Campaign Finance | City Ethics

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play December 17, 2014

The Ethics of Combining Charitable and Campaign Contributions

It amazes me how many ways elected officials misuse charitable organizations to engage in ethical misconduct, especially to get around gift rules. One would think that charities would be sufficiently sacrosanct. But instead they are frequently used as an indirect form of pay to play, and they have played a major role in getting around campaign finance limitations.

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play October 29, 2014

Lobbying City and County Attorneys

There is a front-page article in the New York Times today about the recent increase in lobbying and entertaining state attorneys general (AGs), as well as in campaign contributions from businesses who have a financial interest in decisions that these AGs make, especially with respect to suits they file on behalf of consumers.

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play July 17, 2014

Differing Views on Corruption and Campaign Finance

I keep thinking about the recent line of U.S. Supreme Court campaign finance cases that limit corruption to "quid pro quo" situations. A few months ago, I wrote a blog post explaining that the Court's picture of campaign finance as about political beliefs is not how things work at the local level, where politics is more about power and spoils than about beliefs. But the "quid pro quo" view of corruption is problematic in other ways.

June 19, 2014

Quote of the Day - Soft Money

Old soft money was associated with access, like a wad of cash that you’d slip to a nightclub bouncer to get in the door. The new soft money is more like a bulge in one’s jacket pocket, an implied threat against those who refuse to comply.

June 18, 2014

The People's Pledge in Mayoral Races

In 2012, Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown signed a People's Pledge in their U.S. senatorial race in Massachusetts. The candidates agreed to donate to a charity of the other candidate's choice a sum equal to 50% of any advertisement run by any outside group or PAC. The goal was to let the candidates control their own race and to prevent outside groups from changing the nature of the race, especially by running negative ads, as they tend to do.

May 19, 2014

Counter-Allegations Against Montana's Political Practices Commissioner

You're a government official who has had an ethics complaint filed against you. You want it go away. What do you do?

April 17, 2014

Dealing with Wheeling

"Wheeling" is a term I just discovered. The context is that NJ governor Chris Christie made a campaign promise to deal with "wheeling," and then failed to, according to a South Jersey Times editorial yesterday. Here's how the editorial describes the practice (many NJ local governments prohibit or limit contributions from their contractors):

It goes like this: Smith County has a fat consulting contract with Joe Blow Associates.

April 3, 2014

The McCutcheon Decision and Local Government Ethics

The big news in the government ethics world this week is C.J. Roberts' opinion in the McCutcheon case. The biggest problem with this opinion is its author's continuation of an unrealistic picture of how large campaign contributions work. Roberts acts as if access were not an important goal, and as if the only problematic relationship between contributor and elected official involved quid pro quos.

March 26, 2014

Government Ethics Is Grandly Unified in Texas

According to Wikipedia, a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is "a model in particle physics in which at high energy, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model which define the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, are merged into one single interaction."

February 19, 2014

Winter Reading: "Access and Lobbying"

"Access and Lobbying: Looking Beyond the Corruption Paradigm," by Dorie Apollonio, Bruce E. Cain, and Lee Drutman, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 36:1 (2008) (attached; see below), has some very valuable things to say about local government lobbying, even though it focuses on federal government lobbying.

The authors note that, despite the greater focus of academics and good government groups on campaign finance regulation, more money is spent by companies on lobbying than on campaigns, a sign that they feel it is a more valuable form of influence.

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