Do you wheeze?”

“I wheeze so bad at night I scare myself.”

After about 10 minutes, Fino took Potter to an examining room next door, listening to his chest with a stethoscope.

This typically is the end of Fino’s involvement in the patient’s day. Because a reporter was present, he insisted on being called when Potter was about to undergo his exercise test, saying he wanted to be able to answer any questions that arose.

10:32 a.m.

Potter sat at a stationary bike with a hospital technician and Fino watching. A few minutes earlier, he’d undergone an X-ray, then had blood drawn from his wrist.

The exercise test is an important, and sometimes controversial, portion of the exam. To win a claim, it is not enough for a miner simply to have black lung. He must prove that it has caused him to become totally disabled. One way to prove that is to show that his lungs aren’t able to transfer enough oxygen to his bloodstream.

The technician is supposed to draw blood from the wrist — something even hard-bitten miners describe as painful — while the patient is exercising. If the analysis reveals oxygen levels below a threshold number, the miner is considered disabled.

The key, however, is to draw the blood during exercise, as Labor Department regulations require. For every second the miner stops exerting himself, the oxygen level can rise, making a disabled person seem healthy.

That’s why many doctors — including Dr. Donald Rasmussen, who frequently examines miners for the Labor Department — insert a catheter into the miner’s wrist. A technician then can easily attach a cartridge to extract blood periodically without having to re-stick the miner.

Fino doesn’t do this, saying he doesn’t want to risk tearing or blocking the artery. The result, however, can be an awkward attempt by the technician to find the artery as a miner is pedaling or a race to get blood drawn as an exhausted miner slows or stops.

As Potter pedaled, Fino and the hospital technician encouraged him. They needed him to reach 50 revolutions per minute. After a few minutes, Potter began to struggle. As he slowed, the technician managed to grab his wrist, then stick the artery. Potter grunted.

Other miners have described undergoing similar testing during a Fino exam that they contend may have masked the extent of their disability. Tim Lafferty said the technician told him to slow his pedaling and found the artery only after three or four attempts.

“I said, ‘I thought it was supposed to be done while you were pedaling,’ ” Lafferty recalled telling the technician. “And he just looked at me.”

Ronnie Kern said his exercise test was a walk down the hallway that included multiple stops to avoid other patients. The technician didn’t try to draw blood until he was back and sitting down, he recalled.

“She stuck that needle in there, and she busted my artery,” Kern said. “And I mean blood was squirting everywhere. It scared her.”

After a few minutes, another technician got a sample drawn, he said. Fino pointed to the results of the test as proof that Kern wasn’t disabled. Two other doctors who examined him used catheters and found that his oxygen levels dropped to disabling levels during exercise.

11:15 a.m.

Another way to prove disability is through a series of lung-function tests known as spirometry. Among miners, this testing is despised.

Potter was no exception. He bit down on a green mouthpiece with a tube leading to large machine. At the technician’s command, he sucked in a deep breath, then blew out violently. A line on the computer screen nearby shot up, then slowly descended as the technician urged Potter to keep blowing. Finally, he stopped and gasped for breath, his face red.

Doing this even once for miners with lung problems is draining. They must do it multiple times to ensure the study is valid. If they stop blowing too soon or don’t blow out hard enough, they have to do it over.

This series of tests measures a variety of things, such as the amount of air a miner can blow out in one second and the total amount of air he can expel from his lungs. This helps detect if the lungs are unable to expand fully or if the airways are blocked.

The torturous nature of these tests is one of the reasons — along with the low success rate — the Labor Department believes frivolous black lung claims are rare. The agency wrote in a 2000 regulation, “The complete pulmonary evaluation … includes difficult tests, and the Department does not believe that a miner would deliberately subject himself to that testing if he did not truly believe that he met the Act’s eligibility criteria.”

Months later, Potter had yet to receive Fino’s final report. A Labor Department official awarded him benefits, but the company has appealed.

1:30 p.m.

Miners filled a small waiting room with about a dozen chairs in the section of the hospital where the testing was performed. Potter had gone home, but many miners’ exams remained unfinished.

“This is pitiful,” retired miner Chuck Simpson said, frustrated with the slow progress.

At 50, Simpson walks with a cane; his legs and back were crushed when a mine roof caved in. After 26 years of mining, he needs oxygen full time. He wore a plaid shirt, jeans and a goatee, and a pony tail hung out back of his hat, which read “Joy” — a favorite manufacturer of continuous mining machines, which Simpson used for years to tear through coal seams.

“We’ve killed ourselves for them, and the company has moved on,” Simpson said. “Now they’re fighting us tooth and nail. It ain’t right.”

The men tried to pass the time with stories of the mines. Despite the destruction the work had wrought on their bodies, many romanticized their days enshrouded in dust.

The hours dragged on, and reminders of their current station filled the void. Some hacked and wheezed. Periodically, a technician would enter the waiting room to draw blood from a miner’s wrist. The others looked away.

One man arrived in a wheelchair, hooked up to an oxygen tank. A technician told him to remove the tube and let his oxygen level drop to where it would be otherwise before they performed the tests. For about an hour, the life seemed to drain from him. He curled up, head buried in his hands.

Yells and gasps were audible from the room where the lung-function testing took place, separated from the waiting room by only a door. The miner clearly was struggling. He’d been at it for more than 20 minutes. The technician spurred him on.

Between coughs, one sentence was clear: “I’m blowing as much as I can.”

Everyone in the waiting room heard it, but no one spoke. Some miners shook their heads. Most just stared at the ground.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has suspended its black lung program pending a review in response to a Center for Public Integrity-ABC News investigation revealing how medical opinions from doctors at the prestigious hospital have helped coal companies thwart efforts by ailing mine workers to receive disability benefits.

“Following the news report we are initiating a review of the [black lung X-ray reading] service,” said a statement issued late Friday by Johns Hopkins Medicine. “Until the review is completed, we are suspending the program.”

Hopkins’ decision came as United States senators from coal country announced they have begun working on new legislation to address “troubling concerns” raised in this week’s reports.

“This new report raises a number of troubling concerns,” said a statement from U.S. Sen. Robert P. Casey, D-Pa. Friday. “It is imperative that miners receive fair treatment and are not victimized at any point in the system.  I am working closely with Senator (Jay) Rockefeller to develop new legislation to address this problem.”

Rockefeller called the treatment of coal miners a “national disgrace” in an interview with ABC News.

At the center of the program is the work performed by Dr. Paul Wheeler, who heads a unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital where radiologists read X-rays of coal miners seeking black lung benefits. Wheeler found not a single case of severe black lung in the more than 1,500 cases decided since 2000 in which he offered an opinion, a review by the Center and ABC News found. In recent court testimony, Wheeler said the last time he recalled finding a case of severe black lung — a finding that would automatically qualify a miner for benefits under a special federal program — was in "the 1970's or the early 80's.”

Officials with the United Mine Workers, the labor union that represents coal miners, expressed outrage at the Center-ABC News report and called on the federal agency that oversees the nationwide network of doctors who read X-rays in black lung cases to prohibit Wheeler from further involvement in black lung cases.

“Whatever penalties or punitive actions that can be taken with respect to Dr. Wheeler should be,” said Phil Smith, the spokesman for the union. “But whatever they are, they will pale in comparison to the pain and suffering he has caused thousands of afflicted miners. There is no penalty which will make up for that.”

In an interview for the news reports, Wheeler stood by his opinions. “I’ve always staked out the high ground,” Wheeler said.

Earlier Friday, Johns Hopkins Medicine posted a statement on its website saying the hospital was “carefully reviewing” the media report and the top-ranked hospital’s black lung unit.

The news report triggered a vocal response from lawmakers and advocates for miners, who expressed outrage at the challenges the coal workers were confronting when trying to obtain the monthly disability payments from their employers.

“This scathing report lays bare for the public something miners and their families in the coal fields have known for decades,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, and a former president of the union’s affiliate, the United Mine Workers. “Even with my years of experience in the mines and as a union leader, knowing full well that coal companies have been cheating miners since the day coal was hand loaded and weighed … I was sickened and angered” by the report.

“You don’t have to be a doctor at Johns Hopkins to know black lung disease when you see it,” said Trumka, who noted that his father died from the disease.

As I watched Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius being grilled by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, it was immediately clear to me just how many of them are in the pockets of the industry I used to work for.

Former colleagues of mine undoubtedly had a hand in writing the members’ comments and questions. Their behavior showed just how much more willing they are to protect the profits of health insurers than protect the health and financial well- being of their constituents.

I got the same treatment from many of those committee members when I provided testimony in March — or tried to. I had been invited to talk about the business practices of insurers — practices that have contributed to the rising number of uninsured and underinsured Americans. Among them: refusing to sell policies to millions of us because of preexisting conditions and charging exorbitant premiums for skimpy coverage to others.  

When I tried to tell the tale of a Florida woman who died of cancer last year because she was priced out of the market and was unable to buy coverage at any price, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from my home state of Tennessee, cut me off. She clearly had no interest in hearing about Leslie Elder or anything else I had to say. Instead, Blackburn held forth for more than five minutes and gave me all of 20 seconds to respond.

Throughout that hearing, a former co-worker from my Humana days, who later worked for the industry’s big lobbying group and then the Bush administration, stood a few feet behind Blackburn. That former co-worker now serves as senior policy adviser to the committee. So I was not the least bit surprised that Blackburn was determined to give me as little time to talk as possible.

During the Sebelius hearing, Blackburn and other GOP members talked about letters constituents have received informing them that their policies will not be available next year. How could that be, they asked, when the president assured us four years ago that, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Blackburn, et al accused the president of being dishonest.

Obama should not have used those exact words. That’s because one reason for the Affordable Care Act in the first place was to protect us from insurers all too willing to lure us into inadequate policies with slick marketing materials. Insurers have made billions in profits from selling such junk insurance, and people like Blackburn clearly want to get rid of the law that makes junk insurance illegal.

As I wrote in Deadly Spin, a years-long industry strategy has been to shift more and more medical expenses to patients. As part of that strategy, big insurance firms bought smaller companies that specialize in limited-benefit plans, which often provide such skimpy coverage that some insurance brokers have refused to sell them.

