Fired Up Missouri! has a must-read post on Peter Kinder’s use of a sham committee called Better Leadership for Missouri to raise money in excess of the contribution limits for his campaign. To be clear, BLM wasn’t used as a conduit to bring money back into his main campaign committee; Kinder was using BLM to raise and spend as a de facto second campaign committee for the infrastructure of Kinder’s campaign. It’s actually a more blatant violation of campaign finance law.

As they say, read the rest.

It isn’t that Stan Cox, Republican Rep. from Sedalia, isn’t making a valid point: he complains about the sneaky way campaign contributors smuggle funds to politicians in both parties through a labyrinth of PACs. Cox (aka Undead Charleton Heston) says that the current system “can be defined no better than money laundering. It’s a circuitous route of getting the money somewhere for the purpose of deceiving the people.”

Too true. And Democrats do their share of it. They have to. To stick strictly to the limits would be to disarm unilaterally. But Cox’s bill achieves transparency by lifting all campaign contribution limits. That’s like criminalizing embezzlement even as you legalize armed robbery. Armed robbery is certainly a more transparent crime. But it’s still…not…right.

In the nineties, Missourians voted for campaign contribution limits. They wanted to stop the wholesale auctioning off of our legislature. No matter how righteous Cox and the Republicans pretend to be, they’re flouting the will of the people.

Mr. Cox and other Republican legislators: Put your guns down now and surrender peacefully.

Nobody even spoke up for or against lifting campaign finance limits when it came before the state Senate on Tuesday. Why bother? Republicans are going to blast away and get their way. Well, yes, lifting the limits makes politicians look bought, but … so?

Majority Leader Charlie Shields said:

“If they think politicians are bought and sold, at least they want to know who they’re bought and sold by.”

We’re up for sale and we don’t care who knows it.

In fact, lifting the limits guarantees that the price of putting a senator in one’s pocket will go up, thus further guaranteeing that only the richest will control the state. Your little $25 contributions here and there will seem increasingly paltry.

In 1994, 74 percent of Missouri voters approved imposing campaign finance limits. Do you have any idea how rare it is to get 74 percent of voters to agree on anything? You couldn’t even get 74 percent of them to approve of Mom and apple pie. But Missourians knew this was an important idea.

Nevertheless, Republicans keep saying we should lift the limits so that contributors who want to get around them won’t do it in a sneaky way, using PACs. What we want, they tell us, is “transparency”.

No, what we want is to know that Rex Sinquefield and the Farm Bureau aren’t buying our state government. Nor is it hard to figure out how to halt the auction of elected officials.

In a posting last October, I interviewed Jim Trout about the limits. He pointed out that:                                                  

the old law had bugs in it, but the no-cap solution was no solution.  “Take the bugs out, but don’t use a Sherman Tank to do it,” he said in a PubDef interview last January [’06].

What he means by “bugs” is that current law allows legislative committees to raise ten times as much money as any individual can give and there is no limit on how many legislative committees may be formed. Everybody and his brother can have one.  Furthermore, as even Republicans correctly argue, those legislative committees are far less transparent than straight donations.

Trout would like to see two changes in election law.  First, each PARTY should be allowed one PAC, with a set amount of donations allowed.  That means two PACs in the state instead of dozens.  Second, the campaign limits need to be raised.  Inflation has taken a huge bite out of the limits passed a dozen years ago.  Stamps have gone up, and so has air time.

But Republicans didn’t consider taking the sane, responsible, fair course of action by keeping the limits, raising them to account for inflation, and restricting PACS. Instead, they’ve given the finger to the 74 percent of us who approve of those limits.

Their thinking is that the voters won’t do anything about it. Rich GOP donors love it, and the other dunces will keep voting them into office as long as Calamity Jane Cunningham proposes laws to rein in those traitorous judges and the legislature defends us tooth and nail against illegal immigrants–by forbidding them to attend public universities.

So the simpletons froth over judges who might someday raise taxes (even though they never have and wouldn’t). The gullible foot soldiers expel a sigh of relief now that Mizzou is free of wetback students. Meanwhile, the Republican legislature will be free to continue, for example, taking checks from Premium Standard Farms in exchange for denying local governments a say in controlling CAFOs. If rural people keep voting Republicans into office, a lot of them will have to kiss their property values goodbye, not to mention finding themselves living in the midst of illegal immigrants who take the low paying jobs at Tyson chicken processing plants.

Because that’s how it goes, when voters shrug their shoulders over politicians that whore after money.

Three Democratic senators want all campaign finance contribution limits lifted:  Tim Green (Florissant), Chuck Graham (Columbia), and Chris Koster (Harrisonville).  Tim Green, in fact, introduced the amendment to lift the caps. 

Because Koster has taken a hundred thou from Rex Sinquefield, he’s also taking some political heat.  KMOX radio interviewed him about that question, and he stood firm for lifting the limits.  Here’s the interview if you want to hear it.  Republicans–and these three Democrats–like to muddy the waters with the old “we need transparency” canard.  Yes, we do, but throwing out all caps on contributions is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Just last week, I wrote about senator Joan Bray’s solution to the transparency in contributions problem.

“The public thinks we’re all controlled by money, and we don’t need to do anything more to make that reality or perception,” Bray said. “The public strongly likes the idea of contribution limits. It has expressed that in votes in the past. And we should respect and not resort to indulging ourselves in unlimited contributions.”

Bray argues for legislation that would control the proliferation of PACs and political committees. ….

Here’s an analogy:  If people are finding embezzling too easy to get away with, Republicans think it would be wise to make the embezzlement easy to spot … and legal.  They figure that if it’s easy to spot, the boss can fire the embezzler.  Democrats want to make the embezzlement more difficult to achieve … and illegal.

That’s a no-brainer.

A no-brainer indeed, unless you’re a legislator who prefers to sell yourself and sell the public out.

I’m not being hard on Koster here because he’s a former Republican.  We’re glad to have anybody from the other side who sees that Democratic ideas are better.  And Koster has charisma that would be put to better use promoting Democratic ideals than pushing Republican selfishness.  If he would promote Democratic principles.  But how much good does it do Democrats to have Koster switch parties if he still votes to get rid of campaign donation limits?

And by the way, Tim Green and Chuck Graham also need to repent their votes on this issue and push to limit PACs. 

Because that’s the solution:  limit each party to one PAC. 

Jim Trout, who sued over the no-cap-on-contributions law and won, has said that the old law had bugs in it, but that the no-cap solution was no solution. 

“Take the bugs out, but don’t use a Sherman Tank to do it,” he said in a PubDef interview last January.

What he means by “bugs” is that current law allows legislative committees to raise ten times as much money as any individual can give and there is no limit on how many legislative committees may be formed.  Everybody and his brother can have one.  Furthermore, as even Republicans correctly argue, those legislative committees are far less transparent than straight donations.

Trout would like to see two changes in election law.  First, each PARTY should be allowed one PAC, with a set amount of donations allowed.  That means two PACs in the state instead of dozens.  Second, the campaign limits need to be raised.  Inflation has taken a huge bite out of the limits passed a dozen years ago.  Stamps have gone up, and so has air time.

Senator Koster.  Senator Green.  Senator Graham.  C’mon now.  You know that solution would level the playing field so that ordinary voters would get a fair shake for a change.  Don’t you?

(Tim Green is pictured above and Chuck Graham is pictured below.)