It’s past time to enforce campaign disclosure law

NOW THAT A FEDERAL judge has dismissed the dilatory lawsuit filed by a group pushing school privatization, the State Ethics Commission needs to do what it should have done months ago: Require the group to obey our state’s campaign disclosure law.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Perry’s opinion suggests — but by no means guarantees — that he doesn’t buy the argument that SCRG’s rights would be violated if it had to tell voters how it was trying to influence their votes. That’s no surprise. Contrary to the lobbying group’s claims, the law in question merely requires SCRG to tell voters how much money it spent on the election and how; thanks to a loophole, the group doesn’t even have to say where it got the money.

It’s also no surprise that the judge said there was no actual case here to decide.

SCRG went to court after receiving a letter from the State Ethics Commission staff saying it needed to file a report detailing its spending on a half-dozen radio ads that ran a few weeks before the June primaries. As a result, the commission essentially froze in its tracks, never even filing the formal complaint that is the first step in actually ordering anyone to do anything.

Judge Perry’s order bolsters our belief that SCRG was wasting the time and resources of the courts and of state officials by filing this suit. But our larger concern is how the Ethics Commission responded to the lawsuit — and how it will respond now that the suit has been tossed out of court.

It will be tempting for the commission simply to drop the matter; after all, the election that SCRG sought to influence has come and gone. Why go through the hassle of what will surely be another lawsuit, the agency might wonder, in pursuit of information whose usefulness is now vastly diminished?

The answer to that question is contained in Judge Perry’s order, which detailed the lengthy state appeals process that should be exhausted before a federal court would even consider intervening. “Allowing the target of a possible administrative complaint simply to file for an injunction in a federal district court,” he wrote, “defeats the purpose of the Ethics Act.”

That is precisely what SCRG managed to do in this case. By filing this frivolous lawsuit, it was able to cow the already-timid Ethics Commission into sitting on its hands. The result was that the elections SCRG tried to influence came and went without any state action to provide voters with information to which they were legally entitled.

If the state fails to pursue this case now, it will send a clear message to every secretive group out there that it can ignore our disclosure laws, file a lawsuit if the state so much as hints that it will enforce the law and then watch the clock tick past the time when disclosure would make any difference.

Besides that, a post-election lawsuit gives us the chance to test the law in court, find out if it actually does contain any constitutional flaws and correct those flaws before the next round of elections. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves in this same position two years from now — with a well-meaning law and a toothless law enforcement agency that together provide little protection for voters who want to know how indebted their would-be representatives may be to special interest groups that are helping get them elected.