Cigna, for example, marketed a limited-benefit plan to narrowly targeted prospective customers: mid-sized employers with high employee turnover, such as chain restaurants. The underwriting criteria was specific. The average age of an employer’s workers couldn’t be higher than 40 and no more than 65 percent of the workers could be female. (Insurers have long charged women more than men because in their eyes being born female is a pre-existing condition.) In addition, employers had to have a 70 percent or higher annual employee-turnover rate, meaning that most employees wouldn’t stay on the job long enough to use their benefits. Employees also could not get coverage for care related to any pre-existing condition during their first six months of enrollment.

Limited-benefit plans like that one, blessedly, will not be available next year, and that’s because of the Affordable Care Act. Neither will plans with sky-high deductibles. Another way insurers have shifted costs to patients in order to enhance profits: luring or forcing them into plans with such high deductibles they join the ranks of the underinsured the moment they enroll. When people in these plans get seriously sick or injured, they are on the hook for thousands of dollars in medical bills they’ll have to pay out of their own pockets.

Millions of Americans — including my son, Alex — got letters from their insurers in the years before the ACA was enacted informing them that their plans were being discontinued. Why? To fulfill the industry strategy of moving people out of plans with affordable co-payments and co-insurance obligations and into high-deductible or limited-benefit plans. Such plans are far more profitable.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear a politician railing against Obamacare because people are getting letters from their insurers. The truth these politicians want to obscure is that Obamacare is protecting their constituents from buying coverage that provides little to no shield against financial ruin. And that protection is something the insurance industry wants to get rid of. 

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has raked in millions from out-of-state donors while at the same time hammering Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe for doing the same, campaign finance records show.

Cuccinelli has received $8.1 million — more than 40 percent of funds raised by his campaign since Jan. 1 — from the Republican Governors Association (RGA), a Washington, D.C.-based group that funnels big contributions from corporations and billionaires into races for governor across the country, according to state data collected by the Virginia Public Access Project.

Tomorrow’s contest pits tea party favorite Cuccinelli against McAuliffe, former Democratic National Committee chairman and friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Heading into Election Day, Cuccinelli trails in the money race, having received nearly $20 million compared with McAuliffe’s nearly $32.9 million, according to VPAP. A Quinnipiac University poll released Monday shows McAuliffe with a 6 point lead.

Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, has attempted to paint McAuliffe as a carpetbagger, backed by out-of-state liberals with no connection to Virginia.

An Oct. 15 email warned supporters that “liberal Democrats in New York and Hollywood are trying to buy the Virginia governor's mansion.”

An Oct. 30 fundraising email blast from the Cuccinelli campaign noted McAuliffe has been helped by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC and San Francisco environmentalist Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action PAC.

Records show more than $1.7 million in advertising was paid for by Independence USA and another $1.6 million by NextGen.

But just less than 5 percent of the RGA’s donors in the first six months of the year were from Virginia, the organization’s IRS filings show, and none of the organization’s top 30 donors were from the state.

Among the top donors in the first half of 2013 was billionaire David Koch, who gave $1 million. Koch Industries, the company he owns with brother Charles, gave $25,000, according to IRS records. Tied with David Koch for the top spot at $1 million each were two Texans, the late Houston homebuilder Bob Perry and billionaire Harold Simmons’ Contran Corp.

However, Virginia state records differ. The RGA reported to the Virginia State Board of Elections that David Koch only gave $250,000 this year to the group. In addition, state records show Contran gave $950,000.

Out-of-state groups like the RGA are required to disclose the source of all donations greater than $2,500, according to elections board spokeswoman Nikki Sheridan.

The RGA did not respond to requests for comment.

The second-largest contributor to Cuccinelli’s campaign, the Virginia Republican Party, received more than $155,000 from the RGA and $428,000 from the national Republican State Leadership Committee. Of the $12.5 million the RSLC has raised this year, about 7.5 percent came from Virginia, IRS data shows.

Koch Industries is also an RSLC backer, having given more than $202,000 through Sept. 20 of this year, according to the group’s filing with the IRS. The company also donated $7,500 to the Republican Party Virginia House Campaign Committee, another of the state party’s top sponsors.

Koch — who listed a New York address for himself and a Kansas address for his company — gave another $25,000 directly to Cuccinelli. According to Federal Election Commission records, he also contributed to the Republican National Committee, which gave more than $85,000 to Cuccinelli.

Even when categorizing the state party as an in-state group, Cuccinelli still received only about a third of his funds from inside Old Dominion. A spokeswoman for the campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.

This year’s gubernatorial election is the first in state history to be funded primarily by out-of-state donors, according to VPAP.

McAuliffe received less than one-third of his roughly $33 million from groups or people in the state, including some with Virginia addresses whose funds come primarily from out-of-state.

McAuliffe’s top donor was the Democratic Governors Association’s PAC, DGA Action, which contributed nearly $6.5 million. According to IRS records, the DGA’s top donors in the first half of the year were the Washington D.C.-based Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) trade group and the International Association of Firefighters union.

The DGA’s biggest donors are typically national labor unions.

In addition to what he received from Bloomberg’s and Steyer’s PACs, McAuliffe received nearly $1.7 million from the Virginia League of Conservation voters — which received 97 percent of its funds from its parent organization.

McAuliffe received $1.1 million from the national Planned Parenthood Votes PAC, which doesn’t list any donors from Virginia. The PAC also funded Planned Parenthood Virginia and the national Planned Parenthood Action Fund, both of which contributed separately to the campaign.

McAuliffe’s campaign spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.

The impact of national groups extended to the state attorney general’s race.

Of the $4.5 million raised by Republican candidate Mark Obenshain, nearly $2.7 million — more than half — came from the RSLC.

The RSLC’s biggest donors in 2013 include health insurance and tobacco companies, as well as Koch Industries.

Similar to McAuliffe, Democratic candidate for attorney general Mark Herring received help from Bloomberg and an out-of-state party association. Of the roughly $2.9 million total he has raised, nearly $1.4 million came from the Democratic Attorneys General Association, a group similar to the DGA, and about $1.3 million from Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC. Another $366,655 came from the state Democratic Party, which was  heavily funded by McAuliffe’s own campaign.

And like McAuliffe, he was backed by Planned Parenthood and the League of Conservation Voters, as well as national, Washington D.C.-based unions.

Representatives from both the Obenshain and the Herring campaign did not immediately return requests for comment.

Virginia governors are limited to a single four-year term. The attorney general is often looked at as the next gubernatorial candidate, thus the race has attracted tremendous interest, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

“Republicans really want to avoid a sweep because, if Mark Obenshain gets elected, they automatically have their 2017 gubernatorial candidate,” he said. “Given that you have this weird dynamic in Virginia where you only can serve for one term, a gubernatorial election is always conducted with the next one in mind.”

Alan Suderman and John Dunbar contributed to this report.

Sometimes the impact of a Center for Public Integrity investigation is both immediate and substantial. That’s been the case for our latest black lung series published last week, "Breathless and Burdened."

After spending a year on this project, Reporter Chris Hamby told the story of how a major law firm and a prestigious hospital have been able to prevent coal miners suffocating with black lung disease from receiving federal benefits. He produced detailed and powerful reporting based on data and documents, like so much of the Center’s best work.

These reports have already yielded important reactions:

• Johns Hopkins Medicine has suspended its black lung x-ray reading service, pending a review. Our reporting, in collaboration with ABC News, revealed how medical opinions from doctors at Johns Hopkins helped coal companies block ailing mine workers from receiving disability benefits. The coal industry has paid the hospital millions of dollars over the years for its services.
• United States senators from coal country have begun working on new legislation to address “troubling concerns” raised by our reporting. U.S. Sen. Robert P. Casey, D-Pa., said it’s “imperative that miners receive fair treatment and are not victimized at any point in the system.” Casey said he is “working closely with Senator (Jay) Rockefeller to develop new legislation to address this problem.” Rockefeller, D-W.Va., called the treatment of coal miners a “national disgrace.”
• In an interview Monday, a top U.S. Department of Labor official acknowledged there were problems with the current law, and said the agency is helping the two senators craft legislation to reform the black lung benefits system.
• And Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, wrote in a column on Monday that the Center’s reporting “lays bare for the public something miners and their families in the coal fields have known for decades. Coal companies, their lawyers and their hand-picked doctors will go to any length — ethical or not — to deny the small monthly benefits that stricken miners are due under the Black Lung Benefits Act."

Trumka obviously feels strongly about this issue. “Black lung … killed my dad in 1999. Since then, more than 9,000 miners have died of black lung.”

Trumka suggested several solutions to this mine workers’ disease, including adopting new rules that control coal dust right at the point of contact in the mine. “They do that in Australia,” Trumka wrote, “where dust control rules require strong ventilation and wetting agents on the cutting machines to keep breathable coal dust out of the air. There has not been a single new case of black lung diagnosed there since 2006.” By contrast, in the United States black lung is growing and being diagnosed in younger and younger miners, according to new studies and the Center’s own reporting from last year.

When consumer advocate Ralph Nader helped get new federal legislation passed in 1969, there was an expectation that black lung would slowly become a disease of the past. That did not happen — it is very much a growing disease of our time. Clearly, the system designed to compensate ill miners has been too often sidetracked by the coal industry and its allies.  

The real test of impact from our investigative work is whether substantive reform really results. In other words, will sick miners now get the black lung benefits the federal law was designed to provide to them? In our current political system of legalized corruption, deep-pocketed special interests have more often than not been able to delay or derail changes after public outrage subsides by making sure Congress does not act forcefully to clarify the law and make it stick.  

The coal industry, along with many other sectors of our economy, such as energy, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, financial services, health insurance and the chemical industry, have more often than not succeeded in using their political clout and financial muscle to shield themselves from public-interest reforms — even in the most outrageous situations. The coal industry will no doubt be seeking to do that yet again. However, I can tell you that our investigative team at the Center for Public Integrity will be watching closely.  

Until next week,
Bill

U.S. senators are crafting legislation to reform the black lung benefits program, using a series of reports by the Center for Public Integrity and ABC News as a guide, Sen. Robert Casey said Monday.

“The system didn't work” for ailing miners, Casey said. “Their government failed them as well as their company failing. So we have, I think, an abiding obligation to right this wrong.”

The reports revealed how lawyers and doctors retained by coal companies have played a key role in helping defeat the benefits claims of miners sick and dying of black lung disease.

Casey, D-Pa., said he is working with Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., to identify gaps in a bill previously introduced by Rockefeller and to strengthen the legislation to better protect miners.

