One thing is clear: World of political money isn’t

11/17/2005

The acquittal of former state GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner has focused attention once again on the complexity and vagaries of campaign finance laws.

Dane Smith,
Star Tribune
Last update: November 16, 2005 at 9:45 PM

Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s campaign coordinates a TV ad buy in 2002 with the Republican Party and ends up with penalties exceeding $500,000, one of the highest amounts in state history for a violation of campaign finance law.

In 2004, a Democratic-allied national advocacy group fails to meet state disclosure requirements after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Minnesota and ends up being assessed hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

Money from interest groups pours into both parties’ legislative caucuses in unlimited amounts—and then is spent by the caucuses to elect candidates whose campaigns are under strict limits on interest group contributions—and nobody files complaints.

Ron Eibensteiner, a former state Republican Party chairman, is accused of receiving an illegal corporate contribution, with evidence based primarily on the wording in a thank-you note, but after two years of legal wrangling and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer bills, is acquitted.

Those major campaign finance controversies in recent years have undoubtedly left many citizens in a daze about what’s wrong and right, legal or illegal, in the bewildering and complex world of state and federal campaign finance.

“The law is confusing and the public is confused about what is permitted and what is not,” said David Schultz, a Hamline University professor and expert on state campaign finance. “You can’t give certain money to candidates, but you can give that same money to caucuses or to Washington and some of it appears to come back.”

Campaign experts point out that enforcement of the law sometimes looks capricious and inconsistent because there are so many different enforcers under different sets of laws.

The regulators and enforcers in Minnesota federal and state campaigns include the Federal Election Commission and the federal judiciary, the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board and all 87 county attorneys.

In Eibensteiner’s case, Republicans charged that a county attorney with DFL connections brought the charges. Prosecutors denied that the indictment was politically motivated.

The complexity and confusion has reinforced calls—led by conservative Republicans—for sweeping away many of the regulations, limits on contributions and expenditures, and public subsidies and replacing them with a system that simply requires immediate and complete disclosure of all transactions. Current federal and state laws require disclosure from once to three or four times a year.

“The system has gotten too complicated for normal citizens to know what politicians can or cannot do,” said David Strom, president of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, a conservative interest group. “It has become the province of lawyers and wealthy people and ordinary people can’t figure it out.

“With today’s electronics, it’s very doable to do immediate and complete disclosure. Every reform we’ve tried has undermined faith in the political system rather than restored it. People have never been more cynical,” Strom said.

Defenders of the rules

But others say the regulations still make sense and were imposed as a direct response to scandals and citizen demand.

“There is no area of law that works perfectly,” said Larry Noble, executive director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group in Washington, D.C. “Nobody is suggesting we give up on our laws against robbery just because there continue to be so many robberies.

“The Supreme Court has said over and over again that dealing with the appearance of impropriety is a constitutional concern and that public faith in the system is important,” Noble said.

Noble said the public should get used to the fact that there will always be struggles and conflict over the role of money in politics and whether it buys favors and influence.

“We go through this endless cycle where scandals build up, major reforms are passed, lawyers and political managers find loopholes, time passes, scandals build up, and the cycle continues. There is no end to the struggle over money and power and influence in a democracy,” Noble said.