Panel should close campaign reporting loophole

ASK MOST PEOPLE whether they should be able to find out who bankrolls their legislators’ campaigns, and they’ll say yes. Common sense tells you that even the most honest person can’t help paying a little more attention to someone who writes him a $1,000 check — let alone an industry that underwrites his entire campaign — than to the ordinary voter he’s supposed to represent.

That’s why our laws require candidates to report the sources of their campaign donations, and even limit how much any one individual or group can give to a single candidate.

Most people also realize that there’s no real difference between writing a check to a candidate’s campaign and sending out campaign mailings or running TV ads right before an election that says really positive things about that candidate — or really negative things about that candidate’s opponent.

Whether it’s the S.C. Education Association or the Chamber of Commerce or the ACLU or South Carolinians for Responsible Government, the groups that make these so-called “independent” expenditures can obligate a candidate to them every bit as much as groups that write a check to his campaign.

That’s why people in both political parties were outraged eight years ago when the video poker barons started spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to unseat elected officials, and refused to tell us how much they were spending or who they were.

That’s why people in both political parties spent more than four years working to change state law — over the vigorous objection and even veto of then-Gov. Jim Hodges — to require everybody who spends money to influence our votes to tell us where their money came from.

That’s why Gov. Mark Sanford got personally involved in pushing legislators to finally pass that law after he took office.

Unfortunately, the law didn’t work. It looked like it required disclosure from any group that spent money to say anything good or bad about a candidate in the crucial final 45 days before an election. But a stray sentence invalidated that new provision, and even allowed some groups that had always been reporting to keep their contributions secret.

The effect: Unless the Legislature acts in the next two weeks, voters will know less about who our lawmakers might feel indebted to as a result of this year’s elections than we have known since at least 1992.

The Senate has passed a bill designed to close the loophole, and the House Constitutional Laws Subcommittee is set to take up that bill this morning. Unfortunately (again), the authors of that bill appear to have gotten nearly as turned around as the authors of the law they’re trying to correct. That means the subcommittee needs to fix this new language, so that this time, it really does close the loophole. And then the House needs to pass the bill, so voters can have this minimum amount of information that lawmakers promised.

Elections are supposed to be a contest of ideas, and so we should all welcome a vigorous debate. But that doesn’t mean closing our eyes to the real effects of money in politics. We have every right to ask who is spending money to influence our votes and, in so doing, ingratiating themselves to — or intimidating — the elected officials who are supposed to be representing us.