The U.S. Labor Department is helping the senators with the bill, the department's top lawyer said Monday.

Meanwhile, government and union officials kept the pressure on Johns Hopkins Medicine, which announced Friday it was suspending its program of reading X-rays for black lung, pending a review, in response to the Center-ABC investigation. Doctors in a unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital have amassed a long record of reading coal miners' X-rays as negative for severe black lung, the Center-ABC probe found.

The leader of the unit, Dr. Paul Wheeler, has been involved in more than 1,500 cases decided since 2000 but never found the severe form of black lung that automatically triggers benefits. Wheeler has defended his work, saying he is following standard medical practice.

The government agency that certifies doctors to read X-rays for black lung issued a statement Monday saying it was “deeply disturbed” by the findings of the Center-ABC investigation. The agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), said efforts to address the problems raised in the reports should emphasize “accuracy and mainstream views and minimize the impact of outlying views.”

“In light of the recent troubling reports, NIOSH applauds the decision of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to investigate its [black lung X-ray reading] service and offers whatever assistance we can provide,” the agency wrote.

The union representing miners called for an investigation of doctors in the Johns Hopkins unit. Daniel Kane, the international secretary treasurer of the United Mine Workers of America and a former miner himself, also demanded cases involving Wheeler be reopened.

“I'd like to see the truth come out,” he said. “I'd like to see the wrongdoers in this system exposed for what they've been doing. More than anything, I'd like to see the miners fairly compensated.”

Casey also suggested a second look at cases in which miners may have been wrongfully denied benefits. “I think we should examine ways to reopen cases,” he said.

The black lung benefits program was set up in the late 1960s to recognize the unique health risks faced by coal workers. It was supposed to provide financial support if a miner became too sick to work. But in recent years, after coal companies have appealed awards to miners, fewer than 10 percent of applicants have been granted benefits. 

Solicitor of Labor Patricia Smith called that track record unacceptable. She said the Labor Department will monitor how administrative law judges weigh medical opinions, saying they should examine a doctor’s credibility, not just credentials. The opinions of Wheeler and his colleagues have been key in many cases largely because of their affiliation with the prestigious institution and their backgrounds.

“What I need to look at is whether there’s a legal problem,” labor official Smith said. “I’m going to be thinking about that long and hard.”

Before the news reports, Johns Hopkins defended the unit's X-ray readings in black lung cases; it has since said it takes "very seriously the questions raised" in the reports, suspending the program pending a review.

Casey said the overall findings of the Center-ABC investigation were disturbing. “It just shows us there's a lot more work to do,” he said. “There's a real sense of frustration when you see we haven't made nearly as much progress as we thought we were making before having read this report.”

Incarceration is apparently no excuse for not disclosing your political campaign committee activity.

The Federal Election Commission is demanding former Democratic Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (Ill.) and William Jefferson (La.) — both serving jail sentences for varying forms of public corruption — file mandatory contribution and expenditure reports for their committees that technically remain active.

In separateletters this week to the congressmen-turned-convicts, the agency notes that there's no record of them disclosing their campaign activity from July through September, as federal law mandates they do.

"The failure to timely file a complete report may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action," wrote Deborah Chacona, the FEC reports analysis division's assistant staff director — although that may hardly prod two men in Jefferson and Jackson who are already serving 13- and 2 1/2-year prison terms respectively.

For the past several years, Jefferson's committee has routinely campaign finance reports weeks or even months after federal deadlines, records show. A representative could not immediately be reached for comment.

Jefferson's most recent committee disclosure indicates his committee was still saddled through June 30 with nearly $239,000 in debt, including outstanding loan payments to several banks and Jefferson himself. As part of its investigation into Jefferson both offering and accepting bribes, the FBI found $90,000 in cash stuffed into his freezer next to a box of frozen pie crusts. Originally sentenced in 2009, he began serving his sentence in 2012 after an appeal failed.

Jackson hasn't filed a campaign disclosure yet this year, according to federal records.

In August, his campaign treasurer, Vicky Pasley, wrote a letter to FEC Chairman Ellen Weintraub informing her that she had resigned from Jackson's campaign. Pasley told Weintraub she has no knowledge of how Jackson's reports were prepared and "there is no possibility whatsoever nor will there ever been a possibility that I could file any report for this committee."

Jackson's committee last reported— on Nov. 26, 2012 — having $105,703 in available cash and no debt.

The former congressman and son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson admitted stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his campaign account to fund vacations and luxury purchases, including furs and Rolex watches.

As members of the U.S. House and Senate meet this week to hammer out a farm bill, they are likely to consider changes to the way the United States delivers food aid to hungry and impoverished nations. The debate will reprise an intense legislative battle that flared in June when food aid reforms were proposed in the House.

That struggle had a startling and little-noticed result: a plan to reshape the way in which the U.S. delivers half of the world’s food aid was dealt a decisive blow by a small but determined group of maritime unions.

Unlike other developed nations, which purchase most food aid in the regions that receive it, the U.S. buys food from American farms, ships it on American vessels, and gives away much of the goods free of cost for humanitarian groups to distribute. Although the Government Accountability Office has concluded that this system is “inherently inefficient” and can be harmful to farmers in recipient nations, for decades the setup has been politically untouchable. A powerful coalition including agriculture companies, the military, the shipping industry and humanitarian aid groups ensured that any changes were dead on arrival in Congress.

But when an amendment to the farm bill seeking to shift up to half of U.S. food aid to local and regional purchases emerged in Congress in June, the tide appeared to be turning.

The Obama Administration estimated it could reach up to four million more people for the same price by purchasing half of its food aid locally. Big agriculture was mostly indifferent, with Cargill and the National Farmers Union endorsing the broad strokes of reform. The Pentagon gave its blessing, saying maritime readiness would not be harmed. Humanitarian groups had turned en masse against the current system, saying flooding poor countries with cheap foods was harmful to local farmers.

“It felt different,” said Gawain Kripke, policy director for the aid group Oxfam America, which advocated in favor of the amendment. “We never really had a piece of legislation to rally around.”

There was one remaining sector that stood squarely in the path of the reform: the shipping industry and maritime unions. With fewer allies but undiminished resolve, maritime groups sentletters, organized phone calls and lobbied vigorously with their allies in Congress.

“We did a lot of aggressive advocacy,” said Ed Wytkind, the president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, an umbrella group that represents 32 transport worker unions. “We’ve spoken very, very forcefully to some of our friends on Capitol Hill who don’t seem to understand the issue as well as we wish they did.”

As the vote approached, the shipping unions told Congress that the reform would destroy American jobs and gut the nation’s military sealift capacity. Their message was repeated among House members as they prepared on June 19 to cast their votes.

“When I was on the floor the chatter among members was ‘You know, unions oppose this,’” said a Democratic congressional staffer, who asked to remain anonymous.

When the votes were counted, the amendment had been defeated by a slim margin of 220 to 203. But unlike Congress’s frequent party-line showdowns, these results reflected an unlikely set of opposing coalitions. Both Republicans and Democrats split nearly evenly on the reform. The top-ranking members of each party to cast votes, Eric Cantor and Nancy Pelosi, supported the proposal and went down in defeat. The 94 Democrats that opposed the measure included leading liberals such as George Miller and James Clyburn.

While more Republicans voted against the measure than Democrats, Kripke of Oxfam America said it was the Democratic votes that provided the crucial margin.

“Where we lost the thing is that we really underperformed among labor Democrats, among progressive Democrats,” Kripke said. “I think that when the unions and the AFL affiliates came in was really influential.”

The maritime unions’ success in persuading nearly half of Democrats to oppose a measure expanding the reach of food aid was not only a product of phone calls and effective lobbying. (A send-up by Jon Stewart on the plight of “the most vulnerable among us” focused on the role of shipping companies.)

According to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, two leading maritime unions, the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association and the AFL Transportation Trades Department, and a maritime group backed by both unions and shipping companies, USAMaritime, contributed a total of more than three quarters of a million dollars to members of the current House of Representatives in the 2012 election cycle. Members who received contributions from these groups voted 83 to 29 in opposition to the measure, along with five who did not vote.

Members who received more than $10,000 from these groups opposed the amendment at a rate of seven to one: the vote among these top beneficiaries of shipping unions’ contributions was 28 to 4, with three not voting.

The Center for Public Integrity reached out to ten House members, both Republicans and Democrats, who were among the top recipients of maritime unions’ contributions. Only the office of Elijah Cummings, D-MD, a vocal opponent of the reform, agreed to discuss his views. Staffers for Cummings said the changes would deplete American sealift capacity in the event of a military or trade war, and that Cummings listened closely to maritime unions as he did to all constituencies affected by Congressional policies. 

‘One of the worst ways to give food aid’

As war raged in Syria and Somalia earlier this year, local populations began to suffer from hunger. The violence made it impossible for U.S. food aid administrators to ship American foods into their communities.

Under the current system, only about 20 percent of overall food aid may be delivered as cash vouchers or purchased locally, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. When those funds ran out, USAID had to make a painful choice. Cash aid to Somalia was scaled back to help address the explosion of need in Syria.

“We are having to make choices between those,” said Nancy Lindborg, the assistant administrator for USAID in charge of food aid programs.

Lindborg said the current hard limits on cash aid force USAID to choose between regions where security and logistics make it impossible to deliver food: Syria, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahelian region of Africa.        

Humanitarian aid groups say that distributing American foods in poor countries can also undercut the market for local agriculture and harm long-term sustainability. Massive deliveries of American crops in the wake of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake undermined local farmers, the Center for Public Integrity reported, and a 2013 study in Malawi found that commoditized food aid was a disincentive for local agriculture.

A third major concern is that the system’s inefficiency leads fewer hungry or disaster-stricken communities to receive aid. A 2007 report by the GAO found that 65 percent of funds allocated to America’s largest food aid program were being spent on shipping and business costs rather than food, and described the practice of allowing humanitarian groups to sell food aid to generate cash as “an inherently inefficient use of resources.”

Dirk Salomons, the director of the Program for Humanitarian Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, said that the most important factor in effective food aid delivery is having flexibility to respond to the circumstances. “You should have the freedom to make an assessment and do the best response for the situation,” Salomons said. “That assessment is really what’s at the heart of it.”

