Battle Of The Billionaires

The GOP is so beholden now to ultra-wealthy billionaire donors in a post Citizens United America that the future of the party will apparently be determined by which faction of networks of super-rich donors can buy out the most Republican politicians:  the Koch Brothers Tea Party machine, Karl Rove's disgraced but still powerful Crossroads donor network, or the new dark money on the block, Wall Street mogul Paul Singer's pro-LGBTQ, pro-immigration group, the American Opportunity Alliance.

On its face, it in some ways resembles a much smaller-scale version of Charles and David Koch’s fabled network, which brings together hand-picked operatives and politicians twice a year at tony resorts to make presentations to dozens of rich conservatives. At the conclusion of the Koch seminars, as they’re called, donors commit massive sums into a pool of cash disseminated to various Koch-backed groups for seven- and eight-figure advertising and organizing campaigns that have made them a force in Republican politics rivaling the official party.

That doesn’t appear to be the goal of Singer and his donors. While many of them — including Singer himself — have attended the Koch seminars and also maintain their own independent spending groups, their approach with the American Opportunity Alliance is more donor-centric, focusing on comparing notes about one another’s political projects and funneling limited hard-money contributions effectively.

In other words, the AOA guys are all about coordinating donations for pet projects for the corporate wing of the GOP.  It's nothing personal, just business.  At our expense, of course.

Still, the list of big-name pols expected at the American Opportunity Alliance’s upcoming Colorado gathering highlights the influence that only a few big donors can command in the post-Citizens United era, when a small group of wealthy individuals can reorder elections with just a few huge checks. That new reality has shifted some of the power and control once maintained by the parties and their candidates to factions of major donors, like the libertarian-infused Koch network on the right or the Democracy Alliance club of major liberal donors on the left.

Of course, the Democracy Alliance has only a fraction of the money that the Kochs, the AOA, or Karl Rove's boys do.  So now there's three huge groups of GOP donors, throwing hundreds of millions at Republicans to buy out state and federal elections, and virtually no hope of stopping them, or even coming close to matching them in order to fight fire with fire.

2014 is not looking good for our side, folks.