Rich has a very good post up at Capitol Fax discussing the ethics commission recommendations.
Frankly, the commission’s proposed $1,000 trigger for disclosure of statewide contributions within 5 business days and the $500 trigger for other campaign committees may be a bit too high and too long.
I tend to agree on the too high issue, but the 5 business days may be too short in between cycles. If a State Senator is at year two in his term and gets a $500 donation in the middle of April–the Senator may not have a political staffer in place and mailed donations might not even be opened in such cases for a while. The answer is relatively simple though–require 30 day reporting of donations outside of the cycle and then go to 5 days during the cycle and even 2 days in the last 30 days. All of this can be solved by relatively easy technical fixes however.
A very real positive step would be to improve reporting on expenditures as well. They lag far longer than contributions.
Best of all, Madigan is largely in favor of greater and faster disclosure so this general recommendation is very doable.
* The campaign contribution caps are, of course, controversial. Steve Chapman makes a good point against them…
…under the 1st Amendment, the Supreme Court has ruled, contributions may be limited but independent expenditures may not. If an asphalt contractor wants to give $100,000 to an incumbent governor’s campaign, the state can forbid it. But not if he wants to spend $100,000 buying ads praising the governor or attacking his opponent. I’m willing to bet that if a candidate will sell favors in exchange for contributions, he will sell favors in exchange for independent expenditures on his behalf.
I also agree that the suggested donation limits are too low, but there are a couple aspects here that are important to keep in mind.
First, donating $25,000 to a campaign is a lot more useful to the campaign than spending it on your own. If you spend it on your own it may or may not be on message and as effective so the donating directly is far more valuable to a candidate. In this way, independent expenditures are somewhat a good thing. If someone is ideologically wanting to support a candidate, they are free to do so, but the pressure to do it is a lot different than when contractors are approached for cash and pushed to donate large amounts. That alone would have limited Blagojevich–not stopped him, but limited him.
A second thing to consider though is what does limiting contributions do to interest groups. Currently, I think one of the healthier aspects of Illinois campaign finance is that there aren’t the ridiculous efforts to ‘not’ coordinate between campaigns and interest groups. Instead, interest groups can simply making in kind donations as they wish and the benefit of this is that it keeps the candidate accountable.
Once you limit that relationship, then it becomes in everyone’s interest to try and find ways to skirt the law and instead of full coordination, pretend to not be coordinating and this leads to an immense amount of time for both the campaigns and the State Board of Elections to try and police the coordination which is a waste of time for all of us.
So what to do about caps? I don’t know. Caps aren’t some magical cure all, but they can reduce the degree of corruption. Blagojevich exploded the number of high dollar donations and in doing so put the state up for sale. There’s no doubt he would still have been crooked, but his auctions for state contracts would have had a ceiling at least.
On the other hand, caps create all sorts of perverse incentives in terms of interest groups and campaigns. Is the reduction in harm created by caps outweighed by the regulatory fiasco created by the caps? I’m not sure I have the answer.
Finally, the real way to reform government in the Illinois General Assembly is to limit the flow of funds between leadership and members. This won’t happen, but if we want to reduce the power of the Four Tops to set the agenda, reducing that connection and the top down funding of candidates is critical. The current funding model allows the majority’s leader (Speaker or President) to bottle up almost anything in Rules or simply let legislation die without a real home.
But even this isn’t without fairly high costs. We can complain about the leadership power that is so concentrated in Illinois, but the alternative are weak parties that cannot agree on important legislation. A rather dramatic example of how this looks from within the Lege is when Tom Cross was given back the power they stripped the Republican leader of after the Lee Daniels disastrous reign. Cross appeared rather agnostic about the whole thing, but the rank and file didn’t want to hassle with it and found a strong leader a more effective model.
What to do then? Increase transparency at both the campaign level and within government. One of the things Blagojevich did to maintain his crime spree, was to hide behind exceptions to information requests. He always lost, but it would take years for that to happen in some cases and better access to such information would have led to the public figuring the guy out a bit quicker. Improving access to information about internal state government workings is just as vital as improving campaign finance.
While the report discusses the issue of transparency in government in general, it’s not the highlight of the report and it should be.
The reality is that with modern technology, transparency is far easier than it ever has been. Quinn has indicated a fairly strong interest in opening up government, but I tend to see many of the basic ideas either too ambiguous to be helpful at this point or stuck in a pre-internet mindset of individuals having to ask for information–the current state of technology really makes it easy to provide information by default.