Currently, 80 percent of American food aid must be shipped from the United States. The proposed reform would have allowed the U.S.’s largest food aid program, called Food for Peace, to procure up to 45 percent of aid in affected regions, but did not create a minimum requirement.

Supporters of the current system question whether local food purchases would be vulnerable to corruption or logistically unfeasible.

"I'm trying to figure out where the regional food purchasing is available,” said Rep. John Garamendi at a Congressional hearing in April. “Presumably, there's a shortage of food in that area, so what is the region?" 

Reformers say that regional procurement can draw from a wider area than a specific locality, and that hunger is frequently caused not by an absence of food but by the inability of significant segments of the population to access that food.

This debate was partially addressed in a 2009 GAO study, which compared the results of a small local procurement program within USAID with the majority of aid that is shipped from America. It found that local procurement in sub-Saharan Africa cost 34 percent less than in-kind food aid, while aid in Latin America cost roughly the same with each approach.

A shift toward more local procurement has been endorsed by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as by advocates on both sides of the political spectrum.

“If U.S. taxpayers are going to provide funding for food aid for poor and hungry people around the world, then those taxpayer dollars should be spent in the most efficient way possible,” said Brett Schaefer, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Raj Patel, a food activist and scholar at the University of California, Berkeley who helped organize the 1999 protests in Seattle, said that food purchases are needed more by farmers in the developing world than in America’s grain belt.

“Everyone can agree that one of the worst ways to give food aid is to buy the food in the U.S. and ship it in U.S. carriers and then give it away for free [to aid groups],” Patel said. “But when you get the U.S. farmers and shippers to the table that consensus vanishes.”

The jobs and security debate

The loudest debate about food aid reform in Congress focuses on its impact at home. Opponents of the reform emphasize American jobs and military readiness.

“You can’t look at this thing as if you’re just debating the Food for Peace program,” said Wytkind of the AFL Transportation Trades Department. “The debate has to be more comprehensive.”

A statement by USAMaritime, an industry group that represents shipping companies and unions, states that “over 33,000 Americans’ jobs depend upon the transportation of U.S. food aid alone.”

This figure has been called into question. When congressional supporters of food aid reform asked the Pentagon how many shipping jobs would be lost, it estimated that only 360 to 495 mariners on a total of eight to 11 ships would be affected. Wytkind noted that this figure does not consider the multiplier effects of the initial jobs being lost, nor the broader threat posed to the U.S. shipping industry as a whole.

The other main argument against the changes is that they would reduce military sealift capacity by driving U.S.-flagged commercial ships known as the merchant marine out of business. Advocates say that in Iraq and Afghanistan, 90 percent of shipping supplies were carried by the merchant marine. 

“If you start hollowing out the U.S. merchant marine, and you start with eight to 10 ships, its going to call into question whether merchant marine operators have a viable future in the U.S.,” Wytkind said.

This contention is also disputed. Since 1996, the U.S. has had a Maritime Security Program that funds U.S.-flagged commercial ships to remain militarily viable, funded at $186 million in FY 2012. A 2010 study by Christopher Barrett of Cornell University found that 70 percent of ships that benefited from food aid subsidies called agricultural cargo preference were not militarily useful, and the ones that were militarily useful were already subsidized by the Maritime Support Program.

“They basically double dip,” Barrett said of the ships that are qualified for activation by the military. “They’re able to collect the premium you get for hauling cargo under cargo preference and they collect payment under Maritime Security Program.”

The Pentagon’s letter to Congress stated that the reform “will not impact U.S. maritime readiness and national security.”

This debate reopened last week, as the House and Senate began to conference on the farm bill, the original vehicle for the proposed reforms. President Obama has declared the farm bill a top priority and urged Congress to move past the rancor of the government shutdown to approve it, while House Republicans are calling for further reductions in government spending.

Food aid reform advocates are trying to get part of the changes that were rejected in June back into the farm bill or the FY 2014 budget. Their current goal is for USAID to have the option of spending up to 20 percent of the Food for Peace program, in addition to 20 percent of overall food aid that is already in more flexible programs, on cash aid or local purchases. Shipping unions and their allies question why the struggling merchant marines should be a target for reductions, and are gathering their strength to ensure that enough liberal Democrats line up once again to sink the proposal.

“We’re not shy,” Wytkind said. “All these battles are all about the same issue, when you start getting into reform debates like this. They’re about whether we’re going to have a viable US transportation industry that supports good middle-class jobs.”

President Barack Obama has nominated one of his top fundraisers in Hollywood to be the next U.S. ambassador to Hungary, the White House announced Wednesday night.

Obama's new choice for the job? Colleen Bell, a producer for Bell-Phillip Television Productions, Inc., the company behind the daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.

Last year, Bell and her husband, Bradley Bell, hosted two campaign fundraising events at their home in Los Angeles that Obama personally attended. One was a reception with about 1,000 supporters that featured a musical performance by the Foo Fighters. The other was a more intimate dinner party with about 80 people attending where tickets cost $35,800 per person, according to the White House press pool report.

All told, Bell helped raise at least $500,000 for Obama's re-election efforts, according to a voluntary disclosure by the Obama campaign. Documents obtained by the New York Times put the total at more than $2 million.

Bell ranks as the 23rd major campaign bundler to be nominated for an ambassadorship since January, according to research by the Center for Public Integrity. Collectively, these moneymen and women raised more than $16 million for Obama since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2007.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bell herself this year has made campaign contributions to Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and former Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the Democrat who prevailed in the special New Jersey U.S. Senate election last month. All three will face voters in November 2014.

On Wednesday night, Obama also announced his intent to nominate Joseph W. Westphal, the current under secretary of the U.S. Army, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The Center for Public Integrity and NPR have won a Kavli Science Journalism Award for a 2012 project documenting the resurgence of black lung disease, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced this week.

The stories — produced online by Center reporter Chris Hamby, and for radio by NPR’s Howard Berkes, Andrea de Leon and Sandra Bartlett — detailed how a disease that was supposed to have been eliminated years ago is now on the rise and affecting younger miners. The reports explored the industry tactics and regulatory failures responsible.

The stories were “a compelling look at the resurgence of an epidemic once thought solved — complete with the science to show why the solution didn't last,” the organization’s website says.

The nonprofit AAAS gives the award each year to “distinguished reporting for a general audience.” NPR and the Center won in the radio category. The Center’s story was part of the environmental team’s Hard Labor series.

Read the Center’s story here.

Listen to the NPR stories here:

“As Mine Protections Fail, Black Lung Cases Surge”
“Black-Lung Rule Loopholes Leave Miners Vulnerable”

Two U.S. congressmen have called on the Labor Department’s inspector general to investigate whether doctors and lawyers, working on behalf of coal companies, have helped improperly deprive hundreds of mine workers of disability benefits they should have received after contracting black lung disease.

“I look forward to learning the results of your investigation as I work with my colleagues to assess legislative reforms to prevent the benefits claims process from being gamed by coal companies, their lawyers, and their doctors,” said U.S. Reps. George Miller, D-Calif., and Joe Courtney, D-Conn., in a letter to the inspector general.

The Nov. 7 letter says the congressmen will seek “to ensure that those who have been improperly denied benefits will have another opportunity at securing fair treatment.”

Miller is the ranking Democrat on the House committee overseeing labor issues.

The press for an inquiry cites a series of reports by the Center for Public Integrity and on ABC News describing how lawyers and doctors hired by the coal industry have played a crucial role in beating back claims for benefits from miners sick and dying of black lung. Fewer than 10 percent of coal miners who apply for the benefits, which range from just over $600 a month to about $1,250 a month, ultimately have received them, Labor Department numbers show.

And, the request comes as Democratic Sens. Robert Casey (Penn.) and Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.) have begun looking into possible legislative action to address the issues raised in those reports, which revealed how powerful — and sometimes surprising — forces have helped the industry defeat claims.

Public records examined by the Center and ABC showed that the leader of a unit at Johns Hopkins Medicine that read X-rays for black lung, Dr. Paul Wheeler, was involved in more than 1,500 cases decided since 2000 — but never found the severe form of the disease that automatically triggers benefits in those cases. Wheeler has defended his work, saying he is following standard medical practice.

Johns Hopkins announced last week that it was suspending its black lung program, pending a review, in response to the news reports.

The congressmen also asked the inspector general to investigate the actions of lawyers who withheld key evidence in black lung cases.

The Center documented how Jackson Kelly PLLC, perhaps the most prominent black lung defense firm, has a long record of shielding evidence generated by physicians, chosen by the firm, that indicated a miner had black lung. Jackson Kelly said it acted properly in filing evidence that supported its cases.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., also has called for an examination of Jackson Kelly’s actions, without mentioning the firm by name. “If these reports are true … they should be punished by the appropriate authorities to the fullest extent of the law,” he said in a statement.

The disability payment program now facing scrutiny was set up by Congress in the late 1960s to address the large number of coal miners who were becoming disabled by black lung disease, a progressive illness caused by dust in the lungs that is often fatal. Recent reports from government researchers suggest that after years of decline, the disease is back on the rise.

In an interview, a senior Labor Department official said she is disappointed the system may be failing miners, and the agency is helping lawmakers with possible legislative solutions.

“I think that if there's a problem with certain doctors who for whatever reason shouldn't be giving evidence in these cases, that's an issue that Congress has to address,” said Solicitor of Labor M. Patricia Smith.

Smith was asked whether it was acceptable that so few coal miners were able to obtain the black lung benefits.

“No that's not acceptable,” she replied, “and we need to work with these new amendments to see if that actually helps improve the situation.”

Government and union officials expressed concerns about the role doctors at Johns Hopkins Medicine played in seeing coal miner appeals for benefits turned down.

The government agency that certifies doctors to read X-rays for black lung issued a statement Monday saying it was "deeply disturbed" by the findings of the Center-ABC News investigation. The agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), said efforts to address the problems raised in the reports should emphasize "accuracy and mainstream views and minimize the impact of outlying views."

"In light of the recent troubling reports, NIOSH applauds the decision of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to investigate its [black lung X-ray reading] service and offers whatever assistance we can provide," the agency wrote.

Two days after Virginia voters narrowly elected Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe over Republican Ken Cuccinelli, Libertarian National Committee Executive Director Wes Benedict declared "mission accomplished."

If so, a pair of super PACs played an overriding role in the success of Libertarian Robert Sarvis, who garned a sizable 6.5 percent of the vote — the third-highest vote total for a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate in history, in any state.

