Lawmaker political action committees enable influential legislators to serve as conduits for campaign funds from special-interest groups to their colleagues. They provide loopholes for campaign donation laws approved after the Lost Trust scandal. The Legislature should ban their existence as incompatible with the spirit of legislative ethics laws.

Only three leadership PACs exist, each controlled by a House leader. They are House Speaker Bobby Harrell; Rep. Dan Cooper, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; and Rep. Harry Cato, chairman of the Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee.

Those lawmakers should set a good example and terminate their respective PACs in advance of legislative action. Three other legislators already have done so: Rep Jim Harrison, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; House Speaker Pro Tem Doug Smith; and Rep. Doug Jennings, former House minority leader.

Allowing legislative PACs to continue will encourage their proliferation, particularly as the abuses associated with the leadership PAC of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay fade out of the headlines. John Crangle, executive director of the South Carolina chapter of Common Cause, says the addition of new leadership PACs would be additionally corrosive to the legislative process.

In a recent essay on our Commentary page, Mr. Crangle noted that leadership PACs provide a way to evade political contribution limits established by the state ethics law approved in 1992. For example, a legislator can receive the maximum $1,000 donation from an individual and then get another $3,500 from the same donor for his leadership PAC.

Further, leadership PACs can be used by well-placed legislators to support the re-election campaigns of like-minded colleagues. Or as Mr. Crangle put it, "Once collected by legislative leaders, special interest money is then handed out to other legislators as campaign contributions. This money, in turn, can give special interest donors double leverage over both key legislative leaders and rank-and-file legislators, assuring not only the introduction of bills favorable to special interests, but also easing their passage through the Legislature."

And lobbying groups can contribute to leadership PACs, though banned from making contributions to legislative campaigns.

Even by their limited presence, legislative PACs muddy the ethical waters that the post-Lost Trust legislation sought to clarify and purify. Sen. Tom Moore, D-Aiken, and Rep. Dan Tripp, R-Greenville, have introduced bills to halt the practice. A similar bill was approved in the Senate last year, but failed in the House.

The three legislative leaders who maintain leadership PACs should dismantle them. That would be demonstrating real leadership.