Seattle City Council Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans & Education Committee 121119

Good morning.

Today is Wednesday, December 11th.

It is 9.31 a.m.

Welcome, everyone, to this regular meeting of the Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans, and Education Committee.

I'm Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez, chair of this committee, and I'm joined this morning by our newly elected and sworn in Councilmember Alex Peterson, who hails from the great district of District No. 4. Welcome to the committee, and I really appreciate your attendance this morning.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

I believe that we will have a couple of other council members joining us later this morning around 10 a.m.

for the discussion on the Clean Campaigns Act, which is Council Bill 119701. Looking forward to welcoming them when and if they're able to join us.

So before we get started, a logistical thing.

If there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

We will begin this morning with public comment after I do a quick little review of our agenda.

For those of you who are just joining us and are interested in making any sort of public comment on items that are listed on today's agenda.

There is a sign-up sheet right in the front.

Just make yourself at home, walk on up, sign in, and let us know what you are here to speak about.

I will be calling out folks individually for purposes of public testimony in just a few minutes.

So this morning, we're gonna go ahead and start with several appointments for consideration by the full council on Monday.

Really excited to have some guests with us today to be considered for the Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission.

Thank you so much to those folks for stepping up and being willing to participate on that really important commission.

I'd like to say that it's the most important commission, but I'm a little biased.

Looking forward to welcoming those folks.

I think we have about six individuals on the agenda for consideration.

to be appointed or reappointed to that commission.

And I understand not all of our nominees could be here with us, but looking forward to welcoming those who are able to join us this morning.

Our seventh and final agenda.

Item for this morning will be Council Bill 119701, the Clean Campaigns Act.

This is legislation that I have been proud to develop in partnership with Fix Democracy First and Free Speech for People to protect Seattle elections from the corruption or the appearance of corruption of big money and foreign influence.

We will have a short presentation covering the legislation from Council Central staff, and then we will have an opportunity to be joined by a panel of experts on campaign finance reform.

Joining us as part of that meeting, that discussion, will be Councilmember Darden Rice, who is the first person to champion this legislation in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she passed a similar ordinance in 2016. Really excited to remotely welcome her via our very sophisticated IT system here.

Also joining us remotely is the Chair of the Federal Elections Commission, Alan Weintraub, and Professor John Coates of Harvard Law School.

In person, we will have Cindy Black of Fix Democracy First and John Bonifaz and Ron Fine of Free Speech for People.

I want to thank these individuals all for lending us their expertise and for traveling from afar to join us at the table to have a discussion about this legislation.

And I also want to thank Eric Depusoy over there, who has been really instrumental in making sure that we can have all of the technology connected in chambers today to handle remote participation of our expert panel.

Thank you, Eric.

Really appreciate it.

Okay, so let's go ahead and get started with public comment.

As usual, each person who has signed up will get up to two minutes to provide us public testimony.

There are clocks in the front for you to self-monitor.

If you go over your two minutes, I will interrupt you and ask you to please wrap up your comments so that we can continue on through our public comment sheet and hear from all of those who have signed up.

Just so you all are aware, I have allotted only 20 minutes this morning for public testimony.

If we exceed the 20 minutes, I will go ahead and suspend public comment until the end of the committee agenda if there are folks who I didn't have an opportunity to call.

So if you signed up, you will get an opportunity to give us public comment.

It'll just be a difference of whether you get to do it at the top of the agenda or at the bottom of the agenda.

So I appreciate your cooperation and flexibility in that as we work our way through a very busy agenda this morning.

So with that being said, we'll go ahead and start the public comment period.

First up is David Haynes.

Good morning.

True democracy versus a city chapter of hypocrisy.

Remember when city council member Sally Clark left and city council bypassed the electorate?

Remember the pedophile that never should have been the mayor and two council member pretty much appointed themselves so they could try and give away more to Amazon to stay?

Remember Rob Johnson who is now co-opting a key arena endangering with a cracked unsafe rooftop?

They all were replaced without letting the electorate vote in a special election.

This bypassing of our democracy is part of the issue.

We have to have a more inclusive special election where all participating citizen voters should have a say, not city council who's part of an oppressive city chapter.

Yet city council colleagues want to cater college esprit de corps favors creating a unconstitutional law that further stalls progress for a digress into more laundered election money bypassing the democracy vouchers to compete with job creators whose employees have suffered the treasonous policies of council who have imploded our society.

Yet this law is specifically designed to only help the city council who's up for re-election in less than two years.

We need an amendment that states clearly if you're not a We need an amendment that states clearly, if you're not a citizen of the United States, you're not allowed to donate to local elections or be involved other than bearing witness to the peace it provides.

Here we are at another winter emergency for forsaken homeless and council is abusing the legislative process to help their own career instead of creating proper policies that don't implode our society, making council worry they should be overthrown of their failed leadership.

No non-citizens are allowed to give you money.

You have to reject all anonymous and non-citizen money, especially laundered through racist nonprofits.

And you have to include in this like egregious, like abrupt quickness, ranked choice because you're cheating us with lame opponents.

Perhaps maybe a second round of voting before the final vote.

Next up is Heather Kelly followed by Grace Popoff.

Good morning.

My name is Heather Kelly, and I'm the action chair and second vice president of the League of Women Voters of Seattle-King County.

I'm here today to express our enthusiastic support of the Clean Campaigns Act and to urge City Council to pass it.

The mission of the League of Women Voters is to empower voters and defend democracy, and this law would accomplish both.

I'll start with voter empowerment.

The League works tirelessly to educate voters not only about the issues on the ballot, but about the power of their vote.

Too often, our message is drowned out by louder messages communicated by big money in politics, that elections and politicians are for sale, that special interests will prevail over the common interest, and that the only way to get a meeting is to write a check.

These messages make voters feel powerless, particularly low-income voters and voters of color who've been systematically and historically disenfranchised.

We lose the benefit of their participation in our democracy when they set their ballots aside.

That weakens our city, because inevitably, those voters are affected by the decisions made here in City Hall, and they do have important perspectives to contribute that could inform your work.

When people sit out the vote because of unconstrained corporate campaign contributions, it means those contributions have tainted our politics, regardless of whether they have any corrupting influence on the candidates themselves.

That brings me to our second goal as an organization, defending democracy.

The Clean Campaigns Act accomplishes that, among other things, by insulating our elections from excessive foreign influence and imposing reporting requirements on independent expenditures.

Seattle voters have already expressed their approval for laws that promote transparency and accountability when they passed Honest Election Seattle four years ago.

Seattleites want to know who and what they're voting for.

They said that with a vote.

Please help the League of Women Voters continue to embolden voters and strengthen the political fabric of our city by passing this critical law.

Thank you.

Thank you, Heather, well done.

Okay, next up is Grace, and then we will hear from Marguerite Richard.

Good morning.

I'm intrigued by the deep fake of this video pretending that there's a council present.

Okay, the First Amendment of our Constitution sets America apart.

We have more freedom to speak our minds than most people around the world.

Yet when money is considered speech, our democracy is faced with a special challenge.

How do we make sure that one person equals one vote, that people with vast wealth do not have undue influence on our elections?

The bill you are now considering is an attempt to level the playing field for city elections.

I support this bill because its goal is so important.

I especially support the $5,000 limit of contributions to independent expenditure groups.

These groups form to escape restrictions on individual contributions.

This bill will reign them in, so please support the Clean Campaign Act.

Now, did you imagine when this building, this very posh building, was designed that a person on the second floor could not find water?

I'm betting that nobody thought of that, but I need water now and then, and I had to use the elevator or the stairs to go to the first floor cafe to find a bit of water.

That's bizarre.

Thank you.

Thank you, Grace.

I think we have some water fountains around the corner if you need water in the future, but we will talk to our facilities folks about that feedback and see if we can get some better wayfinding for folks to quench their thirst if needed.

So thank you so much for that feedback.

Okay, Marguerite, Rashard, you're up next, followed by Noah Ramirez.

Yes, I'm Ms. Richard and I love logistics.

That's a logistics question and I've come down here and talked about that situation too before.

So good luck with that one, huh?

But anyway, since you're talking about Campaign Act, I was wondering how anybody, including yourself, can violate their oath of office five times and still be seated as a council person.

So I think going into 2020 would be a good year, since it didn't happen this year, that City Hall will be rated like Buffalo, New York, because the people cannot continue to live up under this oppression, depression, suppression, and repression.

And I think that the things that people discussed on yesterday, it was supposed to be Human Rights Day, which would fall in line with the criminality that takes place constantly toward black people.

in terms of police beatings, which I was informed that a 24-year-old was recently, black female, was beat up by seven police and you are over public safety.

So it is time to end this corruption that is occurring and when it immediately happens that those names are released of these uncouth police officers that are beating people illegal and then we have to go through some system of the court system to help us to piece our lives back together after after our lives have been shattered.

And so I think it's kind of like, I don't know if it's comical, because some people really do think it's a joke that anybody would even go against the system when they're going through something egregious circumstances.

Thank you, Ms.

Richard.

Your time is up.

Next up is Noah Ramirez, and then following Noah will be Linda Brewster, and then we will hear from Ken Damond.

And then, V, if you could please check the sign-in sheet to see if any others have signed up, I'd appreciate it.

Good morning.

Thank you for allowing me to speak today.

My name is Noah Ramirez, and I'm here on behalf of the Latino Community Fund of Washington State.

I rise before you today in support of the Clean Campaigns Act, championed by the Honorable Councilmember Gonzalez.

The reach of political candidates should be earned, not bought.

When determining in which direction to vote on specific issues, elected officials should refer to the will of their constituents, not that of their corporate sponsors.

Communities of color in Seattle are constantly facing a harsh disadvantage in a political system that was built with the intention of disenfranchising their voice at all intersections of civic and political engagement.

The level of influence that the privileged wealthy individuals and massive corporations can have over how those same fighting people are governed is unfathomable.

The average person in our community is not represented with our current system, and for that reason I must say their voices, rather, our voices matter.

Our voices deserve recognition.

Our collective voices represent a more honest Seattle.

which is home to a diverse community full of people that come from many different walks of life.

By allowing big money, super PACs, and other wealthy players to influence the system, like in the most recent City Council elections, you're reinforcing the notion that our voices don't matter, that our voice doesn't deserve recognition.

We will take our power back.

The question is whether or not you will be there to support us.

Once again, thank you for allowing me to speak, and I'd like to again declare my support for the Clean Campaigns Act.

Thank you, Noah.

Next up is Linda followed by Ken.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Linda Brewster.

I'm the chair of Fix Democracy First, the organization with free speech for people that spearheaded the Clean Campaigns Act.

I also was a mega-volunteer and ultimately chair of Initiative 735, the Get Big Money Out of Elections Initiative.

So as you can see, or as you can understand, I'm totally committed to working for democracy.

