I have to wonder whether the provision actually spelled that out.Last month, when Congress passed a 1,603-page spending bill, it snuck in a provision that further protects dark money in politics. It prohibits the President from using his executive authority to force companies and unions with federal contracts to disclose their political contributions. The provision was buried in the last few pages of the bill along with another measure that increases the individual contribution limits in elections.
When the Patriot Act was passed, the problem wasn't just that no-one was allowed time to read it before voting on it. It's that - and this is routine - little of what it actually did was contained within its pages. Instead if was full of vague edits to a vast number of OTHER laws. "In law A, section B, subsection D, paragraph E, change "the police may not" to "the police may." "In law F, section G, subsection H, paragraph I, change "not allowed" to "allowed." And so a long list of **other** laws would also have to be read and the effects of changes to them considered.
Which is why Congressman Jim McDermott said on camera that no Senator read the Patriot act bill and John Conyers, Jr. said, "We don't read most of the bills. Do you really know what that would entail if we read every bill that we passed?
Now add Congress's tradition of adding on riders, amendments and pork AFTER hearings on a bill are over.
For example, artists could reclaim the copyrights on their work after 35 years. So an RIAA owned and operated Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier added a "technical amendment" to a bill that redefined recorded music as "works for hire". No more reclaimed rights after 35 years. The amendment was added to an unrelated bill, after all the hearings on the bill were over. By the time artists found out about the change, it was too late. (Eventually the issue led to the formation of the Recording Artists' Coalition, which successfully lobbied for repeal of the change.) (Glazier is now the senior executive vice president of the RIAA.)
They're why NASA's budget is drained by half a billion dollars a year for pork projects from regional fisheries centers in Massachusetts and Alaska, to Natural History and Underground Adventures museums.
The fact that this dark money clause was tacked onto a spending bill indicates that it was not meant to be noticed, or if noticed, not something that that people would be willing to stop an important bit of legislation (and OTHER tacked on legislation) over.