Campaign Finance

There is a lot of disagreement over whether contingency fee arrangements between client and lobbyist should be permitted. Many cities, counties, and states prohibit arrangements where lobbyists are paid only if they succeed. The principal reason is that this arrangement encourages ethical misconduct. It encourages lobbyists to do everything they can to win, which may be good in a private adversary suit, but is not appropriate in a public context, where winning involves changes in public policy or obtaining public contracts, grants, or permits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You're a government official who has had an ethics complaint filed against you. You want it go away. What do you do? According to an article in The Missoulian this weekend, there may be a new arrow in your quiver:  file a court suit demanding dismissal of the complaint on the grounds of a conspiracy to remove you from office and to act in a biased manner toward conservative officials.

"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.

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.

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."