I'm not a Seattle resident, and I'm actually a fairly recent American citizen, which is part also of what motivates me that I was going to stop bragging about my country, Canada, and start working really hard to achieve the values that I have for any democracy.

I do believe that this initiative will have national significance, which is why I came from Port Townsend here this morning to speak on it.

And I think the importance of democracy and one person, one vote, cannot be overestimated, and nor can the impact of money and political influence on undermining our governance, our policies, and our belief in democracy.

So please support the Clean Campaigns Act.

Thanks.

Thank you, Linda, for joining us.

Really appreciate all the work you've done over the years, and congratulations on becoming a U.S. citizen.

Okay, next up is Ken, and then we will hear from Layla Reynolds.

Good morning.

My name's Ken Damond.

I'm the co-chair of Fix Democracy First, and I'm kind of batting clean up on this issue.

Obviously, we support passage of the Clean Campaigns Act.

People in our country, and in Seattle in particular, are all wondering who our representatives are actually representing.

And a lot of people have concluded that they're representing those people who provide large amounts of money that contribute either in campaigns or outside by third party PACs to the election of our officials.

You can easily understand why somebody would draw that conclusion.

This piece of legislation has the potential to have a national impact because we do expect that it will be appealed maybe to the Supreme Court even.

And if the rulings go in the direction that we have reason to believe, this could have implications for the entire country.

And we're so glad to see Seattle, and in particular, our brave city council person, Gonzalez, to take the lead on this.

Seattle's led in so many other efforts, easy for me to say, so many other efforts to benefit and improve the way elections are conducted.

And this is yet another one.

So thank you for your support.

Thank you, Ken.

Next up is Leila Reynolds, followed by Sarah Beth Miller.

Hi.

Hi.

My name is Leela Reynolds, and I work at the Washington Bus.

And we're an organization that tries to get young people, particularly underrepresented young people, involved in the political process.

So I spend a lot of time talking to teens and college students about politics and what politics is.

And a lot of the time, what I hear first off is, I don't care about politics.

I don't understand politics.

What is politics?

I don't have a voice in politics.

But then I start talking to them about housing affordability or about climate justice, and they're like, oh, I care about that.

Yeah, the rent is too high.

And I'm like, OK, well, that is politics.

And I think a big part of that and why I'm here in support of the Clean Campaigns Act is that they feel like their voice doesn't matter because democracy is a poker game.

with a big buy-in in an undisclosed location, and they don't have any chips, and they don't have the buy-in.

And I think the reason the Washington bus really supports this act is because we love democracy vouchers, and when we talk to young people about democracy vouchers, they get really excited because they feel like they finally have something that they can actually do to contribute to the political process, like something physical.

And this is just another step in making campaigns in Seattle even more accessible and even more relatable to young voters.

So thank you, Council Member Gonzalez.

Yeah, thank you so much for being here and for the work that Washington Post does across the state.

Next up is Sarah Beth Miller, followed by Mary K. Kite.

Good morning.

Good morning.

I'm Sarah Miller, and I'm here to represent the South Seattle.

Sarah, can you just lower, you can lower that microphone down.

There you go.

Thank you.

I'm here representing the South Seattle unit of the League of Women Voters.

I only just joined the league this past April, and I joined because I was motivated by the same factors that are informing this ordinance.

profound concern about the influence of big money and foreign influence on our elections and its literal and psychological impact on our local and national democracies.

I'm also the mother of two 30-something daughters.

They're politically aware, we talk about politics a lot, but I've recently become more struck by the feeling of a creeping hopelessness that I hear from them, a sort of a maybe I'm going to just give it all up-edness that I hear.

I'm here to urge you and the Seattle City Council to begin the process of saving my daughters and others from hopelessness about our democracy.

And to paraphrase Joe Biden's comment to Mr. Putin, Seattleites should decide elections, not big money and foreign influence.

Thank you so much.

Next up is Mary Kay, followed by Alice Wolt, and then we will hear our last speaker who signed up, Martin Talaris.

Good morning.

Good morning.

I'm also here representing the League of Women Voters, the South End unit, and I'm very, very happy to be here.

I was born on the 4th of July.

My parents and my grandparents were very active in local politics and I somehow grew up thinking that my opinion and my vote mattered and that one person really could make a difference in our country.

how sad it has become.

The Clean Campaign Act aligns exactly with the League's mission and values as an organization, empowering voters and defending democracy.

Our Seattle voters want to know that their votes count and that the money that flows from outside interests will not be the deciding factor in our city elections.

As I was campaigning for a candidate several years ago, I was struck by the fact that so many people, whether it was at Starbucks or at their front doors, didn't think their vote mattered.

And it made me so sad that we have come to this in our country that our citizens don't think they count.

So I urge you to adopt this Clean Campaign Act.

Lorena Gonzalez, thank you so much for bringing this opportunity to us.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for being with us.

Okay, next up is Alice, and then we will conclude with Martin.

Alice Walt, I live at 6514 12th Avenue Northwest, and I'm here this morning to thank you, Council Member Gonzalez, for introducing this ordinance.

As the former executive director of, first, Washington Public Campaigns that then became Fix Democracy First, I've been working on this issue for a long time, along with disclosure, transparency, and many other issues that affect our democracy.

This one, though, is so important.

The money, getting money, big money out of politics, and especially the kind of special interests that can buy elections.

Just seeing this past campaign where we had Amazon dumping a million dollars and more into campaigns.

It really disappointed me, for one, but many, many others in this city.

As a candidate in the past, I believe that it is so much more important for candidates to talk to people about the policies that they believe in rather than asking for money constantly.

The other thing with these independent expenditures, most of that money goes into negative campaigning.

And it's another reason why people don't vote, people think Why do I care?

They believe lies.

And so, thank you again for introducing the Clean Campaigns Act, and we'll be there to support you all the way.

Thank you, Ellis, really appreciate it.

Okay, next up is Martin.

Hi, thank you for holding this important event.

And I want to personally thank you, Representative, for all the work you've done for this.

My name is, for the record, is Martin Tallarico.

Sorry, I misread it.

I apologize.

Hazard of this job.

I'm also a recently displaced financial services worker here in Seattle.

I live in West Seattle at the Alaska Junction.

I've worked with a number of these people through the years in collecting signatures for, you know, when we all voted to ask Congress or ask our state legislators to call for an amendment to the Constitution, which tends to be an elephant in the room when I think of it.

I think it's very important that we have the discussion of amending the Constitution for free and fair elections, and that it can be limited, it can be monitored, and it's our only hope that we have.

Congress is broken.

I took part in the Democracy Spring March in 2016 after my horror with Citizens United and everything I saw and nothing being done.

And that was soon after.

What a lot of people don't know is Congress did act and they wrote bills in response to that that are still sitting in the Senate leader's desk.

And it's not getting done.

Congress is broken.

We have to go around Congress.

The only way we can do that is through the states.

The states can call for a convention just like that Congress can call for a convention.

We never amended the Constitution in our lifetime.

It's time that we do it because the forces out there are great.

And we have to, you all know, we have to approach them from all angles.

And that's what I want to say.

And I want to thank you for the work you're doing.

And I also want to say that I've been fortunate to go in protest.

A lot of people can't do that.

And wherever I go, people always mention Seattle.

And it's because of all of us and us fighting for what's right.

And I thank you for continuing that fight.

Thank you, Martin.

Appreciate you being here.

Okay, well that was our last person signed up for public testimony.

We're just slightly over the 20 minutes, but we only had a couple of extra folks, so I thought we'd just get her done, so I appreciate the indulgence.

Is there anyone else who intended to sign up but didn't get a chance to sign up just so that I have a sense of...

Ma'am, do you intend to stay until the very end, or would you like to provide your public testimony now?

Okay, sure, come on up.

And then the only thing I'd ask is that you make sure that after you're done with your testimony, you just jot your name down for the record on that form up in front.

Thank you.

I just wanted to say for the record, I'm on the board of the League of Women Voters, and our board voted to support this.

We think it's very well written and it has real implication for what's going to happen across the country.

If this can happen here, we can start building from the bottom up.

It's clear that that's the only way we're going to really affect change in our country.

And so I think that we need to remember we're doing this for not just the people in our city and state, but for an example that can lead the rest of our country in this direction.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

Just please make sure to jot your name down there in the front before you walk away.

I appreciate it.

Is there anyone else who wanted to give us public testimony before we go ahead and move into our items of business?

Okay, seeing no one, I will go ahead and close out our public comment period.

We managed to get through all those who signed up, so really appreciate your cooperation with that.

And also just really want to express on behalf of the city council and this committee our gratitude for all of those of you in the audience who showed up today to be here for this really important conversation.

I know that many of you have been what I affectionately refer to as democracy warriors over the many, many, many past years.

And I recognize that we here on the City Council in many ways, by introduction of this bill, stand on your shoulders and the work that you have done historically in this space.

on various campaigns to really defend our democratic process and to make sure that elected officials like myself and Councilmember Peterson are truly accountable to the people who have elected us to these positions and not to big dollar donors and to corporate interests who may not have the same philosophy and principles in mind that we that we have committed to bring to City Hall on behalf of real people living and struggling in our communities.

So really appreciate all of the work that you all have historically done and certainly appreciate your engagement on this issue and look forward to your continued engagement on this issue as we continue to not just advocate and fight for the passage of the Clean Campaigns Act, but once we shift into defending the Clean Campaigns Act.

So thank you all so much for joining us.

Okay, so we're going to go ahead and jump into our items of business.

We'll go ahead and begin with Agenda Items 1 through 6, which are the appointments to the Immigrant Refugee Commission.

So these fine folks are going to work their way up to the table.

And as you do that, I'll ask Vy Nguyen, who is clerking the committee today, to please read the short title into the record for all Agenda Items 1 through 6.

Agenda Items 1-6, Appointments 1503-1505 and Appointments 1513-1515.

Appointment of Denise Guerrero Harvey as a member of the Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission for a term to July 31, 2020. Appointments of Johnson Bagwin and Karen Arlette Gomez Lopez as members of the Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission for terms to January 31st, 2021. Appointments of Elise Aiden and Karina San Juan-Gaiden as members of the Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission for terms to July 31st, 2021. And reappointment of Sholani Marissa Vaniason-Khan as members of the Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission for a term to July 31st, 2021 for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you, V. All right, let's go ahead and go through a quick round of introductions, and I'm gonna hand it over to Catherine for introductory remarks, and then we will go ahead and move forward.

So just first and last name, and for you, Catherine, your title.

I'm Catherine Cortez.

I'm the Finance and Operations Manager for the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.

Johnson, Immigrant and Refugee Commission.

Elise Aiden.

Karen Gamez, Immigrant and Refugee Commission.

Denise Guerrero-Harvey, Immigrant and Refugee Commission.

I'm Peg Lea, I'm the staff liaison for the commission.

Jose Manuel Vazquez, Community Engagement and Program Specialist for OIRA.

Great, welcome all to the table this morning.

