Elected officials write campaign finance laws. Elected officials have a prime directive - get re-elected. Everything they do that can influence re-election is done in that light.
Elected officials wrote and passed the current Maryland Campaign Finance laws (Maryland Code Annotated, Elections, Title 13 Campaign Finance). The Democrat party has held a huge majority in the General Assembly since time immemorial. Each section of the law was passed with consideration of how it would affect the officials' re-election.
Someone has to be held accountable for campaign finance faux pas, intentional or accidental. It would not do to hold the official accountable for these acts, so the scheme has a treasurer who is. The rules are strict, too. Only the treasurer can accept or disburse funds.
There is a case in Maryland where a member of the House of Delegates was convicted of stealing campaign funds and expense account funds. He appealed and the Court of Appeals overturned his conviction and refused to allow as evidence against him the campaign finance reports that he had signed. Only the treasurer was permitted to sign the documents. Any other signature invalidated the forms and they were not permissible as business document evidence. Without the documents, the state could not prove their case. The delegate, who had resigned upon conviction, ran for re-election in 1994 and won. He has a new campaign finance fund, a new expense account, and a job at IWIF, former home of Tommy Bromwell, current home of former Attorney General J. Joseph Curran.
From news reports on the Oliver case, Councilman Oliver admitted that he wrote checks. Under Maryland Campaign Finance Law, only the treasurer can write checks. The treasurer is responsible for the checkbook. Either the Councilman forged a signature, or the Councilman signed a check without lawful authority, or the treasurer pre-signed checks for the Councilman to write as he wished. All three are very bad things to do.
The only time the candidate is liable is when, if acting as the campaign chairman, the mandated reports are not filed timely. The fines cannot come out of campaign funds.
Public Financing of Political Campaigns - Remember the prime directive for elected officials? Do nothing that would impair reelection. Keep that in mind.
PFPC is an idea that comes to us out of the great progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt. It was debated and discussed ad nauseum in a time when the population was inclined towards progressive ideas. This from the era that gave us great programs for leveling in society so that we did not have to suffer through any more robber barons.
Current promoters, all of them elected officials or progressive organizations, complain of the bad influence of money in political campaigns and want to limit it. They also complain of having to spend hours on the telephone fundraising in order to fund campaigns for re-election. Oh, and there is the pitch that political campaigns have become so expensive that well qualified people are reluctant to get involved in representative politics. They call their proposals Clean Campaign Finance Reform. You have heard the joke about how you can tell when a politician is lying - his lips are moving. The lips are flying!
Let us look at some of their arguments. There is too much money in politics. You have heard huge numbers from the media. The presidential campaigns are generating more money per week than President Bush raised for each of the last two campaigns. If you put together all the money for all the campaigns in the country from January 2001 through December 2004, a presidential election cycle, you wouldn't have enough money to pay for the potato chips purchased by Americans during the same period. It is not so much that there is too much money; it is more like not enough of the money finds its way to the elected official's campaign.
Big donations get big attention from elected officials. If I understand this, they are saying that because they have been in office for years, and some people have given the maximum permissible contribution each cycle, that these elected officials are influenced by this money. They do not need campaign finance reform, by their own admission; they need to be turned out of office. More than Clean Money, we need clean politicians.
Well-qualified people, does this assume that current office holders are generally not well qualified, find political campaigns to be too expensive. PFPC schemes establish limits that diffuse this fear, we are told. There is nothing in the PFPC scheme to remove the real problem in this respect, huge campaign war chests held by officials to warn off challengers. Senator Paul Pinsky, the principal proponent of PFPC, has not had a credible challenger since he challenged and beat an incumbent. Since raising money is always seen as a sign of strength and support, rather than collect big checks, PFPC requires a number of small contributions to demonstrate public support. Who has the tougher job of raising these little amounts, the incumbent with a list of thousands of contributors from prior years, or, on of Senator Pinsky's favorite examples, the janitor in the building occupied by the fortune five-hundred company president? Clean Campaigns? It really is more like underhanded dirty dealing.
PFPC gets more people involved in running for office. This might be true. This was one of the stated goals of the Maryland Commission on Public Financing of Political Campaigns. This is somewhat deceptive. A goal to serve the public interest would be to increase the number of challengers elected to public office, and that has not happened. It is unlikely to happen. For example, consider the case of the janitor challenging the two-term incumbent. The incumbent is worried, for good reason. The incumbent might counter this by encouraging several people to run in the challenger's primary. The incumbent can muster a smear campaign against the threat, to be carried out by the solicited challenger. The smart, campaign savvy incumbent can easily keep the credible challenger distracted while remaining above the fray. When the incumbent's record is called forth for public consideration, he characterizes this as an attack from a desperate candidate involved in a dirty primary campaign. This does not cost anybody any money, except the public, and we already know how incumbents regard the public's dollars. This is but one obvious example. Seasoned political operatives know many, many ways to undercut a good candidate. Another easy way to go is to get an independent to run in the General Election and use public money to siphon off votes from the challenger. Remember Ralph Nader and Ross Perot. Remember the impact they had on the presidential contests. PFPC does not even require them to come up with their own money to run spoiler campaigns. Spoiler campaigns are not run merely to please the incumbent. There will always be a quid pro quo at the end. In the 2008 Presidential campaign, Governor Huckabee is said to have stayed in the race in order to minimize Governor Romney, splitting g the conservative vote and giving Senator McCain an easy walk to the nomination. Huckabee is suspected of angling for a VP spot in exchange. Senator Clinton is being encouraged to drop out of the race so she can be added as VP to Senator Obama's nomination.
