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Billionaire libertarian activist David Koch died Friday, removing a major funding figure from the healthcare political scene. But the passing of the 79-year-old co-founder of the right-wing advocacy group Americans for Prosperity likely will have little impact on continuing efforts by that group and his brother Charles Koch on healthcare issues. (Meyer, 8/23)

It was the Obama administration that spurred the Kochs to dramatically escalate their strategic and financial involvement in politics. The new Democratic president was trying to pass both a major expansion of government health care spending and a cap-and-trade bill designed to rein in carbon emissions and combat climate change. Charles Koch called Obama’s agenda “the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes,” saying Democrats’ policies “threaten to erode our economic freedom.” Amidst a recession, there was already a backlash against Obama in the form of the Tea Party — a backlash the Kochs helped stoke and tried to shape around their preferred issue positions (anti-Obamacare, anti-cap-and-trade, anti-regulation, anti-taxing the rich). “The Kochs didn’t like the social issues, so they tried to make it a small-government thing and put ‘values’ on the back burner,” social conservative activist Tony Perkins says in Tim Alberta’s new book American Carnage. (Prokop, 8/23)

Of all the billionaires, hedge fund managers and chief executives who have showered politicians in New York with money in the last five years, no one has given more often than David C. Rich. Since 2014, Mr. Rich has doled out more than 200 contributions totaling over $900,000. Last year alone, he gave away nearly a quarter of a million dollars across dozens of campaigns, according to an analysis by The New York Times, and has donated at least 39 times so far this year. (Goodman, 8/26)