Looking forward to hearing from our nominees.

So Catherine, why don't you go ahead and kick us off?

Thank you, Council Member.

I'll just give a very quick introduction of the four commissioner appointees that we have with us here today.

First is Karen Gámez.

Karen came to the U.S. from Mexico at the age of three, graduated from the University of Washington in 2018. She's been a leader with the student organization Purple Group, where she fundraised scholarships for undocumented students and leadership without borders.

Karen also organizes an annual toy drive for children who have parents detained in the Tacoma Immigration Detention Center, which is now a small community organization called Relief and Empowerment for Immigrant Families.

We believe all of our commissioners are going to be great additions.

I'll just say that sort of overall.

I should have said that to begin.

And I just wanted to give you a little bit about them, and then they'll introduce themselves.

Second up, we have Denise Guerrero Harvey, the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants.

As an education professional, she's taught history to English language learners in high school and currently serves as an academic advisor at the University of Washington, working with many immigrant and undocumented students.

Next we have Johnson Bach Nguyen, born in Saigon, Vietnam.

Johnson moved to Seattle in 1997. He has a bachelor's degree and is working on his master's in public administration, both from the University of Washington.

Johnson's been a student leader of several organizations and worked as a preschool teacher, following his passion for investing in early education.

And finally, with us today, we have Elaise Aden, a Somali-American activist who came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1995. She studied at the University of Washington and American University Law School.

Elaise has worked locally in civic engagement and a range of other activities supporting immigrant communities.

She's a co-founder of the Eat with Muslims Project to counter Islamophobia and a winner of Congressman Adam Smith's 2018 Champion of Justice Award.

Great.

Okay.

Thank you so much for being with us.

So why don't we go ahead and just go down the line and you can tell us a little bit more about yourself, anything you think we should know about you.

We obviously have had access to your materials and we've both read through those and are really familiar with your qualifications.

make certain that all of you are very, you are all very, very highly qualified to serve on this commission.

But just give us a little bit more context about who you are and what you hope to be able to accomplish on the commission once you're appointed.

Should we go ahead and start with you, Joseph?

Hi, so again, I'm Johnson Nguyen.

I'll be wrapping up my first year with the Immigrant and Refugee Commission, and I'm looking to join for another term of two years.

And so when I first joined the commission, I really believed in public service and the power of local politics to be able to empower and raise up the local Immigrant and Refugee Commission.

In the past year, I feel like all of that was confirmed again, not only from the work within the city, but from the folks I got the chance to work with on the commission, they were all incredibly intelligent, graceful, and had so much poise in the way that they presented themselves and in the way that they engaged not only with city officials or with departments, but with the communities themselves.

And so I'm just joining the commission again to really continue on that path and to really hold my belief that immigrant and refugee community members have a right to healthy, happy, and fulfilling lives.

Thank you, Johnson, appreciate it.

All right.

Hello, my name is Elyse again.

Thank you, Council Member Gonzalez and our awesome OIRA group, because yes.

I really want to join this commission because as a Somali American, as somebody who's been here in the Seattle region for 15 years and seen the extreme change, I can only imagine if you've been here longer.

But I really want to make sure that I'm lifting up the voices of my community.

and making sure that we don't have the silos amongst all of our immigrant refugee communities.

How can we share information?

How can we lift up our voices?

How can I use my legal expertise to make sure that we have more access to housing, environmental justice?

A lot of our communities are facing pollution and the effects of climate change.

And I just, I want to make sure that I'm serving, you know, and that's, this is a really important step to making sure that I have the ability to bring up my peoples.

So, yes, thank you.

That's great.

Thank you.

Hi.

So, I think that, as was mentioned in my bio, I was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. at a young age.

I've lived in California for many years and then lived in Washington for many years, predominantly in the Kent area.

So growing up, I was always in very diverse spaces and very Latino or places with people from around the world.

And I think growing up in a low income area with low income parents, I think I have worked in a lot of different jobs.

So I've worked cleaning houses, I've worked in housekeeping hotels, I've worked as a waitress for years.

I know I look young, but I have worked in a lot of different things.

I've worked cleaning airplanes in the airport.

And so I think that throughout my, work experience I've always seen, and in my family, in my community, I've always seen the lack of access to and disenfranchisement from a lot of community resources and just resources in general.

So I always thought it was so important to be able to access, you know, working rights, labor rights, and access to legal representation.

As the oldest daughter, I was always the translator, the interpreter, the social worker, right?

So I always felt that it was really important for myself to be open about my undocumented status because if I didn't do it, I wouldn't be able to access resources for my family and for my community.

But I graduated high school in 2013 before WASFA passed, so I think that has really shaped my experience.

But in general, overall, I just want to see more representation.

I want to see people in commissions that are actually in the community that they're serving.

And I hope to see, be able to help my community and provide more resources for them.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Hi, good morning.

So I'd like to just share a little bit about myself and why I want to be in this commission.

So I am the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants, and my parents arrived in this country 40 years ago.

And they were undocumented, and I didn't know this until I was much, much older.

My parents were fortunate enough to become residents and then later citizens, but there are so many other family members of mine that didn't have that privilege.

So I know what it's like to live in a mixed immigration status family, and I also understand the fear that many folks continue to live with today, given our current political climate.

On a professional level, I have been very intentional of working very closely with immigrant and refugee communities, both documented and undocumented.

As a high school teacher and as a current college advisor, my focus has always been to work and help students as a whole, right?

Because a student cannot be successful in a classroom if they're worried about where they're going to live, where they're going to eat, and what is going to happen to their families.

And so I have dedicated my life to be able to assist and to remove barriers when possible and to advocate when possible and to connect my students and their families with resources.

So students and their families are able to succeed and reach their academic and professional goals.

This work is personal, right, and political.

And if I can be of service, if I can lend who I am, I'm happy and honored to do it.

I really look forward to working with the commission, and I know that together we can support, empower, and strengthen our immigrant and refugee communities in the city of Seattle.

So, thank you.

Thank you, well said.

So as we can tell, this is a very qualified and motivated group of candidates for us to consider today.

I'm really excited to be able to have an opportunity to do that before the end of the year and just wanna take a moment to open up an opportunity for questions.

If Council Member Peterson, you have any questions or comments, would welcome those now.

Good morning.

Hi, good morning.

Just comments.

We reviewed all your background materials and like Chair Gonzales said, very qualified.

Thank you for your willingness to serve.

The commission's really important.

A lot of the best ideas originate from the boards and commissions that we have.

So look forward to your service and would like to, you know, move the first six items on the agenda for approval.

Great.

Second.

Any other information we should consider before I call this to a vote?

No, I don't believe so.

Okay, great.

Well, thank you all so much for being with us.

So I will go ahead and call this for a vote.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

No opposition?

The ayes have it.

So your nominations will move forward to the full council this Monday, December 16th.

Yay!

And you do not have to be present on Monday, so please don't feel compelled to join us at 2 p.m At the City Council meeting on Monday, but we will consider it at that time and I expect that it'll go through with with flying colors So thank you so much more more importantly for your willingness to serve this is As we look through your resumes, we know that this is just another way for you to serve because many of you have been serving and advocating for the immigrant refugee community in our city and across the state for much longer than this period of time.

And so really want to recognize and appreciate the work that you all do and the experiences that you bring to the conversations that we continue to have.

at the city about how to make sure that we continue to be a welcoming city and how we can continue to invest in our immigrant and refugee communities to make sure that we are empowered and resilient and are able to advocate for ourselves and our families and our needs is such critically important work.

And we know that 2020 is not gonna be an exception.

It's part of the reason why I was really excited to work with members of the immigrant refugee a community who really highlighted the need for additional resources to be able to do some of that empowerment and advocacy work.

So I was really excited to have the full council support on a $375,000 investment to go directly towards those efforts and really appreciate OIRA's partnership and great thinking in making sure that we get those investments right so that it's the best use of dollars for the best purpose and the greatest need.

So looking forward to making sure that the Commission is aware of that investment and that we have the benefit of your expertise as we continue to develop that program.

So thank you all so much for being with us.

Thank you.

Okay, so we are going to transition into our last agenda item, which is the Clean Campaigns Act.

If you are here to present on this issue, I'd invite you to join us at the table while Vee reads this into the record.

And if there's a short title, you can read the short title, Vee.

Agenda item seven, Council Bill 119701, an ordinance related to elections.

limiting independent expenditures by foreign influence corporations and contributions to independent expenditure committees and clarifying reporting requirements for briefing and discussion.

Excellent.

And then, Lish, you're going to kick us off, right?

So you're going to run the PowerPoint presentation if there is one?

Yes.

I think there is one.

Excellent.

Uh-oh.

B. Eric, somebody?

SOS?

There's a password being asked for, which I've actually never seen.

All right, there we go, okay.

So let's, as folks settle in, let's go ahead and start with a round of introductions.

For those of you who have not been at the table with us before, you gotta make sure you get these microphones extra close to your face in order for them to pick up your voice and your microphones should be on, but if they are not projecting, there's a little gray button on the stem and the green light should be on and that'll signal to you.

that it's on.

So let's do a quick round of introductions, and then I'm gonna hand it over to Lish, who's gonna walk us through a presentation on the nuts and bolts of this bill.

Please.

I'm Ron Fine.

I'm the legal director of Free Speech for People, a national nonpartisan organization, nonprofit.

I'm John Bonifaz.

I'm the president of Free Speech for People.

I'm Cindy Black, the executive director of Fix Democracy First.

Lish Whitson, Seattle City Council Central Staff.

I'm Albert Altshuler.

I'm a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School.

Well, thank you all so much for joining us.

I know that many of you have traveled from afar.

And on the phone, I know that we have some folks as well.

And we will make sure to introduce you folks on the phone.

As soon as Lish is done with his presentation, we'll go ahead and ask those who are joining us on the phone to unmute themselves so that they can introduce themselves and we can begin with an expert panel presentation from folks who are joining us on the phone.

So why don't we go ahead and get going with Lish.

And then at the conclusion of his presentation, we'll go ahead and take an opportunity to see if any of us have any questions or comments.

And then I will open it up for the folks on the phone.

Lish.

Great.

And I'm going to rush through this.

Please stop me if you have questions.

But really the purpose of today's briefing is to hear from the experts.

Yeah.

And just so you know, Council Member Peterson, Lish is a fast talker.

Okay.

So I'm going to talk about existing conditions, what we saw in terms of contributions and independent expenditures in 2019, and Seattle's current campaign finance regulations, and then what the Clean Campaigns Act includes.

The next three slides present a snapshot on campaign spending.

The final filing date for the 2019 election season was yesterday, so these numbers don't reflect the final numbers, and I'll update them when we have the final numbers.

This table compares spending for and against general election candidates over the last 10 years.

And as you can see, 2019 we saw a significant increase in independent expenditures in Seattle campaigns.

In 2011, there were no independent expenditures.

