Tracking money hard to carry out

Published: December 5, 2010 3:00 a.m.

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20101205/EDIT0501/312059952/1044/LOCAL08

Associated Press

Former Texas Congressman Tom DeLay was convicted recently on felony conspiracy and money-laundering charges in Texas

WASHINGTON – A Republican political strategist was spot on: “Common practice here in D.C. looks an awful lot like plain old corruption everywhere else in the country.”

John Feehery was writing about the recent conviction of former Texas Congressman Tom DeLay on felony conspiracy and money-laundering charges. DeLay was accused of illegally scheming to funnel corporate campaign contributions to Texas statehouse candidates in 2002.

DeLay’s plan for getting more Republicans elected to Texas’ congressional seats involved strengthening the GOP power in the state legislature (which was dominated by Democrats for generations). So he directed $190,000 in corporate contributions from his federal political action committee to GOP state candidates. A 1903 Texas law bans corporate contributions to candidates for state office.

When DeLay was indicted, the reaction from Republicans in Washington was that the prosecutor (a Democrat) was out to get DeLay and, therefore, the charges were bogus. The subtext was that everybody – that is, everybody in political Washington – moves money around to circumvent contribution limits and disclosure, so what’s the big deal? Any prosecution stemming from DeLay’s actions could only be from purely political motives.

The prosecutor may well have taken partisan glee in making DeLay’s life miserable; I don’t know. But the bottom line is that a Texas jury – who may have better remembered the accused as a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars” than as a former top-dog in the GOP-led House – said he broke the law.

The relationship between money and politics is endlessly fraught. Few donors send as little as $50 to a preferred candidate merely because they admire the person from afar. Even if it’s nothing more than a request for a flag flown over the Capitol, a donor expects some extra little consideration from the lawmaker. So if a $50 donor expects a tad more, what does a $10,000 donor expect?

How to pay for elections in a democratic society without generating expectations from donors is beyond me. Total public funding – that is, making all taxpayers share equally in the cost of all elections – is both hideously expensive and a violation of our First Amendment rights. Besides, who would choose which candidates merited the public financing?

So let’s accept that we’re stuck with at least the outlines of the system we now have.

Is there some way to address the other aspect of the DeLay case, the funneling of money from one type of campaign cash receptacle to another?

This is so widely done that you’d be hard-pressed to find a candidate who does not contribute some of his or her donations to other candidates. Although former Rep. Mark Souder was considered a wimpish fundraiser, he generally managed to scrape up some money for other GOP candidates who needed it more.

In explaining this transfer of money, Souder said what any candid incumbent would say: His financial backers were fine with that because they trusted him to look at the Washington scene more broadly and use their money to assist other candidates who would share Souder’s (and their) political and legislative agenda.

In fact, this is how more-established politicians in Washington rack up IOUs. They create political action committees (which have higher donation limits and looser rules about how the money can be used) and disperse money to colleagues and candidates.

And it would shock no one to think that some donors, who have already given the maximum legal amount to Candidate X, give money to other pols or their political action committees with the expectation that a check will be written to Candidate X.

In another context, it’d be called money laundering. Oh, that’s right. That’s what they call it in Texas.

So why aren’t members of Congress indicted for money laundering right and left? Because it’s not against federal law to accept donations (from corporate and union PACs or individuals) and then pass on the money to other candidates.

In fact, federal election law (written by guess who?) puts limits on how much a corporate or union PAC or an individual can donate, but it has few restrictions on what the campaign can spend it on.

Is it a problem? Not if you share the view of many candidates that what their supporters want is a political climate in Washington that’s conducive to their candidate’s ideology.

But if you are uneasy about the flow of money from one campaign to the next without also tracking the original source, don’t expect transparency to come to the rescue. It is impossible – without some evidence such as e-mails or whistleblowers – to determine that Campaign A was merely a pass-through for donations to Campaign B that, if made directly to B, would have exceeded the donor’s limits.