Arent Fox’s Brett Kappel, counsel in the firm’s government relations practice, was quoted in a recent edition of The Atlantic Wire discussing the media’s coverage of super PACs.

The Atlantic Wire reports:

Since the Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United decision, super PACs have been depicted as secret, malevolent slush funds of unyielding corporate influence. The question is: Has the media accurately depicted this new trend in electioneering or have the doomsayers been over-stating their case?

Waging war on the rhetorical plane of this debate is Mediaite owner Dan Abrams, whose lawyer dad Floyd Abrams won the Citizens case, Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and Atlantic contributor, and Rick Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California Irvine. Abrams and Kaminer say the media has grossly distorted Citizens United while Hasen said they're both living in a dream world. …

In a point for Team Abrams, one of the common media misconceptions agreed upon was the issue of donor anonymity. As Abrams wrote in February, one of the common media myths was that in Citizens United, "The Court invalidated disclosure requirements in political advertising, thereby allowing donors to remain anonymous." Brett Kappel, an election lawyer at Arent Fox, tells us "Dan is right." And that's because the court ruled just the opposite in the 2010 case, upholding the McCain-Feingold requirement of identifying donors by an 8-1 vote.

The second media myth cited by Abrams and Kaminer is much more contested. Both note that newspaper articles often cite how Citizens United opened the door to affluent donors to pour millions of dollars into PACs. Abrams and Kaminer emphasize that was dealing with corporate and union donations and that it "did not expand or address the longstanding, individual rights of the rich to support independent groups." … However, Kappel notes that Abrams's and Kaminer's point is only partially right. In some respects, that's because these 527s existed under a shady legal cloud, which inhibited wealthy donors from throwing their money into campaigns at the same pace as they're doing now.

To read the full Atlantic Wire article, please click here.