This year, there was over $4 million spent on general election campaigns, more than that spent on all campaigns, including people who did not proceed past the primary.

That was led by Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy, but many other PACs also received significant contributions.

And the case, or Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy, contributions and expenditures were led by donations from one corporation.

laws include a number of key terms that are terms of art for election laws.

I'm not going to go through these, but just know that, for example, person has a very broad definition when we're talking about campaign finance regulations.

Seattle has Campaign contribution limits that depend on whether or not a candidate wants to participate in the Democracy Voucher Program.

Candidates not collecting Democracy Vouchers can receive contributions up to $500, and most candidates who do participate in the Democracy Voucher Program have a limit of $250.

There are no limits on contributions to political committees rather than candidates.

CL has no current regulations related to foreign contributions, but federal law does provide some restrictions on foreign donations.

Domestic subsidiaries of foreign contributions are eligible to contribute, and there is no restriction based on foreign ownership of a company outside of the federal regulations.

Advertisers taking money for commercial advertisements for political campaigns must maintain documents and books in account for three years from the time of the election.

And our Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission enforces our regulations.

There is a fine of up to $5,000 and return of contribution for most Campaign contribution regulation violations, illegal contributions can result in fines of up to two times the contribution amount or $5,000 in return of the contribution, whichever is greater.

If a court finds that the violation probably affected the election, the most significant impact would be overturning that election.

The Clean Campaigns Act adds a number of new definitions to the code and then regulations that rely on those definitions.

In particular, independent expenditure committees are regulated.

There's not a distinction in the current code between political committees that contribute to candidates and independent expenditure committees.

And there's a new concept of a limited contribution committee, which is a political committee that receives a large number of small donor contributions.

The proposed Clean Campaigns Act would limit contributions to independent expender committees for sale campaigns up to $5,000 per person.

There would be no limit on contributions from limited contributor committees, but again, those committees have limits on how much people can contribute to them.

A number of new definitions related to foreign influence corporations, and the Clean Campaigns Act states that foreign influence Corporations may not make independent expenditures or contribute to independent expenditure committees.

And corporations that are seeking to contribute to an independent expenditure committee must declare that they are not foreign-influenced.

The Clean Campaigns Act also includes new reporting requirements, expands the amount of information that a commercial advertiser must keep on record related to commercial advertising and who's placed it, and it adds a new definition for qualified public communications, which are political advertisements that occur outside of the election context and are intended to influence legislation.

Any questions?

All right.

Thank you, Lish, for that presentation.

This is an opportunity for council members, and I want to welcome Council Member Bagshaw for joining us.

Thank you for being here.

Do you have any questions for Lish on the bill as introduced or the existing framework of our campaign laws?

No questions?

Okay.

Lish, thank you so much for the presentation.

Really appreciate it.

I know that we will have a special committee meeting next week, so we will have an opportunity to queue up any additional questions or identify issues for discussion at next week's special committee meeting.

That'll be December 19th.

at 9 30 in the morning.

Okay, so that will be an opportunity council members for you to work directly with Lish on identifying any potential issues that should be queued up with potential options for amendment considerations, which will be taken up on January 7th.

So Lish is at the ready, and I really want to appreciate his work thus far on this bill.

He even helped support some of the work that we were doing with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission during the budget process, and I really, really appreciate the fact that he was doing double duty at that point as well, so thank you, Lish.

Okay, so we are going to go ahead and begin our expert panel conversation now.

We have a few folks on the phone.

There they are.

So we will go ahead and do a quick round of introductions from our guests on the phone.

We're going to start with Councilmember Rice.

So Councilmember Rice, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself first.

And then walk us through your remarks, and then we'll continue through the line of our other special guest, which is the Federal Elections Commission, Commissioner Weintraub.

And then we also have Professor Coates.

So please, Council Member Rice, thank you so much for joining us and for the work that you did in St. Pete.

And just got to make sure that you are unmuted so we can hear you.

There you are.

We can hear you now.

Thank you.

Thank you so much Chairwoman Gonzales for this opportunity and congratulations and hello to Council Member Alex Peterson.

And I'd like to say hello to other people who are calling in and sitting at the table.

Many of you are people who we worked with before here in St.

Petersburg and it's nice to see the familiar faces.

I'm Darden Rice.

I am on my second, midway through my second term on city council at the city of St. Petersburg in Florida.

What I will be talking about today is our efforts in the year and a half effort that we went through to ultimately pass our ordinance, which is very similar to the one that you're looking at today.

So I look forward to, after we go through the round of introductions, talking about what we did here in St. Pete and answering any questions about our experience with our own anti-Super PAC campaign finance reform ordinance.

Hi.

Would you like me to just introduce myself or do you want my opening statement now?

Let's do an introduction.

My name is Ellen Weintraub.

I'm the chair of the Federal Election Commission.

And maybe just to complete the introductions, I'm Professor John Coates.

at Harvard Law School and have focused on corporate law principally in my career and have only in the last, well, 10 or 15 years been sort of dragged somewhat reluctantly into Commissioner Weintraub's world because corporations used to be relatively reluctant to enter into campaign Finance, they, as you know, are increasingly, unfortunately, active.

And so the intersection of the two worlds is where I find myself increasingly.

So happy to be here.

Thank you for inviting me.

Okay, and then we want to do one last introduction.

Did Commissioner Weintraub already go?

Okay, sorry.

I had to step out for just a moment.

So we'll go back to Councilmember Rice so that we can hear from you, Councilmember, on your experiences leading this effort in St. Pete.

Take it away.

All right, thank you so much.

So for those of you, just for a little bit of background, St. Petersburg is on the west coast of Florida.

We are sort of a sister city to Tampa and part of the Tampa Bay region.

We're the fifth largest city in Florida.

We have a population of 260,000.

A lot of people describe us that St. Pete is to Florida like Austin is to Texas.

We have a strong mayor form of government and we have eight city council members, each of us who have our individual districts that we take residence in, but we're all elected in the citywide general election.

Prior to getting elected to council back in 2013, I was the president of the League of Women Voters of St. Petersburg and held that position for a number of years.

I bring a pretty strong background and solid commitment to good government issues, fair and clean elections, voter protection, voter registration, and citizen public engagement.

So I came into office as a pretty strong, your basic good democracy nerd.

One of the first things I started working on was actually to limit to reduce the maximum contribution cap, which was state law at the time, the state of Florida had allowed the maximum contribution to local elections be increased from $500 to $1,000 per entity.

I thought it was a pretty modest reform to propose that we actually pull that back down to a $500 cap.

We also looked at issues such as different types of public financing of elections and our own voucher program.

And unfortunately, although all of these ideas were politely received, they died on the vine and it was difficult for me to get the majority support I needed for my colleagues.

They weren't stirred to action because the feeling was that what would be the point of enacting any of these local measures if it was so easy for someone to just simply go around those local laws and contribute unlimited amounts to a super PAC?

So I gave that a lot of thought and we ended up coming back later with our ordinance to address the influence of big money and super PACs in local elections.

In August 2014, our council unanimously supported a resolution to support a move to amend.

And that was an opportunity for us to express our values about the way we felt about our position on Citizens United and big money and politics.

And this resolution ultimately became, is a very effective organizing tool I was able to later work with the same group of people who brought the resolution to us, and this same group of community leaders also connected me to the great people at Free Speech for People.

And Free Speech for People was definitely aligned with the people in my community, the League of Women Voters, myself, on on what we wanted to do for campaign finance reform, and they helped provide invaluable assistance in crafting a legally sound ordinance, as well as connecting us to subject matter experts, some of the best legal minds in the country, and indeed many of the people that you have there with you today to help us answer any questions that we had about the process of passing this ordinance.

So we spent about 15 months deliberating this ordinance.

We had multiple meetings, two committee of the wholes, two public hearings, a number of community-wide panel discussions, including a panel discussion at our local law school.

We had a group of our citizens, dozens of citizens that came in to speak at open forum to express support for the bill and why.

And we were joined by very strong community support organized by our neighborhood associations, the League of Women Voters, SEIU, a number of environmental organizations and social service organizations.

In St. Pete's case, We passed our ordinance prophylactically.

We saw the threat that super PACs and the corruption of big money was bringing to the national and the state level.

And we decided it was really a matter of time before it was going to land at our door.

So we thought it was prudent to take proactive measures to keep big money out of our local elections.

In fact, at the very same time, that our council was deliberating on fingerprint background checks for Uber drivers.

Uber was putting $9 million into a referendum in Austin, Texas to overturn almost the same exact ordinance that the Austin City Council had passed.

And as we work with our community, it was very clear that from every corner of the community, people expressed to us that we didn't want our housing regulations to be written by Airbnb.

We didn't want our public safety laws to be written by Uber or for the NRA for that matter.

And we didn't want some of our tools to address affordable housing such as inclusionary zoning to be kind of wiped out by the influence of the realtor's organization.

We also depend on tourism.

We don't have a state income tax, so we definitely don't want to see the fossil fuel industry writing the laws that protect us and protect our clean shores from the threat of offshore oil drilling.

So it was clear that there were loopholes in the federal laws that enabled us to fully protect ourselves from the influence of big money if we did not write this ordinance.

And luckily, a majority of my colleagues and I saw that one of the best ways to protect ourselves was to really step forward and lead the way with being one of the first municipalities to write a ordinance like this.

We feel like we're on pretty good grounds, constitutionally speaking.

The $5,000 limit from corporations is commensurate with other federal case law.

And the law on forbidding money from foreign nationals is not complicated, and it's pretty straightforward.

So requiring that any corporation that gives over $5,000 to a PAC must affirm that there's a very low threshold of foreign nationals on their board seems pretty reasonable.

And we're confident that this is a constitutional ordinance that we are happy to serve, and we will defend.

The ordinance was passed two years ago.

After it went into effect, we've only had one local election take place, and that was our city council election that took place at the same time as yours last November.

It's an off-year election.

There were four odd-number city council districts up for reelection, and we did not see any activity of anyone trying to go over the $5,000 limit.

We have not been sued or challenged and have not received any official questions challenging this.

It may come up perhaps in a couple of years.

We're going to have a mayoral election in 2021, and it's certainly going to be a high-profile election.

And that might be a time where We might see some sort of opposition, but so far it's been pretty quiet and we've had strong support from our mayor and from our community at large.

Great, thank you.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much, Council Member Rice.

Really appreciate you taking the time this morning for us and early afternoon, I believe, for yourself to join us via video to walk us through your, all's experience as being the first city in the nation to pass a very similar ordinance.

Really appreciate all of your work and and your accessibility to me and my staff as we have been deliberating this issue and looking at it over the many past several months.

So I want to provide my colleagues an opportunity.

I want to recognize that Council Member O'Brien has joined us at the table.

He sat as far away from us as he possibly could.

I will not be personally offended.

But colleagues, any questions or comments for Council Member Rice?