In the final stretch of the campaign, a pro-Libertarian super PAC called the Purple PAC financed a media blitz, spending roughly $300,000 on TV ads — nearly $100,000 more than Sarvis' campaign itself raised during the race.

And of the roughly $200,000 raised by Sarvis, the Libertarian Booster PAC ranked as his largest donor, behind Sarvis himself, at about $11,500, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

Major donors to the Purple PAC include Kentucky horse breeder Richard Masson and billionaire options trader Jeffrey Yass, who sits on the board of the Cato Institute, as the Center for Public Integrity has previously reported.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Booster PAC, which under Virginia law is allowed to accept unlimited contributions, was started in 2011 by Benedict. It counts Joe Liemandt — the Stanford University dropout who founded and runs the software company Trilogy — as its largest donor this year.

That relationship has earned Sarvis and the PAC ire from the likes of Rush Limbaugh to Karl Rove in recent days.

The reason for their fury: Liemandt and his wife Andra have deep financial ties not only to the Libertarian Party, but also to Democrats including President Barack Obama.

For instance, Andra Liemandt was credited by as bundling $326,000 for Obama's 2012 re-election efforts, according to documents obtained by the New York Times. Federal Election Commission records show the couple alone donated $156,700 to the Obama Victory Fund, which boosted Obama's campaign, the Democratic National Committee and Democratic parties in battleground states like Virginia.

The Liemandts together also donated about $141,000 to the Libertarian National Committee between 2008 and 2012, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of FEC records.

In a press release issued Thursday afternoon. Benedict argued that Sarvis should not be called a spoiler by Republicans.

"My hope with the Robert Sarvis campaign was for the election to be close between the Democrat and Republican, with the Libertarian getting more votes than in previous elections," said Benedict

"I want Libertarians to win elections," Benedict continued. "But I also want them to run for office even when they're unlikely to win. Why? To get the public to discuss and consider libertarian principles."

Both McAuliffe and Cuccinelli also benefited from spending by independent groups, although not to the same extent as Sarvis. And for his part, McAuliffe raised about $33 million, while Cuccinelli raised $18 million.

Update Nov. 8, 2013, 10:16 a.m.: Purple PAC President Ed Crane — a former chairman of the Libertarian National Committee and founder of the Cato Institute — told the Center for Public Integrity that his group's extra boost was a "healthy thing" for the Virginian electorate, which got to hear from a candidate with a "socially tolerant agenda" who also favors "lower taxes and less business regulations."

Like Benedict, he challenged the notion that Sarvis' campaign was a boon to McAuliffe.

"This idea that libertarians are automatically taking votes away from Republicans is just not true," he said.

Crane added that if Purple PAC had started earlier and had $5 million at its disposal, instead of a few hundred thousand, Sarvis "could have got a quarter of the vote."

My heart sank when I got an email late last month from my friend Robert, who has been battling multiple sclerosis for the past decade. He wrote to tell me that he was among the many Americans who in recent weeks received letters from their insurance companies saying that their policies won’t be available next year.

Insurance companies are sending those letters primarily because the policies they will no longer offer don’t provide enough coverage — or have deductibles that are too high — to comply with the Affordable Care Act. In many cases, however, the policyholders getting those letters are simply victims of a business practice insurers have engaged in for years: discontinuing policies because they’re no longer sufficiently profitable.

Robert understandably was worried. Like most of us, he’d been seeing the news stories about people who had received similar letters and seemed to be resigned to having to pay more in premiums next year for comparable or even less coverage, thanks to Obamacare.

Considering his very serious and costly preexisting condition — his medications alone cost more than $5,000 a month — Robert was nervous as he started looking for a replacement policy. How much more would he have to pay to stay insured?

A couple of weeks went by. I assumed Robert, like many others, was still waiting for the Obama administration to fix Healthcare.gov so he could shop online for coverage. It turns out Robert wasn’t willing to just wait. He decided to call an insurance agent and talk to a real live human being about his options for next year.

He could barely believe what he heard: he could get better coverage than the policy being discontinued — and pay less — thanks to Obamacare.

“The overall cost of the plans I’m considering is cheaper than the plan I am currently paying for,” he wrote me this week. “My total cost for coverage now, including premiums and out of pocket costs, is about $9,800. Two of the plans I’m seriously considering for next year have total costs of $8,400. I’m shocked, but in a good way.” 

So not only did Robert not experience the sticker shock he had been expecting, he will save $1,400 next year on health insurance.

The plan he is leaning toward — a top-of-the line “platinum” plan — will have a higher monthly premium, but he will still save on average about $117 a month because of the way his out-of-pocket costs will be calculated.

Robert is among many who are losing their current coverage but in the end will be better off. In fact, considering that many folks buying coverage on the individual market have at least one pre-existing condition — which insurers can no longer take into consideration when pricing their policies — it’s likely that more people will get more for their insurance buck next year than less.

In addition, most of the people who buy coverage through the new insurance marketplaces (as Robert will when the balky Healthcare.gov website is working more smoothly) will be eligible for tax credits and subsidies from the federal government that will lower their monthly and overall costs even more.

Robert knows that you can’t determine how much you’ll spend on coverage during a given year just by multiplying the monthly premium by 12. If you don’t take into consideration out-of-pocket costs and just pick the policy with the cheapest premium, you could wind up paying more overall than if you picked a plan with a slightly higher monthly premium.

Robert also will be able to spread the cost of his coverage more evenly over the year. Under his current plan, he had to have at least $5,000 in the bank at the beginning of every year when his policy renewed to cover the cost of his medications for just one month. Under the new plans he is considering for next year, his monthly out-of-pocket costs will range from $80 to $120 a month.

“It will be easier to manage paying for my drugs spread out over a period of 12 months instead of in one lump sum at the beginning of the year,” Robert told me.

Robert said the insurance agent told him his case is not unique, that a lot of the people she talks to who have been frightened by the media coverage are pleasantly surprised to learn that they will get better coverage for less money next year. Once the Healthcare.gov website is fixed, more people who have received letters from their insurance companies will get a similar pleasant surprise.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, known for churning out industry-friendly legislation, received $10,000 from the Nuclear Energy Institute last year, according to a new tax filing obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

The Nuclear Energy Institute — the nuclear industry’s main trade association — disclosed the payment to the controversial think tank in an annual report recently submitted to the Internal Revenue Service.

ALEC, which is organized as a charity under Sec. 501(c)(3) of the tax code to promote “free markets” and “limited government” in the states, is not required to publicly identify its funders.

Nuclear Energy Institute spokesman Steve Kerekes said his group contributed to ALEC as a way to “increase awareness of energy and environmental considerations among state and local” officials.

A spokesperson for ALEC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One of the main goals of the Nuclear Energy Institute is “to achieve a predictable and stable regulatory environment,” according to materials published on its website. Another is “to achieve durable, bipartisan political support for nuclear energy.”

ALEC, which is composed mainly of business interests and state-level Republican lawmakers, maintains an “Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force” that seeks “to ensure states remain the first among equals with the federal government on environmental regulation.”

For its part, ALEC raised $8.4 million in 2012 — a year during which it faced fierce criticism for its activities.

Several major corporations — including McDonald’s and Coca-Cola — and dozens of state officials dropped out of ALEC last year after the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. Liberal groups had called for boycotts of ALEC-affiliated companies because ALEC had championed the “stand your ground” law at play in the case.

In 2012, ALEC was also the subject of an IRS complaint from a handful of liberal-leaning ministers in Ohio that was written by attorney Marcus Owens, the former director for the tax agency’s exempt-organizations division. The complaint alleged that ALEC “elevates commercial gain for a few over the well-being of society’s less fortunate” and should be stripped of its 501(c)(3) charity status.

Overall, IRS records show the Nuclear Energy Institute spent $55.5 million in 2012 and doled out a total of $627,200 to 26 nonprofit organizations, including ALEC.

Its top beneficiaries were Third Way, a Democratic-aligned group that claims to represent “Americans in the ‘vital center,’” which got $155,000, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, a charity whose founders include Republican Bob Dole and Democrat Tom Daschle, which got $120,000.

Coming out of the primaries in last year’s gubernatorial election, New Hampshire Republican Ovide Lamontagne enjoyed a huge cash advantage over Democrat Maggie Hassan.

Polls predicted a tight race for the general election in the Granite State, but Hassan’s expensive primary victory left her with less than $17,000 cash on hand, while Lamontange had more than  $250,000.

That advantage might have proved decisive in previous elections — but in a race where outside groups outspent the candidates and flooded the state with millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads, it was largely meaningless.

By Election Day, organizations backed by unions and the largely union-funded Democratic Governors Association (DGA) would spend roughly $7 million on the New Hampshire election. National unions spent another $2 million directly. Most of the cash went toward ads bashing Republican Lamontagne, who supported “right to work” legislation aimed at curbing union power, the same legislation that outgoing Democratic Gov. John Lynch had vetoed.

“Hassan was propped up and carried to victory by the outside groups,” says Fergus Cullen, a former head of the state Republican Party who helped raise funds for Lamontagne.

Since the Supreme Court loosened rules on political spending in 2010, the Republican Party, boosted by corporate and billionaire backers, has been painted as the biggest beneficiary. But in New Hampshire and a handful of other states in 2012, Democrats flipped the script.

In New Hampshire, groups backing Democrats reported spending nearly $1 million more than their Republican counterparts.

Nonprofits, super PACs, and other non-candidate groups reported spending at least $209 million to influence elections in 38 states, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP) and state elections offices.

Pro-Democratic groups, many associated with unions, outspent their Republican counterparts by more than $8 million, according to the Center’s analysis.

More than one out of every two dollars spent originated from groups funded primarily or entirely by out-of-state donors. Even seemingly local entities, like state parties, were recipients of huge influxes of outside cash. In New Hampshire, for instance, the DGA gave the state Democratic Party nearly $3 million, which mostly went to helping Hassan.

Analyzing outside spending in the states is difficult due to weak disclosure rules. In South Carolina, for instance, outside groups are not required to report a dime of what they spend.

Twelve states were left out of the analysis either because there was no significant election activity, or disclosure laws were so poor that it was impossible to accurately identify outside spending activity.

In addition, totals may not include spending on so-called “issue ads,” which often clearly favor a candidate but are vaguely worded enough to avoid reporting requirements.

