Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Florida Legislature moves to block local curbs on campaign finance

St. Petersburg, Florida

St. Petersburg, Florida's fifth largest city, serves as the model for other cities that want to put restrictions on some forms of political giving.

Henryk Sadura/Getty Images

Feb. 6 and Feb. 14: This story was been updated and clarified with additional reporting.

Cities and counties in Florida that want to limit dark money or foreign donors in their own elections would be stopped under a surprise proposal now moving through the Legislature.

Curbing money in politics at the local level has become the cause of choice for advocates of tougher campaign finance rules, who find themselves blocked from any chance at nationwide success in the partisan gridlocked Congress. The effort launched this week by Republicans in charge in Tallahassee looks to be the most prominent move yet by a state to preempt such local statutes.

The GOP target is an ordinance enacted three years ago by St. Petersburg, the state's fifth biggest city, that has been cited as the first of its kind in the country and the model several other cities have followed since.


It required corporations that spend money on municipal campaigns to certify that no more than 5 percent of their ownership is under the control of foreign entities. And it essentially ended the ability of super PACs — which can spend without limit to support or oppose candidates — to get involved in local elections.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Republican Jeff Brandes, who has represented the city in the state Senate since 2013, on Monday pushed through a committee a measure that would ban cities and counties from "adopting any limitation or restriction" on contributions to PACs or expenditures from political organizations in city elections.

Further compounding the anxiety of democracy reform organizations, Brandes attached the proposal to bipartisan legislation to make a small fix in state election law that could make it easier for thousands to cast proper ballots this fall, when the nation's biggest purple state will once again be an enormous focus of the presidential race.

Brandes told the Tampa Bay Times his ultimate goal is to compel more openness about the funding of local races. Now, he said, contributors to contests in his home town are evading the city's ban by making donations to political parties, which have wide latitude to shield the identifies of their contributors.

"I want a very transparent, seamless process in the state of Florida," he said, although he conceded his preemption measure would not address that loophole.

No one challenged or complained about the new rules when they were applied to the city's most recent elections, last year. The next round is in 2021, when the mayoralty and half the city council seats will be on the ballot.

One of the groups that helped draft the ordinance, Free Speech for People, said it was confident the measure would withstand any legal challenges based on Citizens United v FEC, the Supreme Court's landmark campaign finance deregulation ruling of a decade ago.

"We hope that the corporations and wealthy donors that might be affected by the ordinance choose to comply with the law rather than file court challenges, but if they do go down that road, we are prepared to help the city defend its laws," said the organization's legal director, Ron Fein.

The underlying bill makes clear that poll workers may use peoples' addresses to determine if they've gone to the correct precincts on Election Day. Currently, if election officials at polling sites see identification that suggests the voter is in the wrong place, they may not ask about the address.

Read More

Could Splits Within the GOP Over Economic Policy Hurt the Trump Administration?

With Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) by his side President Donald Trump speaks to the press following a House Republican meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Tasos Katopodis

Could Splits Within the GOP Over Economic Policy Hurt the Trump Administration?

Republican U.S. Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri is an unusual combo of right and left politics—kind of like an elephant combined with a donkey combined with a polar bear. And, yet, his views may augur the future of the Republican Party.

Many people view the Republican and Democratic parties as ideological monoliths, run by hardcore partisans and implacably positioned against each other. But, in fact, both parties have their internal divisions, influenced by various outside organizations. In the GOP, an intra-party battle is brewing between an economic populist wing with its more pro-labor positions and a traditional libertarian wing with its pro-free market stances.

Keep ReadingShow less
How Language and Cultural Barriers in Healthcare Plague Seattle’s Latino Community

stethoscope on top of a clipboard

Getty Images

How Language and Cultural Barriers in Healthcare Plague Seattle’s Latino Community

A visit to the hospital can already be a stressful event for many. For those in the Seattle Latino community, language and cultural barriers present in the healthcare system can make the process even more daunting.

According to Leo Morales, a healthcare provider at UW Medicine’s LatinX Diabetes Clinic and co-director of the Latino Center for Health, communication difficulties are one of the most obvious barriers in healthcare for Latinos with limited English proficiency.

Keep ReadingShow less
How the Trump Administration Is Weakening the Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws

Kennell Staten filed a discrimination complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development after he was denied housing. His complaint was rejected.

Bryan Birks for ProPublica

How the Trump Administration Is Weakening the Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws

Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. “She said I was too flamboyant,” he remembered, “that it’s a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.”

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court rulingthat declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Keep ReadingShow less