Council Member Bagshaw.

Thank you.

Council Member Rice, thank you so much for all your work.

Thank you for weighing in and being part of it today.

I appreciate it.

I'm Sally Bagshaw.

I am one of the council members who has been here for 10 years and I've got about another week to go.

So I am here in support of Council Member Gonzalez and really appreciate it.

everybody here who's at the table.

A question I have, and I have to smile because when you started listing off the companies, whether it's Uber or the oil companies or the Airbnb issues, all of these we're dealing with as well.

Do you have any advice as far as how, as a community, you got the word out, got support for your, what did you say, 260,000 population?

to get the full support that you did, no lawsuits, at least on this first year with the first campaigns?

Yes.

That is a great question, Commissioner.

I think that one of the things that was really going for us is the public is not in support of this type of influence of big money in elections.

We've seen the impact that this has on the federal level.

and on the state level, and we certainly didn't want to see it, we didn't want to see our city become a playground for super PACs.

And so I think that message was very strong.

We worked with a great team of people that were, I think, very smart at showing how some of this, some of the super PAC activity impacted us on the local level.

And I think people, and certainly there's liberal super PACs, there's conservative super PACs, but I think on the local level, people really did not like the idea of corporations having such strong influence with maybe even picking the representatives who sit at the table, much less writing our laws.

So that seemed to have a very strong appeal in St. Petersburg.

I will tell you that when this discussion first started, I did have a lot of pushback from our legal staff.

And St. Pete has a great legal team, but we are a mid-sized city, and our attorneys are hardwired to keep us from doing anything that might get us sued.

And we don't have the same level of expertise, and I don't think anybody would expect a city to have attorneys on staff who are constitutional and election law experts.

And that's why working with Free Speech for People was so effective, because it really helped us bring that expertise into the room.

Once we had the mayor on board, it helped us work a little bit more with our legal team and encouraging them to be more solution-oriented and to be problem solvers, rather than just putting obstacles in our way and putting the fear of God in our minds about getting sued.

It really came down to the fact that my colleague stood up and said that we can't be stopped from doing what's the right thing to do because we're afraid of being sued.

And I think that that type of courage and commitment is what won the day.

Well done.

Thank you for that.

Great.

Thank you.

Any colleagues, any other questions from you for Council Member Rice?

Okay, well, it looks like that is all of the questions from our council members here at the table.

Council Member Rice, I know that you have other obligations, so we will say goodbye to you at this point for now.

Look forward to staying engaged with you over the next several weeks.

as we continue to work on our legislation, but really have truly appreciated your perspective and your guidance and your counsel as we continue to deliberate through this, and really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us.

So greetings to you and to all of your constituents in St. Petersburg, and thank you so much for all the work that you've done in this space.

Thank you, and I look forward to working with you, and I'll be talking to you soon.

Yes.

Bye-bye.

OK, we're going to go ahead and move through the rest of our panel.

We are now going to hear from Chair Weintraub and Professor Coates, specifically on the issues related to foreign influence and corporate thresholds in policymaking.

And I'll go ahead and hand it over to you folks to lead us through the conversation on this particular piece.

And I believe, Chair Weintraub, are you going to kick us off?

I believe so.

Great.

Take it away, please.

Good morning.

Madam Chairwoman, members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify regarding this proposed ordinance.

The Seattle City Council is widely renowned for its leadership on campaign finance reform issues.

I am a particularly big fan of your democracy vouchers, one of the most exciting reforms to emerge anywhere in the country in the past few years.

I want to focus my remarks on the provisions that would require a corporation seeking to influence Seattle collections to certify that it is not what the ordinance terms a foreign-influenced corporation.

I want to assure you today that while the foreign-influenced provisions you are considering will build upon your leading-edge reputation for campaign finance reform, these proposed provisions nonetheless fit comfortably with an existing federal statutory law and Supreme Court precedent.

What you are considering here is the sort of reform that may only succeed at the local and state levels at the moment, as ideological opposition to campaign finance law enforcement has effectively paralyzed both the Federal Election Commission and Congress.

Fortunately, state and local governments across the country are stepping into the breach and leading the way with innovative solutions to campaign finance problems.

The provisions you are considering are consistent with an approach I laid out in an op-ed for the New York Times that described a new way to read the Citizens United decision together with the foreign national political spending ban.

In a nutshell, I noted that since the Citizens United majority protected the First Amendment rights of corporations as, quote, associations of citizens, and held that a corporation's right to participate in elections flows from the collective rights of its individual shareholders to participants.

It follows that the limit on the rights of a corporation's shareholders must also flow to the corporation.

And one of the most important campaign finance limits we have is that foreign nationals are absolutely barred from spending directly or indirectly in U.S. elections at any political level, federal, state, or city.

It thus defies logic to allow groups of foreign nationals or foreign nationals in combination with American citizens to fund political spending through corporations.

You cannot have a right collectively that you do not have individually.

Accordingly, the proposed ordinance seeks to ensure that only those corporations owned and influenced by people who have the right to participate in your election are doing so.

Two years ago, I was pleased to support St. Petersburg City Council Member Darden Rice in her efforts to pass this approach into law in her city, and I am delighted that she was able to illuminate your discussion today.

Seattle's adoption of this very similar measure would give major momentum to this fresh approach to corporate political spending.

The heart of your proposed ordinance definition of a foreign influence corporation is 1 percent ownership by one foreign owner or 5 percent ownership by more than one foreign owner.

This might feel like a very tight standard, but I would ask you to keep in mind that you're not working your way down from a 100 percent or 50 percent foreign ownership standard.

You're working your way up from the zero foreign influence standard that is a strict reading of federal law would suggest.

The risks addressed by this measure are not theoretical.

Earlier this year, reporters used FEC filings to uncover $1.3 million in illegal foreign nations to a super PAC rooted through APIC, an American subsidiary of a foreign corporation.

And as a result, the commission issued the largest penalty in one matter in the post-Citizens United era.

Had that company, APIC, been required to sign the certifications required by the measure before you, their illegal behavior may well have been deterred.

Again, I am delighted that the Seattle City Council is moving forward to address this key campaign finance issue at a moment when the federal government is unable to do so.

By passing this ordinance, you will be doing not just Seattle, but also Washington and your country a great service.

You will set an example that can be followed by others at the local, state, and hopefully someday federal level.

I thank you for considering this measure.

I thank you for the opportunity to speak before you today, and I welcome your questions.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Really appreciate it.

You have a tremendous record in chairing the FEC and in speaking very eloquently and clearly on what is otherwise an incredibly dense and complicated area of constitutional law.

So I really appreciate it.

And as a lawyer myself who practiced constitutional law for 10 years, It makes my heart go pitter patter as we're having this conversation because I get to access a part of my brain that I don't always get to access as a council member.

So really appreciate you being with us.

Wanted to provide an opportunity for folks to ask any questions or provide comments to Chair Weintraub.

on her presentation.

Council Member Bagshaw.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I really appreciate it.

I'm Sally Bagshaw.

I'm a council member here.

I'd like to ask you a little bit about your vision.

I liked what you said about a corporation cannot have a right collectively that they do not have as individuals.

What would you say or how would you recommend us going forward to make sure that we are not in any constitutional violation if we are able to say or to do what you recommended, the 1% ownership or a combination of 5% ownership for multiple owners.

How do we make sure that we're not running an unnecessary risk?

Well, I think that this issue has been resolved by the Supreme Court in some sense.

The federal law contains a very broad foreign national ban on spending.

And it has been contested.

It was contested in very sympathetic circumstances, not by corporations, but by individuals who were living and working in this country from sort of friendly foreign nations, from Canada and from Israel, countries we consider allies.

They had spent very little money.

They wanted to print up some flyers at Kinko and hand them out in the park and make about $300 worth of contributions.

And the D.C.

courts, which were upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision by none other than now Justice Kavanaugh, said that those kinds of laws against foreign influence are constitutional, that they are consistent with other laws on the Constitution.

In particular, in this Blumen decision the court held over the last four decades the First Amendment issues raised by campaign finance laws have been the subject of great debates involving all three branches of national government.

This case does not implicate those debates.

Rather, this case raises a preliminary and foundational question about the definition of the American political community, and in particular the role of foreign citizens in the U.S. electoral process.

And the bottom line is that foreign citizens do not have a role in the U.S. electoral process, and therefore they cannot have a role as corporate shareholders or in other ways that they might choose to route money into our elections.

Do you have a follow-up?

Yeah, Council Member Baxter has a follow-up question.

Thank you.

How does that work with a publicly traded corporation?

Especially, I think you know a little bit about what may have happened here in the city of Seattle in the last three weeks before the election and a major corporation did invest a million dollars three weeks before the election.

And my real concern is how do we determine whether there is foreign money?

Do we go through each corporate structure?

How does that work?

Well, you would be acting under your new provision.

So it would act the way your provision lays it out as looking to a percentage of foreign ownership in the corporation.

So let's just assume we've got one of these major corporations with millions and millions of assets.

If there is any investor at all that is foreign, then that would suggest that that corporation could not participate in any way in Seattle elections?

Well, the corporation itself would have to certify that it met the definition under the statute of 1% or 5%, depending on which threshold you were operating.

Lish, maybe you want to address the specific components of the draft ordinance that address Council Member Bagshaw's question?

Yeah, so any corporation that seeks to make an independent expenditure or contribute to an independent expenditure committee, would need to certify to the city clerk that they are not a foreign-influenced corporation.

And the definition of a foreign-influenced corporation is one that has either a single owner that owns, that is a foreign national or a foreign corporation, et cetera, that owns at least 1% of the company's assets, or a combination of owners.

who together control 5% or more of the company's assets.

So take a multinational corporation.

We have many here in our region.

And shareholders can buy and sell publicly traded stock.

How would a company, and I'm just going to pick our local air aircraft manufacturer, as an example, would they have to affirm that the shareholders do not come from some other country?

Because with millions and millions of shareholders, or the shares are invested in mutual funds, how would one determine that?

And I'm not suggesting that this aircraft company has invested in local elections, they don't.

But what or how would they make that determination?

Should they choose to do so in the future?

So I looked at another major corporation in Seattle to determine whether or not they would have met the thresholds.

And that's really outside of my area of expertise.

But I think that That corporation had enough owners, either foreign mutual fund companies or individuals, that they were going to hit the 5% threshold.

and it was pretty easy to determine at that level.

They had at least one owner that was 0.89% of their assets was owned by one foreign individual.

So I think they are able to know who owns their shares and can make that determination and the city would not be In the business of making that determination, it's on the corporation that wants to participate in local elections to make that determination.

Council Member O'Brien, did you have a follow-up question?

As a public-traded company, they obviously are going to know who owns all their shares.

And so, you know, they will probably have way more information than the public might have.

If it's a lot of work and they don't want to do it, they can just excuse themselves from participating too.

It's not a requirement.

It seems fairly straightforward.