Eyes on New Hampshire

In New Hampshire, outside spending per registered voter was higher than any other state. Nearly $24 was spent per registered voter, more than double the ratio in Wisconsin, which ranked a distant second, according to the Center’s analysis.

Lamontagne’s campaign in New Hampshire was assisted by the nation’s most prolific state-level outside spender and the DGA’s counterpart, the Republican Governors Association (RGA). Both groups are based in Washington, D.C. The RGA was the sole funder of the “Live Free PAC,” which ran ads attacking Hassan.

The RGA, whose donors include energy and pharmaceutical companies, along with billionaire conservatives, pumped more than $8 million into the New Hampshire group. One Live Free ad attacked Hassan for not paying property taxes on her $500,000 home. The ads failed to mention that the home belongs to Phillips Exeter Academy, a tony prep school where her husband is the principal and is required to live on campus.

“I don’t know who came up with that ad but they didn’t earn their money on that one,” says Kathy Sullivan, a Hassan adviser.

Outside spending groups aren’t new to New Hampshire, but the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 made it easier than ever for them to pump money into last year’s election.

Citing the ruling, the state attorney general’s office issued an opinion in August 2012 that said outside groups could raise unlimited funds and use the proceeds to support or oppose a candidate. Previously, donations to the groups were capped at $5,000.

The most donors could give to the candidates themselves last year was $7,000.

Come Election Day, outside groups had spent more than all state-level candidates in New Hampshire had raised — $18 million to $13 million — according to data compiled by the Center and (NIMSP). Hassan beat Lamontagne by 12 points, Democrats retook the House and made gains in the Senate.

“Candidate committees have almost become irrelevant,” Corey Lewandowski told the NH Journal. Lewandowski was the New Hampshire state director in 2012 for conservative nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, which backs tea party candidates and typically runs non-reported issue ads.

“If you can write a larger, more substantial check, there’s no reason to give to candidates," he said. “Everything you want to do, you can do through a PAC or another entity. It makes the behind-the-scenes players much more influential than they ever were.”

Split victories

Unlike 2010, when the RGA helped Republicans make net gains of five governorships and win control of 22 more state legislative chambers  — the GOP had a rougher go of it in 2012.

National unions, seemingly shattered following Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s easy victory in a recall election the previous June, roared back with massive spending that helped state-level Democratic candidates around the country.

In total, pro-labor groups reported spending nearly $44 million in 2012, according to the Center analysis.

Republicans enjoyed several victories, however.

They gained almost complete control of North Carolina’s state government — where spending by outside groups backed by businesses, billionaires and “free-market” nonprofit entities, some with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch — was rampant.

And in Arkansas, outside groups helped flip the state legislature to GOP control for the first time in more than a hundred years.

The Citizens United decision allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on ads supporting or opposing candidates, as long as they don’t coordinate with campaigns. The ruling had a powerful impact on federal races but also made it easier than ever for outside groups to raise and spend cash on state races.

The high court ruling invalidated prohibitions on corporate and union spending in 24 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Following the Citizens United ruling, outside groups were able to accept unlimited donations, leading to the creation of “super PACs” and the proliferation of political nonprofits, free to spend on both federal and state elections.

Super PACs made it easier for the super-wealthy to spend a fortune trying to influence elections, a prominent story line of the 2012 presidential campaign. Some of the same prominent donors to federal super PACs also gave to newly formed state super PACs.

Casino magnate and Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson gave $250,000 to a new super PAC in New Mexico called Reform New Mexico Now. Major Democratic donor Fred Eychaner gave $215,000 to one in Illinois called Personal PAC Independent Committee.

For candidates on the receiving end of a barrage of outside spending, last year’s elections left a bitter taste. Many feel they would have won were it not for outside groups; others who won still feel they were unfairly attacked by groups with hidden agendas.

It’s a system, many of the candidates say, that’s broken.

“I wouldn’t get back into politics to save my life,” said former Maine state Sen. Lois Snowe-Mello, a Republican who was ousted last year with the help of a union-funded group.

Meanwhile, gridlock in Washington has led to a greater focus on the states — where a dollar goes a lot further than it does in federal contests.

“Right now in Washington, D.C., as long as you have a divided government, there’s only so much you can do,” says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax nonprofit. “More of the important decisions — the whole conversation of tort reform to tax policy to spending issues — are happening at the state level. So we’ve been more interested in focusing there.”

Americans for Tax Reform spent at least $440,000 targeting state legislative races in seven states last election cycle.

Early start

The proxy wars started early last year with the June recall election of Walker who pushed to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of many of Wisconsin’s public sector unions.

Walker, who was able to raise unlimited amounts for his campaign while his opponent could not because of a quirk in state election law, enjoyed a $30.5 million to $4.4 million advantage over Milwaukee’s Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett.

Outside groups funded by national unions spent heavily to help Barrett stay competitive. In total, outside groups reported spending at least $30 million in Wisconsin state elections last year, though millions more were likely spent on “issue ads” that went unreported.

Funds from the D.C.-based headquarters of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union and the National Education Association teachers’ union moved between several nonprofits and state-level committees before being spent.

Those groups include Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters and the immigrant-rights organization Voces De La Frontera, according to state and Department of Labor records.

The outside funding that helped Walker took similarly circuitous routes. The RGA reported spending $9.4 million helping Walker win the recall election, making it the biggest single outside spender of that election.

Walker beat Barrett 53 percent to 46 percent.

Union comeback

In January 2012, on the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued a statement saying the case “seriously undermined our democracy.”

“The Citizens United ruling further tilted the playing field in favor of the 1 percent and against the 99 percent whose voices are being drowned out by excessive corporate spending and influence,” Trumka said.

But unions were among the organizations that took best advantage of the deregulated environment in state-level races last year.

Union-funded outside groups helped Democratic governors win close contests in Montana and Washington. And Democrats took control of the state House in Colorado and both chambers in Maine and Minnesota. In those states, Democratic candidates received significant help from outside groups funded largely by wealthy individuals and national unions.

Colorado is ground zero for this model of liberal-leaning outside spending.

It began in 2004 after four wealthy liberals — tech entrepreneur Tim Gill, heiress Pat Stryker, Democratic Congressman Jared Polis, and former gubernatorial candidate Rutt Bridges — helped organize and fund a network of progressive nonprofits with a goal of turning Colorado state politics blue. By 2008, Democrats dominated all levels of government in Colorado, despite there being a near-even split among registered voters.

“It’s kind of like a venture capital model,” says former Republican state Rep. Rod Witwer. He co-authored a book called The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care), which detailed how a small group of donors helped reshape Colorado politics and created a model that has spread to several other states.

Witwer says Colorado’s liberal-leaning donors had “perfected the art” of influencing state elections through nonprofits prior to the Citizens United decision, which “just opened a few avenues that weren’t available.”

America Votes, a national liberal nonprofit group backed largely by unions, was active in several state-level races last year, including in Colorado. Its spokesman John Neurohr says state-level coalitions around the country work on the same premise: “that to win we must be coordinated and collaborative.”

In 2012, more than 60 percent of the $7.4 million reported in Colorado was controlled by three Democrat-supporting groups — the Colorado Accountable Government Alliance, the Coalition for Colorado’s Future and the Community Information Project. These groups were largely funded by national labor groups and Gill.

Gill did not respond to a request for comment.

Republican House candidate Brian Watson says he was targeted by negative TV ads, mailers and even a plane pulling a banner on Election Day accusing him of not paying his taxes.

“They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us, then they ripped the sink out of the wall and threw it at us,” said Watson, who lost a close election.

As in Wisconsin, it’s challenging to follow all the spending by national unions.

AFSCME, for instance, gave more than $100,000 each to the Colorado Accountable Government Alliance, the Coalition for Colorado’s Future and the Community Information Project.  Among other large contributors to these groups were AFSCME-backed organizations like America Votes and a Boston-based nonprofit called the Fair Share Alliance, which Labor Department records show received $200,000 from AFSCME in 2012.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which works to elect down-ballot Democrats, also contributed $220,000 to Colorado’s outside spending groups. AFSCME was the DLCC’s biggest single donor in 2012, just as it was for the DGA.

Parts of the Colorado model have been replicated on a national scale with the Democracy Alliance, a clearinghouse for liberal causes that coordinates giving from 100 or so wealthy individuals as well as from national unions.

Members of the little-known group, whose donors include billionaire George Soros (whose foundation provides funding to the Center for Public Integrity) and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, gave heavily to help re-elect President Obama last year.

‘Dwarfed’

In Minnesota, liberal donor Alida Messinger (a former Center for Public Integrity donor) and national labor unions helped Democrats take control of both the House and Senate.

The largest-spending non-party outside group was Alliance for a Better Minnesota, which spent more than $1.9 million. The group was funded by two other outside groups, WIN Minnesota and the 2012 Fund, whose biggest funders were wealthy individuals and organized labor.

Messinger, who founded WIN Minnesota, donated at least $850,000 to outside groups during the 2012 election cycle. Messinger is an heiress to the Rockefeller family’s Standard Oil fortune and the ex-wife of Minnesota Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton. National unions contributed at least $465,000 to Minnesota’s outside groups, while Colorado’s Tim Gill donated $75,000 to WIN Minnesota.

The progressive groups built on their success from 2010, when they helped Dayton win the governor’s race. In that campaign, Alliance for a Better Minnesota not only ran hard-hitting ads highlighting Republican candidate Tom Emmer’s decades-old DUI arrests, but also helped put a damper on corporate-funded outside groups.

After the Citizens United decision in early 2010, Republicans were given greater latitude to strike back in Minnesota.

Previously the state allowed unions to spend from their treasuries on outside spending groups while corporations could not. In 2010, corporations put large donations into MN Forward, an outside group that was working to help Emmer get elected.

Target targeted

Citing Emmer’s opposition to gay marriage, Alliance for Better Minnesota helped organize a protest that summer against Minneapolis-based Target for giving $150,000 to MN Forward. The ensuing uproar led Target’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel to issue an apology and may have chilled future corporate donations to outside groups in Minnesota and around the country.

“I don’t think corporations spent as much as they could have [in the 2012 election],” said David Schultz, a professor and campaign finance expert at Hamline University School of Law. “Simply because the backlash was so significant, it dissuaded other corporations from getting involved.”