Presently, incumbents have name recognition, established fundraising and volunteer organizations, and the power of incumbency, the ability to promote themselves at no expense to them, but often at a dollar cost to their constituents, to aid them with reelection. Public finding, even when shared with their opponents, provides them with money without working for it. This is not corruption because of the sharing aspect of the scheme. It is a scheme that will continue progressives in office. Virtually all of the support for PFPC comes from the political left. In Maryland, the left has promised to bury the right. Does anyone really believe that PFPC will level the playing field? If so, can I interest you in some land just east of Ocean City, Maryland?
Real political corruption does not have anything to do with campaign contributions. It has to do with corrupt people. Minor politicians will be caught with their hand in the campaign cookie jar. Recall the scandal surrounding the expenses for hotel room in Towson for Baltimore Mayoral candidate Keiffer Mitchell. This not unlike the Baltimore County Councilman Oliver situation. Both campaigns saw the money sitting there and decided to use it for things prohibited by law. Real corruption takes big money and that cannot flow through a regulated campaign finance system.
Tommy Bromwell was not caught up in campaign finance problems. No matter how much was in his campaign account, or how much he might have needed money for personal things while serving as a Senator, he didn't skim. It was guaranteed he would be caught. He would go into debt before he would ever consider such a thing and there is no indication that he even considered it. He was corrupted by big money. Instead of getting a big paycheck to do the job at IWIF, he exchanged it for similar money to wield influence in state government. Once he went down that easy money path, he became addicted. That was his downfall. The people in the money chain rolled on him. His friends and loyal supporters aren't mad at him for taking the money and the services in exchange for his power, they are mad at the scummy people who rolled on Tommy and snitched him out. There is no shortage of big corruption for elected officials. I recall that Oliver North faced similar charges over a security fence built at his home at no cost to him. Saying that money is the problem is the equivalent of blaming guns for crimes. Neither political party is without corrupt members. Lord Acton's admonition about power comes to mind.
PFPC does not level the playing field. The results from the four states and New York City that have tried this, and all are very different from Maryland, but for one party domination and progressives in their legislatures. Public funding will be used by candidates without a prayer and by incumbents who are not threatened. The first will tilt at windmills and the second will use the money to self-promote at your expense. And that, my friend, is the key.
Polling on this topic always favors: reducing the influence of money in elections; reducing the time incumbents spend raising money and increasing the time they spend on issues important to you; reducing the influence of big donors on public policy; giving you an equal voice with the special interests; cleaning up elections; removing the financial obstacles to well-qualified people who want to run for office. All of these are runaway winners. There is a runaway loser question on these polls, when it is included: Are you in favor paying higher taxes to fund political campaigns in Maryland?
Under the current laws in Maryland, and excepting the office of Governor, candidates for election solicit money from people they think will support their candidacy. People who contribute can be assumed to support that candidate. There are exceptions to this, for instance an employee who buys a ticket to a fundraiser because the boss really wants them to, but largely, contributors to campaigns are supporters. People would be surprised to find out that the Democrat candidate for the Eighth District Senate seat made financial contributions to their Republican candidate's campaign. People would be more surprised to find out that they had contributed to the campaign of someone for whom they would never vote. Under PFPC that would happen to everyone who paid taxes under threat of going to prison. (All taxes are voluntarily paid under threat of going to prison.) There are plenty of governmental programs funded by tax dollars that significant numbers of people disagree with. That happens in republican government. In at least one state with this plan and insufficient money to fund everyone who chose to run, a court challenge resulted in the government having to allocate funds from other programs in order to fund political campaigns. Are we ready to have schools closed, firehouse shuttered, reductions in the number of police officers, all of the foregoing coming from the left's play book, so that we can finance the political campaigns of anyone who can generate four-hundred five dollar contributions? At the Federal level, the check-off for allocations, not additional taxes, to the public funding of presidential campaigns cannot support the needs of the program. Thankfully, most candidates find traditional funding sources – citizens. If the proponents of PFPC would be honest and tell us that it would be Additional Taxes to Fund Political Campaigns, this would be a non-starter.
Public financing of political campaigns is a bad idea for the public. It will not reform the influence of money in politics. It will not open the doors to the state house to new people. It will continue to aid incumbents, making their already all but guaranteed reelection even more assured, and nothing more.
Check back for campaign finance ideas that will help the public.