We've crafted the legislation to place the burden and the onus on the corporations to provide a certification under penalty of perjury as to whether or not they are in compliance with the ordinance.

Should they misrepresent that certification, then they would be subject to penalty of perjury.

But I believe that Professor Coates might also be a subject matter expert in this particular space.

And perhaps this would be a good opportunity for us to transition to him, to have him address this particulars around that question, Kazimir Beksha, which is a really good question.

And then in the context of that, something that I think is that we get a lot of questions about is why the 1% or the 5%.

To a lot of people, anecdotally, it seems like such a low number, and people are having a hard time, I think, understanding what exactly the degree and level of control and power actually is. if you're a shareholder or a group of shareholders that owns either 1% or 5% collectively.

So perhaps we can have our experts keep that in mind and help us understand sort of the practical aspects of how that functions in boardrooms.

Professor Coates, would you like to go ahead and take over?

Sure.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can.

Great.

One more word of background about me.

I used to practice corporate law in New York City at a law firm called Wachtell Lipton, which is a leading New York firm and represented large public companies routinely in complying with regulations and laws of the kind that I'm going to be talking about.

And this is the principal focus of my teaching and research.

I'm going to very quickly sketch a couple of additional motivations for why this bill makes sense, and then I'll try to answer some of the practical questions that just came up.

Corporations, of course, can be of all kinds.

Some of them are set up deliberately to avoid or evade detection in the campaign system, and I actually think that's foreign companies, foreigners, excuse me, set up U.S. companies, which look on their surface like U.S. companies, but are really actually just conduits for foreigners.

They then, the foreigners donate money to those companies, and then companies show up as the formal donor to various other kinds of entities.

They then dissolve, and the companies are really sort of used as transient ways to camouflage donations.

So that's one thing to motivate a bill like this.

is that even among public companies, which are subject to some kinds of disclosure obligations, of course, political activity is not one of those.

The SEC and Congress to date have not imposed any meaningful disclosure obligations on large or small publicly held companies as to their political investments and involvements, despite the fact that most large institutional shareholders think that politics is actually something that they think is investment relevant.

Nevertheless, there's been a reluctance to do so.

Foreign influence over U.S. companies, whether public or private, is growing.

In a research study that Ron Fine, who's there at the table, and I and others did a few years ago, we found that nearly one in ten U.S. public companies now have foreign owners that are holding not 1% blocks, but 5%, like big blocks, significant blocks.

And that number has been growing pretty steadily over time.

U.S. corporations that actually have 51% foreign owners control over $10 trillion, that's with a T, in assets in the United States.

There are over 100,000 such companies that are filing actively with the IRS.

So these are real businesses that are filing every year.

And on those forms, they have to indicate their foreign ownership, and 51 percent and up, 100,000 of such companies.

Overall investment by foreigners in U.S. companies of all kinds has been dramatically increasing from about 20 years ago when it was 5 percent of all of the corporate ownership reported to the Federal Reserve.

It's now over 25 percent.

That's an aggregate.

Of course, it varies from company to company.

And that's just a reflection of globalization of investment.

It's probably a good thing overall for the world that that's occurring.

But nevertheless, it means that when you look at a company, even a company that seems as American as Budweiser, you have to recognize actually that's a foreign company.

And foreign ownership of those foreign companies has been steadily increasing, and foreign ownership of U.S. companies has been steadily increasing.

All right, so here we are.

We're in a world in which companies are increasingly politically active.

and foreign ownership of U.S. companies is increasing.

So the main takeaway, and I'm happy to follow up if more questions occur to you after today.

I'd be delighted to help supplement any worries you might have.

But the main takeaway is I'm both in the St. Petersburg and on this one I've worked with the teams trying to advise to make sure, from my experience on Wall Street and from teaching and working in the corporate governance area, that the law is practical and workable.

And bottom line is, it is.

The 1% threshold, let me just take that on, which might seem low as was indicated by the council member, that's the same threshold that's already in place for guaranteeing a shareholder under federal law the right to put proposals to annual meetings of U.S. public companies.

It's viewed as a very high threshold in the public company context, because actually 1% of U.S. public companies is a great deal of money.

And for any one investor to have that much, if they are all diversified, that implies they have even more money.

And so it's actually a relatively rare level for most investors to reach of U.S. public companies.

And when they do reach that level, they're typically among the largest shareholders.

They can certainly get the ear of the CEO or the investment relations officers of any U.S. public company.

And even below 1%, if they're in the half a percent to 1% range and they put a call into the company, the fact that they can potentially get that level of influence means that they're going to get some engagement from the company.

And that engagement often is meaningful in changing strategic direction.

and financing choices, whether to do a buyback or to invest, and how the company is managed.

I should say that while the nationality of every shareholder of a company is changing on a daily basis, in the case of public companies, all 5% and up shareholders have to file very promptly.

So that has to be kept current.

And less than 5%, if it's more than $100 million of assets that are managed by that investor, that also is disclosed regularly with the SEC.

In addition, the companies themselves have to keep relatively continuously accurate a list of their shareholders, because they distribute dividends, and they have to communicate, and they have to elicit proxies, votes at their own meetings.

And so from their own transfer agents and other intermediaries, they can pull lists of their shareholders relatively promptly.

One question that was asked about mutual funds, the way the bill language works is you do not look through a mutual fund.

So if Vanguard, for example, a fund I invest in, because it's a good fund, invest in a public company, The fact that Vanguard may in turn raise money from lots of foreigners is irrelevant for purposes of the bill.

Vanguard is a U.S. domestic mutual fund.

It's managed and advised by U.S. people.

The fact that they raise money at the mutual fund level would not change the dominant U.S. orientation of Vanguard, and so the bill would not look through the mutual fund.

So that's one practical point.

Another practical point is that the bill only requires what's feasible.

So the certification is upon due inquiry.

So if unbeknownst and unknowable to the management of the company, some partner had used some subterfuge or there had been a rapid change in their 1% or 5% of ownership, that would not create criminal liability or even civil liability for the company filing the certification.

It doesn't allow evasion, so if the company knows this, that doesn't work, or reasonably could have known it, then that doesn't work.

But if it's just a question of practical day-to-day changes, the bill takes care of that and would not impose liability.

And then finally, to the point that we made earlier, of course, companies only have to confront this question if they want to participate in politics, right?

So they don't have to.

And when they are gearing up for that, that's not a casual decision typically.

It's something that's done with some preparation and forethought.

And I'm quite sure already their lawyers are advising them about this because there are numerous statutes that regulate foreign ownership already outside the political sphere.

So aircraft manufacturers, if they have defense contracts, have to worry about defense department regulations of foreign influence already.

So this is a routine part of what large companies have to deal with.

And I'll stop there.

Great.

Thank you so much, Professor Coates.

Really appreciate that insight.

Any follow-up questions or additional questions for the good professor?

Council Member Bagshaw?

Thank you, Professor.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Two adjectives that you used is that this law is both practical and workable made me very happy.

Do you have any words of wisdom for us to reduce potential liability?

You mean the risk that someone could sue?

Successfully.

Successfully sue.

We're familiar with lawsuits around here.

The question is whether or not somebody could successfully sue us.

And I just wonder if you have any recommendations on anything that should be added or things that we should know before we try to implement this.

I think you're already doing what needs to be done.

That is to say, you're getting advice around the constitutional questions from experts like Commissioner Weintraub and the others around the table.

You're getting some input from me about the practicalities of influence by foreigners and establishing that you have a record that shows that, in fact, there's a reason to believe, and there is, that if a 5 percent or a 3 percent or a 1 percent shareholder of a large U.S. public company is both foreign and wants to exert influence, they can.

So with those two things in hand, I think you've got what you need to successfully defend any challenge to this law.

As Commissioner Weintraub says, the standard is stricter for individuals, for non-corporate people, people as we used to call them.

And so you're really, the question is how much looser do you need to be for corporate business entities that are susceptible to foreign influence?

And I think the levels that the bill establishes are reasonable.

And they're consistent, just to say something I didn't quite say, the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, admittedly in a different context, but nevertheless, are on record as saying that a 1% level is a significant enough level to treat those shareholders differently as a matter of federal law, and that they're important.

And that is a critical threshold for understanding practical influence by shareholders.

So the kinds of organizations that are in the general set of those that might challenge the bill would have a hard, well, legally, they'd have a hard time speaking out of both sides of their mouth on this, I think.

So the short answer is I think you're already doing what you need to be doing and getting other people to tell you that Commissioner Weintraub and I are not just making this up would be helpful, but that's probably the end of it.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Any other questions for Professor Coates?

Okay, we're gonna go ahead and transition to speaking of people who might be able to confirm the theories that we just heard from folks on the phone.

We're gonna shift over to real people at the real table who are gonna talk to us about issues that are more specific to the Super PAC question in particular.

So we will go ahead and begin the process of transitioning back over here.

I'm going to let Professor Altshuler go first, because I understand you have a hard stop at noon.

Right.

OK, so why don't we go ahead and start with you, Professor Altshuler, and then we'll go ahead and go down the line if that's all right with the other presenters.

Well, thank you for the opportunity.

Madam Chair, if I could interject for just a moment.

If you all are done with me, I'm happy to remain available for any later questions that anyone has.

But if you're transitioning to the group at the table, perhaps this would be an opportunity for me to thank you again and wish you well in your effort.

Thank you so much, Commissioner Weintraub, for that gentle reminder.

Yes, we are, I think, done with you folks on the video.

For either of you, if you'd like to continue to stay with us to listen to the conversation, you're welcome to.

But otherwise, you're welcome to hang up and we can conclude the video conferencing portion of today's committee hearing.

I want to thank both of you for your expertise in this area and for lending us your expertise in this area.

And you can rest assured that we will continue to be in contact as we develop this legislation.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Well, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this pioneering and very important ordinance.

My role, as I understand it, is not to discuss all aspects of the ordinance, but just to address the concern that limiting contributions to super PACs might be held unconstitutional.

And when we talk about this part of the ordinance, I can't assure you that there's no risk of an adverse ruling.

In a case called Speech Now Organization Against the FEC, the U.S.

Court of Appeals for the D.C.

Circuit held that all limits on contributions to super PACs are unconstitutional.

And soon thereafter, in Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce versus the City of Long Beach, the Federal Court of Appeals for this part of the world, the Ninth Circuit, followed suit.

But the U.S.

Supreme Court has not considered the question.

The Justice Department didn't seek review of a speech now because, as Attorney General Holder explained to Senator Reid, it believed that the decision would affect only a small subset of federally regulated contributions.

You can, if you like, put Holder's statement on a historic list of wrong predictions next to that of the grand old Opry manager who told Elvis Presley to go back to driving a truck because he would never make it as a singer.

Well, these two decisions have given Seattle a very strange system of campaign finance.

