Rochester, N.Y. --- Rep. Louise Slaughter (D – Fairport) went “off script” for many minutes at a campaign event on Thursday discussing what she expects to be an expensive media buy that attacks her.
"You are going to be bombarded at every second with pictures of me so ugly that even my family wouldn't recognize them," Rep. Slaughter said to local media and supporters. "Just think about that for a minute, a $1.4 million just that we know from Crossroads, we don't know where that came from."
13WHAM News confirmed through a spokesman for American Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (GPS) that the $1.4 million will be spent for three weeks of TV ads in Rochester beginning Saturday, October 13th. Crossroads GPS is a sister organization of the Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads group. The spokesman stated Crossroads GPS is, “committed to educating, equipping and mobilizing millions of American citizens to take action on critical and legislative issues that will shape our nation's future in the years ahead.”
This media buy is just one recent example of how outside groups and organizations are now able to spend unlimited amounts of money gathered through largely anonymous donors on political speech. It goes back to the January 2010 U.S. Supreme Court Ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
"There is grave concern and reason to be concerned that a lot of the money coming in is coming from foreign countries," Rep. Slaughter continued. "I'm very angry about this, I'm angry about the court (and) one of the reasons I need to go back is I'm fighting the Supreme Court. They have no ethics that they have to live by, none. I want to bring the Supreme Court under the same ethics that federal judges live by.”
The fallout from that historic Supreme Court Ruling is still underway and its impact on the political dialogue remains hotly debated.
