Scott Walter to Testify Before Senate Judiciary Subcommittee Today

Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), will testify at 3 p.m. ET, Wednesday, March 10, 2021, before Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-RI) Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. Walter, an expert on political nonprofits who served in the George W. Bush White House, will present the conservative case that there is more “dark money” on the Left than the Right.

Watch the hearing here, starting at 3 p.m.

The subcommittee will reportedly focus specifically on the judiciary and presumably whether big money in politics played a role in Republicans’ recent gains in seating conservatives on benches in court districts across the country and the Supreme Court. Whitehouse is expected to make the case that so-called “dark money” from political nonprofits legally allowed to lobby is akin to gaming the system in favor of conservative judges. Walter is expected to address why the Senator seems to have less of a problem with this same “dark money” when liberals use it to affect their preferred policy changes.

Walter said:

The term liberals favor—“dark  money”—conjures up a bogeyman meant to shift debate away from the substance of legal and political disputes by pretending that one’s opponents are nefarious because they use what are, in fact, the same kind of funding arrangements that everyone else uses.

If liberals were honest, they’d acknowledge when it comes to ‘dark money’ they have a distinct advantage. By any measure, they’ve benefitted more from it than conservatives; and the Left’s funding arrangements are, in some ways, more dark than conservatives’ arrangements.

Walter is expected to make his case by using examples from research compiled by experts at CRC, particularly related to the leftist funding behemoth Arabella Advisors.

He will also lay out the historical precedent for protecting donors’ privacy going all the way back to the landmark NAACP case in which that organization successfully argued in favor of donor privacy for fear of dangerous reprisal if supporters’ names were made public.

CRC’s related work on donor privacy can be found here.

CRC’s work on Arabella Advisors can be found here.