Although Seattle voters have approved and the Washington Supreme Court has upheld a democracy-enhancing system of campaign finance that includes voter vouchers and sharp limits on campaign contributions, These decisions make evasion of the contribution limits easy.

After making the maximum donation to a candidate, a person may give thousands or millions of dollars to a super PAC whose only mission is to support that candidate.

So Seattle's limits don't restrict how much people can give to electoral efforts.

They just require people to send their contributions to less responsible and more destructive speakers.

Super PACs have been called the attack dogs and provocateurs of modern politics.

The candidates don't have to take responsibility for what a super PAC says.

These groups often disappear once an election is over.

The ads they produce contribute to cynicism about politics, a cynicism that runs particularly deep among young people.

Of course, the fact that these are doing negative campaigning is no reason to suppress them, but it's unfortunate that Seattle now has a system of campaign finance that actively channels funds towards less responsible speakers.

No sane legislator would vote in favor of this system, and no legislator ever has.

You folks certainly didn't do it.

Seattle has this topsy-turvy regime.

Not because you chose it, but because some federal courts have held that the First Amendment requires it.

Yet the thought that the Constitution requires it looks very strange too.

The Supreme Court held 43 years ago that contributions to candidates can be limited to prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption.

According to the D.C.

and Ninth Circuits, however, legislatures may not forbid multimillion-dollar contributions to super PACs because these contributions don't create even an appearance of corruption.

The law currently says that President Trump might be corrupted by a $6,000 contribution to his campaign.

That contribution remains illegal.

But he can't be corrupted.

by the $50 million that Sheldon and Miriam Adelson are expected to give to a super PAC supporting his re-election.

Not even the Speech Now opinion maintained that the regime of campaign finance it created was desirable or defensible.

Instead, the court argued that a single sentence of the Citizens United opinion compelled its result.

The Supreme Court wrote in Citizens United independent expenditures do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

And the D.C.

Circuit said, in light of the courts holding as a matter of law that independent expenditures do not corrupt or create the appearance of corruption, contributions to groups that make only independent expenditures also cannot corrupt or create the experience of corruption.

That's the whole opinion in essence.

And the first thing to say about this supposed syllogism is that it obviously isn't true.

Contributions to super PACs can corrupt even when expenditures by these groups don't corrupt.

Federal prosecutors have in fact indicted public officials for bribery.

because they've given favors or allegedly given favors in exchange for contributions to super PACs.

Courts have upheld these bribery indictments.

You can't escape a bribery charge by saying, please pay the money to my sister.

And you can't escape a bribery charge by saying, please pay the money to my super PAC.

Obviously, a contribution to a super PAC can corrupt.

And notice that the indictments don't say that the SuperPAC itself did anything wrong.

They don't say that its expenditures corrupted anybody.

The SuperPACs weren't involved in the corrupt transactions, probably didn't know about them.

Contrary to the argument of the D.C.

Circuit, contributions to SuperPACs can corrupt even when expenditures do not.

There's some other things to say about this opinion.

One is that the statement on which the court relies was dictum, a non-binding aside.

Another is that the Supreme Court didn't mean this statement to be taken the way the court took it.

You'll find all those points developed in an article I wrote with Lawrence Tribe, the Loeb University professor at Harvard, Richard Painter, the White House ethics czar during the George W. Bush administration.

And Norman Eisen, the White House ethics czar during the Obama administration.

Eisen's the fellow you saw last week questioning academic witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee.

And you can easily find my article online if you want to look for it.

It makes other points.

For 43 years, the Supreme Court has distinguished between contribution limits and expenditure limits.

It upholds contribution limits very regularly, strikes down expenditure limits all the time.

The court has offered five distinctions between contributions and expenditures.

I'm not going to run through them all.

You can find them all discussed in my article.

But if you go through them the way the article does, you'll see that the contributions to super PACs just can't be distinguished from contributions to candidates.

whose limitation the Supreme Court allows.

The ultimate question about the Supreme, opposed by the Supreme Court's campaign finance decisions is whether super PACs create a sufficient appearance of corruption to justify that limitation.

And our article has a lot about that too.

We describe public opinion polls on how corrupt everybody believes America is now.

the views of Washington insiders, politicians on both sides talking about how corrupt super PAC donations are.

And I think we show that speech now has sharpened class divisions and helped to tear America apart.

So, in brief, this DC Circuit case was wrongly decided.

I think the Supreme Court is likely to say so when an appropriate case comes before it.

That case may very well arise if Seattle limits contributions to super PACs, and I hope you will.

Seattle has led the way in combating the corruption produced by unlimited political contributions, and I think this city's mission is not over.

Thank you, Professor.

In terms of your presentation, I have a couple of questions.

One is on the expenditure versus contributions question.

In your review of the ordinance as we've introduced it, Do you have any opinions based on your view of case law and your expertise in this space?

Do you have any opinions about how we've structured the ordinance in terms of this distinction between Expenditures not being able to be potentially regulated, but contributions historically being able to be regulated if an interest exists to be able to do so.

The ordinance very carefully limits only contributions, does not restrict how much.

A super PAC remains free to spend however much money it can collect, but it can't collect more than $5,000 from any one contributor.

In your opinion, we've drawn the line pretty clearly between expenditures and contributions, staying away from contributions and really sort of squarely focused on contributions only.

Correct.

Okay.

Staying away from expenditures and focusing just on a reasonable regulation on contributions.

Correct.

And then on the second thing, you mentioned a lot about how, in your remarks, you talked about how nationally, what the perception is of democracy as a result of contributions to super PACs.

Is there any reason to believe that Seattle somehow is an outlier in regard to that sentiment?

Or is your review of of public opinion and sentiment in this space pretty consistent across the country?

I think it's pretty consistent.

I mean, you heard the public witnesses this morning talking about how discouraged people are, that they think their votes don't count anymore, that only money counts.

And you will find that view expressed in national public opinion polls.

And it's getting worse all the time.

I mean, these polls show change over time and greater cynicism about politics, greater discouragement about politics everywhere.

Great.

Any questions for Professor Altshuler?

or comments?

Okay.

Thank you, Professor, so much.

And if you have to leave, please feel free to do.

I want to thank you so much for all the work that you've done in this space and for my own personal copy of your article.

I do have electronic copies of this article, colleagues, and would be happy to circulate that, and we intend to make it part of our clerk file.

So thank you so much for joining us and for making the journey out this way to be with us.

So let's go ahead and We're going to move into the rest of our panel.

We are running a little behind this morning, so I'm just going to ask that folks limit their comments accordingly so that we can be respectful of my colleagues' time and the public's time.

Council Member O'Brien.

I have to step out for another meeting, but this has been really informative and amazing, and I appreciate you, Chair, finding so many experts from around the country to come weigh in on this.

I apologize, I'll miss your comments, but I'll catch up with those.

And I am thrilled that there appears to be a really solid path to move forward to continue to reform the potential for corruption in our elections, which is awesome.

And I just want to acknowledge that Council Member O'Brien, who is finishing up his tenure, not just his term, but his tenure with us on the City Council, has been a champion of democracy reform efforts and campaign finance reform laws.

I was actually a commissioner on the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission at the time when Council Member O'Brien asked the commission at the point to opine on a set of laws that would allow for publicly financed campaigns.

That was the previous iteration to what we ultimately approved via honest elections.

So you've been a huge advocate and champion in this space and have been really humbled to be able to continue the legacy of your work and look forward to the last touches that I'm sure you'll want to have on this legislation.

So thank you for those contributions to our city.

Okay, let's go ahead and move on.

All right, so the reason why I'm here, I'm not a legal expert.

I run a local organization that focuses on democracy-related issues, voting rights, campaign finance reform, public funding of elections.

In fact, we used to be Washington Public Campaigns, and we worked to help overturn the law that prohibited public funding of elections to open the door for the voucher program.

We recognize that the voucher program, though, doesn't address the money coming in from outside, the independent expenditures, the super PACs, and we needed a way to address that.

When I heard about the St. Petersburg Ordinance, from John was making a presentation at a national conference with some people from St. Petersburg.

I said, why don't we do something like this in Seattle?

Why don't we bring this to a bigger city to try to defend the vouchers?

We were very concerned about the vouchers.

and wanting to protect that.

We know the onslaught of money coming in is undermining that.

We know the voucher program is working.

More people are participating.

It opens a door for people to run for office that couldn't.

But the money, we have to address the money.

The vouchers were never supposed to do that.

We have to come up with another solution and that's why we wanted to bring forth this ordinance with the help of free speech for people and then thank you Councilmember Gonzalez for championing this because we needed somebody to get behind this to support it because we know the public wants this we hear all the time we've done research in the state.

Money in elections is a big issue people want to deal with and we need to be proactive.

Seattle has been ahead of the game in so many ways.

I think we can be ahead of the game in this.

So I really hope that we can get this through and set an example for the rest of the country.

So thank you.

Thank you, Cindy, so much for all your work and for your collaboration and your partnership with us as we continue to work on this really important policy issue.

I have really appreciated it.

Any questions for Cindy before we move down the line?

Okay.

I'll refer to Ron first.

Okay, great.

Ron.

Thank you.

I'm just going to make a couple brief but extremely wonkish points about the public interest or government interests that the Council ideally would have in mind when considering this to make sure that they are the correct interests.

So with respect to the SuperPACs provision, the issue there is the prevention of corruption, particularly quid pro quo corruption and the appearance of corruption.

And that is why the Clean Campaigns Act wisely limits the spending from independent expenditure committees, but not the – sorry, I said that backwards – limits the contributions to the independent expenditure committees, but not the spending from them.

The prevention of circumvention of the contribution limits that are already in Seattle, the $500 maximum contribution limit, is also a factor to consider.

But certainly the council would not want to consider, for example, the exact nature of Independent Expenditure Committee's speech, what it is that they're saying, nor is it really at issue whether the super PACs are coordinating their spending with campaigns, but rather whether these very large contributions to the super PACs are causing corruption or the appearance of corruption or circumventing the basic contribution limits.

That's a slightly different legal framework when we consider the provision about foreign-influenced corporations and their political spending.

Because there, as Judge, now Justice Kavanaugh, has explained, there's a different public interest that can be considered, and that is democratic self-government and the preservation of democratic self-government.

The issue here is not xenophobia, it's not about concern about foreign nationals themselves, and it's certainly not an opposition to foreign investment in U.S. corporations, but rather the extent to which a foreign-influenced corporation's political spending can threaten the preservation of democratic self-government.

So I know that's a particularly wonkish set of points to make, but it will be important to have those in mind as the ordinance gets further considered.

Thank you so much for championing this.

It's a hugely important reform and we look forward to working with you on it in the future.

I think, Brant, on the piece around foreign nationals and sort of where the genesis of that comes from, I mean, I think we're seeing a real-life example of where that's coming from in terms of our national conversation around the impeachment trials that are happening in Congress right now, right?

So we're being reminded as to why our U.S.

