Hillary Clinton Endorses Corporate Political Spending Rules Proposed by Professor Robert Jackson
New York, September 8, 2015—Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has voiced her support for U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules requiring corporate political spending disclosures that were proposed by Columbia Law School Professor Robert J. Jackson Jr. and other legal experts.
Jackson co-chaired a committee that in 2011 filed a petition calling for the rules’ adoption. Columbia Law School Professors John C. Coffee Jr., Ronald J. Gilson, and Jeffrey N. Gordon also signed on to the petition, which garnered more supportive comments than any other rulemaking proposal in the history of the SEC. So far, the agency has failed to act on it.
“I am delighted that Secretary Clinton has expressed her commitment to moving forward with the SEC rules requiring transparency in corporate political spending that my colleagues and I proposed four years ago,” said Jackson, who previously spoke in support of the disclosure rules with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) at a Senate briefing on the matter. “It is long past time for Chairman Mary Jo White to proceed with this rulemaking. As a bipartisan group of former SEC officials recently argued in a letter to Chair White, her refusal to do so ‘flies in the face of the primary mission of the Commission, which since 1934 has been the protection of investors.’ The case for proceeding with rules shining light on political spending is strong, and the SEC should do so without further delay.”
Jackson is co-director of the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership. Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2010, he served as an advisor to senior officials at the Department of the Treasury and in the Office of the Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation.