More new campaign finance regulations

The Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United campaign finance case applied to companies as well as unions as well as independent organizations such as Citizens United, but the new bill would only look at changing the rules for companies.

They are planning to unveil their bill at a press conference Thursday morning in front of the Supreme Court, and have set the goal of passing their bill by July 4 – which still might make it difficult to enact the legislation in time to affect spending on the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

The House sponsors, who will introduce their bill inside the Capitol a few hours later, have set no such timeline, but Van Hollen has said he’s hopeful the bill could be implemented in time to affect newly legal ad spending in 2010 congressional races.

The specific language of the bills is eagerly awaited by advocates of reducing the role of money in elections, some of whom have complained that the vague legislative blueprints made public in recent weeks don’t go far enough.

The bill is to include provisions restricting the types of companies that could air campaign ads and require those that did to disclose precisely how much they spent on such ads – and possibly force their CEO’s to appear in them.

The goal is partly to discourage the types of previously prohibited spending legalized when the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision ruled in favor of the conservative non-profit group Citizens United, which had argued that its free speech rights were impinged by decades of law restricting political spending by corporations, unions and other organizations.

In addition to the heightened disclosure provisions, the Van Hollen and Schumer bills would limit spending on political advertising by companies that received government bailouts from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, as well as those with government contracts or that are more than 20 percent foreign owned. . . .