Constitution is very clear that our government should be governed by the people of this country.

And it is fundamentally about preserving our democratic process and protecting our Constitution.

and the principles and the values in that Constitution.

And so I think that it's a really important point to make that this goes back from the inception of the U.S.

Constitution and also is not driven by xenophobia or other anti-foreign national sentiment, but really it's about making sure that as we are considering these types of regulations that we are squarely focused on getting back to the intent of the U.S.

Constitution and forming a U.S. government for people of, for the people of this country and for our existing democratic process.

So really appreciate that reminder.

Any questions for Ron?

Great.

Last but not least.

I'll just briefly say first, Councilmember, thank you so much for your leadership and championing this model bill for Seattle and for the nation.

Thank you to the committee members as well for being here for this discussion.

I'll just bring us back to what Councilmember Rice from St. Petersburg talked about at the outset.

We worked with her and other city council members in St. Petersburg.

The focus there was addressing the threat of the flood of SuperPAC funding expenditures, as well as the threat of foreign-influenced corporate spending in St. Petersburg.

Here, the issue is not the threat.

It's here and now.

Seattle is already experiencing this flood with respect to the corrupting influence of big money into super PACs and with respect to foreign influenced corporate spending.

So the city is well suited dealing with the facts on the ground here to address this flood and to protect its democracy and we're proud to be working with you on this model legislation.

Great, thank you so much.

Any questions for our panelists or comments?

Just all of you, this is such an important step forward, and I really appreciate it.

I didn't run this last election, but the three elections prior to that, it is hard to raise money.

And especially if you're dealing with democracy vouchers, $25 at a time.

That's a tough situation, but it's a right situation, something that we've respected.

You had an opportunity, I think you both did, to get democracy vouchers during your campaigns.

I'm interested in knowing a little bit more, when you worked with St. Petersburg, what lessons did you learn that we should know, and probably if you've already been working with Council Member Gonzalez on the legislation, it's already built in, but I'd love to hear from you.

What did you learn and what should we be paying attention to?

Well, we learned certainly at the outset how to make sure that the public understood these threats coming into the political process from big money donors to super PACs, as well as the vehicle of the corporate form for foreign influence in our elections.

And I think in both instances, we were able to build a fairly large coalition to show that public support to the City Council.

As Council Member Rice said, unlike the situation here in Seattle, the City Attorney's Office there had a lot of concerns about the City Council moving forward with this.

But the City Council members ultimately decided they needed to as she said, do the right thing, irrespective of that concern the city attorney's office was presenting.

We're happy the city attorney's office here seems to be very supportive of this, but I think that going forward, helping to explain to the public why these two threats to Seattle elections need to be addressed with this legislation will be helpful.

I have a sense that the public here has already responded with its votes.

And what we saw three weeks before the election in polls and what we saw on election day, what was it, 11 percentage points apart?

That is a big number.

And I had many conversations with people that came up to me independently, not a question that I had asked, that just said they were so offended by the big money investment that they were going to vote contrary to what they had intended to just because they didn't want to be told what to do.

And I think that that's something that the corporations need to pay attention to.

I hope they are, but getting the public really to understand, too, what we're trying to accomplish and threading that needle between Citizens United and the new cases that have been brought forward are going to be really important.

So I look forward to any suggestions or advice you have as we're making the communications clear.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Peterson, any comments or questions?

So thanks for being here and really want to compliment Councilmember Gonzalez on this because besides this being a great idea, which I supported when you first developed it, it's the process you've gone through in terms of it's sort of a gold standard for public policymaking, I would say, because you've brought in national experts, you've looked at what other cities have done, you went to our We have a lot of work to do.

We have a lot of work to do.

We have a lot of work to do.

We have a lot of work to do.

We have a lot of work to do.

We have been multitasking in my office, doing budget and other policy issues and developing sort of the plan around the due diligence in the background and executing it, sometimes quietly, but deliberately.

And so really appreciate your recognition of that hard work.

And a lot of credit goes to my staff who has been exemplary in this area and just making sure that everybody is on board and ready and prepared.

So thank you, Vee, for all the work that you've been doing on this.

Thank you, Vee.

And Brianna Thomas as well in my office.

So it's always a team effort, so really, really do appreciate it.

There is going to be more to come on this bill.

This is a first briefing and discussion.

I want to also really thank Lish for his efforts on making, on drafting, putting the draft together, making sure that we are dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's and in your expertise in making sure that we are well-staffed on this from the Council Central staff perspective.

I really want to thank Cindy for bringing this issue to me in the first place.

In October of 2018 is when we first had a conversation about what this kind of law could look like and I've really appreciated your guidance and your partnership in developing the legislation and in making sure that the public, that our neighbors and people in our community's voters who are impacted by big money and politics understand what the bill is and that we are continuing to build support.

So really appreciate your grassroots efforts there as well.

And then John and Ron, thank you so much for being our legal brains on many of these complex issues and always being willing to talk to us on the phone.

So I know that you are.

as equally accessible to any of my colleagues and that you all plan to set up individual meetings and offer yourselves as experts in this space to make sure that folks feel like they have the right amount of information that they need to feel comfortable with this legislative package and to have any sort of questions answered as folks may be considering potential amendments to the ordinance.

And then I just want to thank both of you for being here today.

And, you know, really I think this is an opportunity for us, and it's been stated multiple times, to not just frame the conversation here at home in Seattle about how this really has an impact on how people perceive our democratic process, but also on the impact of voter suppression.

There's a number out there that says that 26% of voters decide not to vote when big money plays into super PACs.

That number is in the mid-30s when we're talking about African-American voters, low-income voters, and Latinx voters.

And we also have heard numbers that 77% of Americans have lost faith that their vote even counts at all.

We have a super PAC system like the one we do now, which is completely unregulated, unfettered contributions can come in at any point to these political action committees.

And those numbers should be startling to us.

And we have no reason to believe that somehow Seattle is an outlier and that we're some unicorn in this system of corruption and that that isn't a sentiment that people hold here, I do believe.

that people in Seattle want to see big money out of politics.

We know that because they have overwhelmingly supported initiatives like Initiative 122, which is Honest Elections, and Initiative 735, which was the statewide initiative around getting a constitutional amendment to return Citizens United.

We know that people here at home in Seattle and across the state feel very strongly about this issue, and it is a bipartisan issue across the ideological spectrum and political spectrum.

There is wide support for a bill like this, and we have a real opportunity to, again, not just frame up the issue and do the right thing here in Seattle, but hopefully inspire others across the country to also do the same.

So really excited about the ongoing conversation, which will occur on December 19th here in Chambers again at 9.30 a.m.

That'll be our first opportunity to really dig into issue identification and potential options for addressing those issues.

And then we will break for recess.

That will be the last committee meeting for my committee here.

And we will break for recess as a council.

And we will take the issue back up on January 7th, which will be a Tuesday.

I think we're still working on a time.

We're still working on a time based on folks' availability.

And my hope is that we'll be able to get an amended version of the bill, if any amendments do come forward, out of committee on January 7th and in front of the new full city council that following Monday, which I believe is the 16th?

17th?

Something.

13th.

Someday, it is the 13th, for the viewing public and just for transparency's sake, I will not be here on January 13th because my baby is due on January 12th.

And I'm just like lighting every candle I can possibly light in the hopes that this baby won't come before January 7th.

But we have a plan in place and really excited that Councilmember Lisa Herbold has agreed to see this over the finish line if for some reason I'm not able to be here with you all.

But we'll certainly be here in spirit if I can't be here in person.

Councilmember Peterson said it very articulately and well, but Councilmember Gonzalez, this is champion stuff.

And I appreciate what you've been doing, but also the way you've been doing it and reaching out to St. Petersburg and hearing what they have done, the same issues we're facing.

That was a really brilliant move.

Two years into this, they've not been sued yet.

As people pointed out, likely since we're a little bit larger and have a target on our back sometimes, it's entirely possible we will see that.

But just the way you've been going about doing this, It's extremely impressive and I just want to say thanks.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for that.

We will also be putting together a clerk file to support our legislative intent and history here.

So please colleagues keep that in mind as you are doing your own independent research and working with LISH if you find relevant law review articles, news articles, other pieces of information that help us articulate not just the threat, but the reality of what's happening in our democratic process here.

We are actively compiling that information to develop a clerk file that will join the passage of this council bill.

to really pin down the fact that we are addressing a real issue with a real solution to address those issues.

One quick thing, and this comes back, Ron and John, to your points.

I really like the fact that we've got a Fordham Law Review.

Is there anything from the University of Washington Law School or Seattle University that has been written or we could request to become part of the clerk file?

These are fairly specialized topics about which not a lot of people are writing, so I don't believe there's anything directly on point from one of the law schools in Seattle.

I could look to see, but really Professor Altshuler and Professor Tribe have been at the forefront of this issue.

taking on the SuperPACS issue, and in terms of the issue of foreign-influenced corporations and their political spending, it is Commissioner Weintraub and Professor Coates.

So these are the experts that we have here.

That's not to say that there aren't people in the Seattle area law schools who couldn't develop that expertise as well, but so far it has not been, the issue, expertise that has been there has not been from those particular schools.

Thank you very much for that.

I think that that just also underscores the work that you've done, is that you've got the national experts weighing in.

You've got the people that are writing, as my contracts professor used to say, the book on this.

And so I hope that we can build on this, but I really do appreciate the fact that locally we've got people who are weighing in and advising us as well.

We do have a professor on the East Coast who's done a fair amount of evaluation and analysis of our Democracy Voucher Program.

And so we've been in contact with her and they've been doing research independent of this effort that's just part of the evaluation of the Democracy Voucher Program and we hope to be able to incorporate some of her findings in the reports.

I'm trying to remember the name of the university.

at SUNY Stony Brook.

What is it?

Jennifer Herwig at SUNY Stony Brook.

Yeah, Jennifer Herwig at Stony Brook.

University?

No?

It's a SUNY.

State University of New York.

State University of New York.

I'm like a sieve these days with information.

Professor Tribe did submit written testimony to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission in support of this bill and he will be submitting written testimony in support of this bill before the City Council.

Right.

Yeah.

And we didn't mention it before but the PDC also heard about this is in support of it as well.

Yeah, the Washington State PDC.

Do we have anything in writing from them?

We do.

We have a letter from them, and we also have a letter from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.

All of that will be condensed down into a clerk file.

So we're hoping to be able to, again, build as robust of a clerk file as we can.

So as you all are continuing to ask questions and thinking about things, please feel free to flag some of those resources for Lish and my office so that we can incorporate it into the clerk file.

We have a good little stack going already, but always welcome to add more to that, of course.

Great.

Okay.

If there are no other questions or comments, then we have reached the end of our agenda.

I really appreciate y'all's flexibility.

We're about 20 minutes over time, but really appreciate your flexibility and willingness to join us here and your ongoing engagement.

So with that being said, this meeting is now adjourned.