Tuesday, Mar. 08, 2011

http://www.thestate.com/2011/03/08/1727007/house-should-ban-its-money-laundering.html#

UNDER NORMAL circumstances, the most money any individual, company or PAC can donate to a legislator is $1,000 per election. Under normal circumstances, those legislators (or other elected officials or candidates) can’t donate money from their campaign accounts to other candidates.

The reason for the $1,000 limit is to reduce the amount of influence that any one entity can exert on elected officials, who, after all, are supposed to be representing their constituents — regardless of whether they donate or not — and not their non-constituent donors.

The ban on donating donations to other candidates prevents campaign money laundering — that is, a candidate acting as a pass-through agent by accepting money and giving it to other candidates so those other candidates can either evade the legal limit from a given donor or else accept money from a donor who would be politically toxic in their districts. It also prevents legislators from using other people’s money to buy political support within the Legislature — to advance specific legislation or their own leadership ambitions — which could make the legislative money launderers even more beholden to their contributors.

Although we understand that some people object to capping donations, we don’t see how legislators could object to the money-laundering ban, since its purpose is to prevent legislators from circumventing the cap that they have the power to change. And yet House members do object, and since 2003 they have been able to ignore it, through an abnormal provision that they insisted on adding to state law to allow elected officials to operate so-called “leadership PACs” in addition to their regular campaign accounts.

These would be insidious even if we didn’t have the ban on legislators donating their donations, because they allow legislators to “donate” money from their PACs back into their own campaign accounts, thereby doubling the donations they can receive from a donor. In addition, these PACs can accept individual donations of up to $3,500 per election rather than the usual $1,000 per legislator.

And unlike candidates’ campaign accounts, which you can find fairly easily by selecting a candidate’s name in the state’s on-line database, you’re not going to find these accounts unless you know what to look for, which insiders do but most voters don’t. For the record, the only ones we’re aware of are controlled by House Speaker Bobby Harrell, House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper, House Labor, Commerce and Industry Chairman Bill Sandifer, House Democratic Leader Harry Ott and Reps. Jim Merrill, Alan Clemmons and Gilda Cobb-Hunter.

You’ll notice rather quickly that there are no senators on that list, which helps explain why it was so easy for Sens. Jake Knotts and Vincent Sheheen to get 38 of their 43 colleagues to sign on immediately last week as co-sponsors of a change to the Senate’s internal rules to prohibit senators from forming leadership PACs. That rule change, which could be approved this week, will ensure that no senators create money-laundering PACs. But that’s not the primary purpose: The primary purpose is to put political pressure on the House to go along with the Senate’s longstanding efforts to outlaw leadership PACs — which the Senate also should continue in the more traditional way, by passing Mr. Sheheen’s bill to prohibit all such PACs in state law.

The Senate really shouldn’t have to engage in such theatrics just to get the House to agree to outlaw a practice that was legalized for the purpose of circumventing state law. The fact that the House has been unwilling to do that even though the vast majority of House members do not maintain these money-laundering PACs demonstrates just how effective a tool they are for allowing a handful of House leaders to keep their followers in line.