Business-backed outside groups frequently cite the Target example to explain why corporations aren’t giving as much to outside spending groups as critics of the Citizens United ruling have feared.

“Businesses don’t like enemies; organized labor on the other hand… doesn’t seem particularly concerned about that,” said Scott Hawkins, who ran a pro-business outside spending organization in Alaska, where a union-funded group was the largest spender in last year’s elections.

Unions counter that businesses do make major donations to political entities — they just do so in secret. For example, donations to the nonprofit U.S. Chamber of Commerce are not required to be reported.

Keith Downey, the current head of the Minnesota Republican Party, was one of the biggest targets of outside group spending last year. Downey said that despite raising a large campaign war chest, he couldn’t come close to competing with the outside groups. He said these groups sent out dozens of mailers attacking him in the final weeks of the campaign.

“You don’t have the ability to respond, you just don’t,” says Downey. “You do in the end feel like you’re dwarfed by the outside influence.”

In Maine, Democrats took a similar tack — the party took control of both the House and Senate with the help of billionaire hedge fund manager Donald Sussman and organized labor. Sussman donated more than $600,000 to groups supporting Democrats.

The Committee to Rebuild Maine’s Middle Class was the largest non-party independent spending group. Its biggest donors include Sussman, AFSCME and the National Education Association (NEA).

Outside spending totaled $3.7 million in Maine last year, a state record for legislative races according to the Bangor Daily News.

Biggest spender

Despite the gains by Democrats, the single most prolific source of funds used in outside spending campaigns, according to the Center’s analysis, was the Republican Governors Association. The RGA was responsible for at least $34 million of the $209 million in outside spending in the 38 states that were subject to the Center’s analysis.

Some of the RGA’s biggest donors in 2012 were conservative billionaires who were also active in federal races.

Adelson and his family were the top donors to super PACs in the 2012 election, shelling out $93 million. Adelson and his wife gave the RGA $2 million. The late Texas homebuilder Bob Perry gave $2.5 million in 2012. Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer gave $1.25 million, and David Koch gave $1 million.

The RGA’s total spending was $60 million in 2012, according to IRS records, nearly three times what it was in 2008.

It was the single biggest source of outside spending in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Washington, and North Carolina. It was also likely the biggest spender in Montana, but the state’s lax disclosure requirements make that impossible to verify using public records.

The RGA, and the rival DGA are unincorporated nonprofits that report to the IRS, but are largely unregulated by the Federal Election Commission. They were able to accept unlimited donations from individuals, unions and corporations even before the Citizens United decision, but were technically limited in how and where they could spend their money in some states. The high court’s decision has changed all that.

Besides Walker’s victory, the RGA was also able to claim victory in North Carolina.

GOP control

In the Tar Heel State, Republican Pat McCrory easily defeated Democrat Walter Dalton with the help of several outside groups, including the RGA, which spent more than $5 million in the race for governor. A group backed by the DGA and the NEA spent $2.6 million trying to help Dalton.

The race was never close and both the RGA and the DGA pulled spending on TV ads in the final weeks. Citizens United made it easier for both groups to operate in the state, as the ban on corporate and union funds for outside spending groups went away.

McCrory became North Carolina’s first Republican governor elected since 1988 and was the only member of his party to win an open governor’s seat last year. His victory helped Republicans cement control of all three branches of government.

One of the most closely watched races last year was for the state Supreme Court, where outside groups spent more than $2.6 million helping Justice Paul Newby retain his seat and maintain a conservative 4-3 advantage on the high court bench.

Outside groups favoring Newby outspent those supporting his opponent Sam Ervin IV by about 35 to 1. One of the ads paid for by an outside group attacked Ervin as untrustworthy.

“As far as I know,” Ervin told the Center for Public Integrity, “there had never been an attack ad in a North Carolina judicial race.”

One of the biggest sources of cash for outside groups active in North Carolina’s judicial races was the Washington, D.C.-based Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which spent about $1.2 million to help Newby.

The RSLC is like the RGA’s little brother: a D.C.-based group funded largely by corporate donors that works to elect down-ballot Republicans in state elections. Its chairman is Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and close associate of Karl Rove.

Gillespie and Rove, former political strategists for President George W. Bush, co-founded American Crossroads, a well-funded, high-profile super PAC. The RSLC’s president, Chris Jankowski, is a former insurance and tobacco lobbyist.

‘Tort reform’ backers

The RSLC’s biggest donors in 2012 were nonprofits that support so-called tort reform legislation, or efforts to limit damages paid in civil lawsuits. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform was the RSLC’s single biggest donor in 2012, giving $3.5 million.

The nonprofit American Future Fund was the RSLC’s second biggest contributor in 2012, giving nearly $1.2 million. The Iowa-based “social welfare” group has received millions from groups associated with the Koch brothers.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission recently said that the American Future Fund was part of an illegal scheme to circumvent state disclosure laws involving an anti-union ballot measure last year. The Kochs have denied contributing to that effort.The American Future Fund did not respond to requests for comment.

The American Justice Partnership, a pro-tort reform nonprofit, was the third biggest donor to the RSLC at $1.1 million. Neither the Chamber nor the American Justice Partnership is required to disclose its donors.

Several state legislative races in North Carolina were also flooded with large amounts of outside cash. They helped Republicans gain a three-fifths majority in the House to go along with a similar supermajority in the Senate.

Since taking over, Republicans have lowered taxes, cut unemployment benefits, added restrictions for women seeking abortions, cut limits on carrying guns in public places and enacted a voter ID law, which is now the subject of a Justice Department lawsuit.

Total one-party control in statehouses is becoming more common. The 2012 election left only three split state legislatures in the country — Iowa, New Hampshire and Kentucky. The last time the number was so low was 1944, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Arkansas was another Southern state victory for Republican-supporting outside groups. Both chambers flipped from Democratic control to Republican control for the first time since Reconstruction. The election also completed the Republican takeover of state legislatures in the South.

Judging by mailers and ads, outside groups were extremely active in the Arkansas election, though you can’t tell from official state filings. Reports indicate $460,000 in spending, including just over $230,000 by Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform.

The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the 60 Plus Association were both active as was the Faith and Freedom Coalition, whose founder is the prominent social conservative political consultant Ralph Reed.

Arkansas’ lax disclosure laws allowed these groups to avoid having to disclose how much they were spending by running ads and circulating campaign literature that did not tell the audience to vote for or against a candidate.

One Americans for Prosperity mailer, for instance, asked why a targeted candidate was “raising our cost of living” and urged the reader to call the lawmaker “and tell him how you feel about raising prices on Arkansas families.”

The state’s Democratic Party tried to fight back against the group by producing a TV ad starring Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe.

“A Virginia group is using secret money to meddle in our election,” Beebe said in the ad.

Dark money leads to AG success

Republican-backing groups also had success helping to elect GOP attorneys general in Montana and West Virginia, which both elected Democratic governors last year.

The RSLC reported spending $108,000 to Montana state election officials to help its preferred candidate, Tim Fox, win the Republican primary race for attorney general.

But the group was not required to say how much it spent in the general election because the ads it ran did not specifically urge voters to support or oppose a candidate.

Pam Bucy, Fox’s Democratic opponent, says her campaign collected information from local TV and radio stations showing that the RSLC purchased more than $580,000 worth of ad time for the general election. The ads praised Fox for opposing Obamacare.

Fox and Bucy raised a combined $750,000 for their own campaigns, according to the NIMSP; Fox beat Bucy by 35,000 votes.

“When you look at how close my election was, I think it had a dramatic effect,” Bucy said. “I think it denigrates our system; I don’t think it was a clean or fair election.”

In West Virginia, Patrick Morrisey became the state’s first Republican attorney general in 80 years thanks to heavy spending by outside groups.

A former Capitol Hill aide who went on to have a lucrative career as a lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies, Morrisey was helped by more than $2.1 million spent by two nonprofits, according to state records, that don’t reveal their donors, the Northern Virginia-based Center for Individual Freedom and the American Future Fund, the Iowa-based group with ties to the Koch brothers.

Making bank, win or lose

Among the clear winners in last year’s elections: political consultants.

“Citizens United prompted new spending and new business in federal races that many firms are finding can apply to the state level as well,” says Brad Chism, a Democratic political consultant based in Mississippi, whose former firm did direct mail for a number of outside groups in state contests last year.

Much of the outside money flowed from D.C.-based groups to ambiguously named local committees and then back to D.C. where it went into the coffers of big political consulting firms — many of which are active in presidential and other federal races.

Firms based around D.C. were paid nearly $59 million, more than a quarter of all outside spending identified by in the Center investigation.

The biggest beneficiary, however, was in California.

Target Enterprises, a Los Angeles media buying firm, collected nearly $19 million and was the preferred vendor for the RGA. That’s $2 million more than what the firm made off of federal super PACs last year. Nick Ayers, who was executive director of the RGA until early 2011, is a partner at the firm.

Waterfront Strategies and Great American Media, part of D.C.-based Democratic political consulting giant GMMB, combined collected more than $17 million. The D.C.-based firm was paid $81 million in the 2012 election for federal work by several union and progressive super PACs, according to a previous Center report.

Delacey Skinner, a senior vice president at the firm, noted that totals for media buying firms appear large because they include what the firms spent purchasing airtime on TV stations.

One of AFSCME’s favorite media buying firms was the Campaign Group, a Philadelphia-based concern that was paid at least $9.8 million by state-level outside groups last year. When AFSCME’s longtime political director Larry Scanlon announced his retirement last year, he told The Hill he was going to be doing consulting work for the Campaign Group.

A complete view of all the outside spending may never be available. Most state disclosure laws are weaker than what the federal government requires, allowing groups to run overtly political ads without ever having to report the spending.

In Michigan, for example, outside groups officially reported spending $4 million. But a local watchdog combed through records filed at local TV stations and found that the state parties and other outside groups spent at least $18 million on local TV ads in the run-up to the election.

A full picture of the RGA’s spending in Montana is not available. Montana’s campaign finance regulators did not require the RGA to file a state-specific report because it already included the expenditures in its federal filings — although those reports do not include specifics.

New Jersey, Virginia and beyond

Back in New Hampshire, there’s plenty of frustration with how important outside groups have become in state politics, and how they are often behind the most negative ads. Even those on the winning side are concerned.

“They really can be pretty nasty, there’s really no other way to say it,” says Kathy Sullivan, the Hassan advisor and former head of the state Democratic Party. The money is “gross” and so is the lack of disclosure, she says.

