Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Among this group’s earlier political efforts was a stealth attempt in the early 1990s to get voters to approve ballot measures imposing congressional term limits. Experts suggested that term limits would hurt Democrats, who had more congressional incumbents at the time, and also strengthen the power of outsiders with money, like themselves. As was true of the later Tea Party movement, the supporters of term limits described their movement as a grassroots outpouring fueled by populist outrage at entrenched power. In California, the Kochs were rumored to be behind a 1992 referendum on whether to impose them, but a spokesman denied they had any direct role. But after the referendum succeeded, the Los Angeles Times discovered that the true organizers and much of its funding traced back to a secretive group run by Howie Rich and Eric O’Keefe, U.S. Term Limits. There were ties to the Kochs, too. Fink admitted when confronted by the paper that they had in fact provided “seed money.” Similarly, in Washington State a congressional term-limits ballot initiative nearly passed in 1991 until The New York Times exposed what Murray Rothbard, the irreverent libertarian theorist who had split with the Kochs, called “the Kochian deep pockets behind the ‘grassroots’ movement.” The paper discovered that what supporters billed as “a prairie fire of populism” was in fact the product of a Washington-based group calling itself Citizens for Congressional Reform, which was started with hundreds of ...