An anti-tax group financed mainly by billionaires has emerged as one of the biggest supporters of Republican lawmakers seeking to overturn election results in the United States, according to an analysis by the Guardian.
The Club for Growth supported the campaigns of 42 right-wing Republican senators and members of Congress who voted last week to challenge US election results, distributing about $ 20 million to directly and indirectly support their campaigns in 2018 and 2020 , according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
About 30 of the hardline Republicans received more than $ 100,000 in indirect and direct support from the group.
The biggest beneficiaries of the Growth Club include Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, the two Republican senators who led the effort to invalidate Joe Biden’s electoral victory and the newly elected far-right gun rights activist Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy. Boebert was criticized last week for tweeting about the location of Mayor Nancy Pelosi during the attack on the Capitol, even after lawmakers were instructed not to do so by the police.
Public records show that the biggest donors to the Growth Club are billionaire Richard Uihlein, the Republican co-founder of remittance supply company Uline in Wisconsin, and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, an options trading group based in Philadelphia which also owns a sports betting company in Dublin.
While Uihlein and Yass maintained a lower profile than other billionaire donors, like Michael Bloomberg and the late Sheldon Adelson, their support for the Club for Growth helped transform the organization traditionally known as anti-regulatory and anti-tax pro – a group of corporate pressure that supports some of the most radical and undemocratic Republican legislators in Congress.
“Here is the issue of the hyper-rich. They believe that their hyper-wealth gives them the ability not to be responsible. And that is not the case. If you won billions of dollars, good for you. But that doesn’t make him any less responsible for financing anti-democratic or authoritarian candidates and movements, ”said Reed Galen, a former Republican strategist who co-founded the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump militants.
Galen said he believed that groups such as the Club for Growth now serve to serve the personal agenda of Republican donors themselves, and not what used to be considered “conservative principles”.
The Lincoln Project said it would dedicate resources to pressure not only Hawley, which the group accused of committing sedition, but also its donors.
The Growth Club has so far escaped scrutiny for its role in supporting undemocratic Republicans because it does not make direct contributions to candidates. Instead, it uses its funds to make “external” spending decisions, such as attacking a candidate’s opponents.
In 2018, Club for Growth spent nearly $ 3 million attacking Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, a race that ended up being won by Hawley, the 41-year-old Yale law graduate with presidential ambitions that amplified Donald’s baseless lies. Trump on election fraud.
That year, he also spent $ 1.2 million to attack Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who challenged – and then narrowly lost – against Cruz.
Other legislators supported by the Growth Club include Matt Rosendale, who this week called for the resignation of Republican colleague Liz Cheney after she said she would support the president’s impeachment, and Lance Gooden, who accused Pelosi of being so responsible for last week’s turmoil. like Trump.
Dozens of Republicans supported by Club for Growth voted to contest the election results, even after the rebels invaded the Capitol, leading to five deaths, including the murder of a police officer.
The Growth Club changed significantly as the group’s leadership changed hands. Republican Senator Pat Toomey, who used to lead the group, recently suggested that he was open to considering voting for Trump’s impeachment, and criticized colleagues for challenging election results. Its current chief, David McIntosh, is a former Republican member of Congress who accompanied Trump on a final trip to Georgia last week, the night before Republican candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both strongly supported by the Growth Club, lost. the runoff elections for its Democratic opponents.
Neither Club for Growth nor McIntosh responded to requests for comment.
Public records show that Richard Uihlein, whose family founded Schlitz beer, donated $ 27 million to the Growth Club in 2020 and $ 6.7 million in 2018. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, were called “the conservative couple more powerful than you’ve ever heard ”by the New York Times. Richard Uihlein, the New York Times said, was known to endorse “incendiary anti-establishment” candidates like Roy Moore, which Uihlein supported in a Senate race, even after claiming he had sexually abused underage girls. Moore denied the charges.
A Uihlein spokesman declined to comment.
Yass of Susquehanna International, who appears in public documents as having donated $ 20.7 million to the Growth Club in 2020 and $ 3.8 million in 2018, also declined to comment. Yass is one of the six founders of Susquehanna, called the “crucial driver of the $ 5 trillion global exchange-traded funds market” in a 2018 Bloomberg News profile. The company was founded on the basis of the six founders’ mutual love for poker and the notion that training for “probability-based” decisions could be useful in the trading markets. Dublin-based Susquehanna’s company, Nellie Analytics, works in sports.
At a 2020 conference on the sports betting business, Yass said sports betting was a $ 250 billion industry worldwide, but that with the “help” of lawmakers, it could become a trillion dollar industry. dollars.
A 2009 profile from Yass magazine in Philadelphia described how secrecy permeates Susquehanna, and that people who know the company say that “stealth” is a word often used to describe its modus operandi. The article suggests that Yass doesn’t say much about his company because he doesn’t like to share what he does and how he does it, and that those who know him believe he is “very nervous” about his own safety.
Yass, who is described in some media reports as a libertarian, also made a donation to Protect America Pac, an organization affiliated with Republican Senator Rand Paul. Pac’s website falsely claims that Democrats stole the 2020 elections.