A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call in early January between a policy adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network– shows that Republicans are freaking out about the popularity of some of the provisions in the Democrats’ election reform bill, H.R.1.
According to the New Yorker, participants on the call were worried about the popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors since it would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors like the Kochs.
One senior Koch representative on the call said it would be better to kill the bill in Congress, never mind that has bipartisan support in the public.
“When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” Kyle McKenzie the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together said. “The most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.”
“There’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts,” he added.
Mckenzie said his group tried everything to get the provision in the bill to be unfavorable to conservatives including “an A.O.C. message” claiming that the bill might help the New York rep achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors. Though that message resonated with conservatives, he admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.”
Mckenzie also said they tried to attach the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill by claiming it is “silencing conservative voices” but that did not work either. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie told participants on the call. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”
Ultimately, he admitted that it is up to Republicans in the Senate to use “under-the-dome-type strategies,” like the filibuster to kill the bill because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.”
Listen to the audio of the call on the New Yorker.