Sullivan says she’s seen little appetite on either side of the aisle to curb the influence of outside groups or make their donors more transparent.

Meanwhile, outside groups played outsized roles in state-level elections held earlier this month in New Jersey and Virginia.

In New Jersey, at least $35 million was spent by outside groups on the gubernatorial and legislative races according to the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission, a new record the agency’s executive director called “mind-boggling.”

“It’s a whole new world in New Jersey politics,’’ Jeff Brindle said in a statement.

Union-backed outside groups spent heavily to ensure strong Democratic control of the legislature as a bulwark against Gov. Chris Christie, the popular Republican governor who won re-election.

Outside spending groups reported spending a little more than $3.4 million in Virginia, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project. But with candidates allowed to receive unlimited donations from businesses and unions, national groups gave millions directly.

The RGA was the single biggest contributor to failed Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli while the DGA was the top donor to the winner, Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

That’s just a taste of what’s expected next year.

In 2014, there are 36 governorships up for grabs — including in New Hampshire, where governors serve two-year terms.

Rachel Baye contributed to this report.

The Center analyzed independent expenditure data obtained by the National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP) for 29 states. The Center augmented NIMSP’s data by identifying independent spending in nine other states, primarily through additional government records. The remaining 12 states were not analyzed either because they had no state-level races or they had disclosure laws that were so poor it would make a comprehensive analysis impossible. In states such as Florida, for example, reports filed by committees do not identify the targets of independent spending.

The Center then obtained donor information for all groups with reported spending above $100,000 — which encompassed more than 90 percent of all spending — to determine whether the majority of each group’s funding came primarily from out-of-state donors and whether national political groups, such as the Republican Governors Association or Democratic Governors Association, were among the donors.

Groups were classified as in-state or out-of-state based on where the majority of their donors resided. Additionally, when applicable, groups were classified based on the financial or ideological motives of their donors.

Finally, the Center used data from NIMSP, state filings and news reports to determine whether the $100,000-spending groups supported predominantly Republican or Democratic candidates (or a combination). All spending by state and local political parties was also classified as pro-Republican or pro-Democrat to determine overall spending in support of candidates from each party.

The Consider the Source project is the Center for Public Integrity’s vehicle for focusing on transparency and accountability and the tracking of money in politics.

“So Damn Much Money,” to quote the title of Robert Kaiser’s 2010 book, is deluging our political system at all levels. And increasingly these funds are being spent by outside groups, not by the candidates themselves.

The Center’s latest outside spending report— “Puppet States: National Power Brokers Pull Strings in State Elections” — makes this abundantly clear. After studying outside spending in 38 states, the Center found that nonprofits, super PACs, and other non-candidate groups reported spending at least $209 million to influence elections in the 2012 cycle. Our work analyzes data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP) and state elections offices.

Pro-Democratic groups, many associated with unions, outspent their Republican counterparts by more than $8 million, according to the Center’s analysis. In total, pro-labor groups reported spending nearly $44 million in 2012 in those same states.

More than one out of every two dollars spent originated from groups funded primarily or entirely by out-of-state donors. Even seemingly local entities, like state parties, were recipients of huge influxes of outside cash. And these totals may not include spending on so-called “issue ads,” which often favor a candidate but are vaguely worded enough to avoid reporting requirements.

The Citizens United decision allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on ads supporting or opposing candidates, as long as they don’t coordinate with campaigns. The ruling had a powerful impact on federal races but also made it easier than ever for outside groups to raise and spend cash on state races.

The high court ruling invalidated prohibitions on corporate and union spending in 24 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Despite the gains by Democrats, the single most prolific source of funds used in outside spending campaigns was the Republican Governors Association (RGA). The RGA was responsible for at least $34 million of the $209 million in outside spending in the 38 states that were subject to the Center’s analysis.

Unions have been critical of the Citizens United decision in the past. In January 2012, on the second anniversary of the case, the AFL-CIO  issued a statement saying the case “seriously undermined our democracy.” According to the union’s leadership, “The Citizens United ruling further tilted the playing field in favor of the 1 percent and against the 99 percent whose voices are being drowned out by excessive corporate spending and influence.”

While Republicans have enjoyed the support of wealthy donors and business interests, the Democrats have also managed to recruit their own cast of billionaires to go along with steady support from a host of national unions.

This is the spending picture the Center’s report shows for the first time, detailing just how much union funding was a factor in 2012 state elections.

We can expect much more outside spending by all sides next year, in the 2014 elections, where some 36 state governorships are on the ballot.

Until next week,

Bill

Americans for Prosperity— the main political arm of billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch — spent a staggering $122 million last year as it unsuccessfully attempted to defeat President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of documents filed in Colorado.

That's more than the total amount the group had previously spent from its formation in 2004 through 2011. During its previous eight years of existence, Americans for Prosperity spent a combined $72 million, a review of Internal Revenue Service records indicates.

The group’s unprecedented spending in 2012is a fivefold increase over 2010, a year when a surge of conservative voters helped Republicans regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. And it represents a more than 1,600 percent increase above the $7 million it spent in 2008, when voters first elected Obama to the White House.

"When we see opportunities to engage on our issues, we go all-in," said Levi Russell, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity. "You can expect that to continue."

Organized as a “social welfare” nonprofit under Sec. 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code, Americans for Prosperity advocates for“a limited government and free markets.” While these nonprofits may legally call for the election or defeat of candidates, doing so cannot be their “primary purpose.”

Recently, Americans for Prosperity has been pushing to repeal Obama’s signature health care reform law, and it has spent millions on advertisements to hold politicians “accountable on Obamacare.”

Unlike the big-spending super PACs that have flooded the airwaves with political ads, "social welfare" nonprofits such as Americans for Prosperity — which often do the same thing — need not publicly identify their donors.

The only time these "social welfare" groups must identify a funder to the Federal Election Commission is when that donor contributes for the specific purpose of “furthering” a particular political ad — something that rarely happens.

FEC records show that Americans for Prosperity spent more than $33.5 million in 2012 — a quarter of all its spending — on ads urging viewers to vote against Obama.

It spent tens of millions more on “issue ads” that criticized politicians, including Obama and congressional Democrats, without directly urging viewers to vote against them. The group has also been a major player in state-level races.

(Update, Nov. 14, 2013, 6:34 p.m.: Documents that Americans for Prosperity filed with the state of North Carolina in September show it spent $83 million overall on "communications, ads, media." The group spent another nearly $7 million on "printing and duplication," as well as $5 million on "postage, courier, overnight" services.

The North Carolina documents also show that Americans for Prosperity spent $7 million on "salaries," $3 million on "travel," about $788,000 on "list rental" and $118,000 on "gifts and grants." The documents do not identify the beneficiaries of these grants.)

Americans for Prosperity “saw some opportunities” and “decided to push it" during 2012, said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “As long as the money is there, I imagine they will be spending pretty heavily in 2016.”

Americans for Prosperity was officially founded in 2004, and since then, its prominence has steadily grown. The group arose out of the split of an earlier Koch-backed organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which became Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. The latter group also advocates for conservative candidates and causes.

Americans for Prosperity operates 34 state chapters and claims 2.3 million activist volunteers. Its website touts support from more than 90,000 individual donors who have financially supported the group or its sister foundation, which has also seen its spending rise in recent years.

However, tax records show Americans for Prosperity has received large sums of money from other Koch-connected nonprofits such as Freedom Partners and the Center to Protect Patient Rights. Corporate interests, such as the American Petroleum Institute and tobacco giant Reynolds American, are also among Americans for Prosperity’s major donors.

Because it solicits funds in Colorado, Americans for Prosperity is required to report its national financial activities to the Colorado Secretary of State. The group is expected to file its 2012 annual tax return with the IRS by Friday.

Alan Suderman contributed to this report.

Just because you want to terminate your all-but-defunct congressional committee doesn't mean you can ignore federal regulators — particularly when you're still sitting on a truckload of debt.

So the Federal Election Commission is telling former Rep. John E. Sweeney, R-N.Y., whose congressional career ended in 2007 after now-Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., stymied his re-election bid. 

In a letter this month to Sweeney, FEC Assistant Staff Director Deborah Chacona demanded his incommunicado congressional re-election committee file a mandatory report disclosing its financial activity from July through September.  

"It is important that you file this report immediately," Chacona wrote on Nov. 1. "The failure to timely file a complete report may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action."

To date, Sweeney, who has faced a hostofpersonaltroubles since leaving Congress, has not replied to the FEC's demand, agency records show. He served jail time in 2010 after pleading guilty to driving while intoxicated for the second time in three years and now works as a lawyer at Tully Rinckey PLLC representing clients targeted by congressional investigations.

The last time Sweeney formally contacted the FEC was on June 27 when Sweeney, who serves as his own campaign trasurer, filed a report with the FEC in which he asked to terminate his committee.

Two weeks later, the FEC wrote him back. No way, an agency official said. 

"Based on information you provided in your termination report, it appears that you have not yet met the requirements for terminating your committee," Senior Campaign Finance and Reviewing Analyst Jill Sugarmanwrote, adding that he "must extinguish or settle all outstanding debts and obligations."

Sweeney's deadbeat campaign has done nothing during the past six years to retire this debt, FEC records indicate.

At the end of 2007, the committee reported $223,587.19 in debt. By mid-2013, the amount hadn't budged one cent, records show. Sweeney's committee lists 14 creditors who are collectively owed the cash.

Among them: the New Jersey-based Traz Group ($118,955) for direct mail services and Virginia-based Bellwether Consulting Group ($20,376) for event catering. Two law firms — McGuire Woods LLP and Williams & Jensen PLLC — are also owed back pay for legal services.

Sweeney did not return messages seeking comment. Stephen T. Felano, a spokesman for Tully Rinckey, directed inquiries back to Sweeney.

(Update, Nov. 15, 3:58 p.m.: In an interview this afternoon with the Albany Times-Union, Sweeney says he wasn't aware the FEC had rejected his request to terminate his congressional committee.

"I was operating under the assumption that it was closed. I consider it a nullity,” Sweeney told reporter Jordan Carleo-Evangelist. “I wasn’t aware that they had rejected our request to close, so I’m going to have to look into that.” Asked how he intends to pay off his debt, Sweeney replied, "I guess I could run for office.”)