"Obscene" donation benefits Tillis campaign..."you know it when you see it"

The NY Times published an op-ed on Tuesday involving the Junior Senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, that should make everyone cringe.

The Times piece was done by The Center for Responsive Politics, the people behind OpenSecrets.org.   OpenSecrets.org provides tremendous insight into the money trail that runs through politics by linking donors, lobbyists, PACs, and candidates with campaign donations.

The op-ed covers how an unnamed donor pumped $4.7 million dollars into the "nonprofit" Carolina Rising "social welfare organization" during Tills's campaign against Kay Hagan for US Senate.  That was pretty much everything the group raised and pretty much every penny of it went to support ads benefiting Tillis in the final weeks of the campaign.

Read the NY Times op-ed here.  OpenSecrets.org has published
a much more detailed account here.

The major issue covered in these pieces is that Carolina Rising may have broken all kinds of IRS rules by effectively existing solely to support a single candidate.  At the center if this controversy is information spouted by Dallas Woodhouse at the Tillis victory celebration on election night. Check out Woodhouse in this video from that night.

Woodhouse was recently named as the new Executive Director of the NCGOP.

Now, I don't know about you, but $4.7m seems like a lot of money to me.  "Obscene" is the word that comes to mind. It conjures images of Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart saying “I know it when I see it” when he was describing how to identify pornography.

And of course, it makes one wonder what in the world does someone expect to get in return for spending that kind of money on a candidate's behalf???