Campaign finance disclosure bill doesn’t threaten charities
Public should be able to learn who’s paying for political ads
Bradley Smith’s confusing op-ed of March 8 about an important bill, SB 96, that will shine the light on the sources of independent expenditures now threatening to overwhelm state elections is misleading. The article’s headline, “Bill threatens charities with harmful regulation” could not be further from the truth.
SB 96, sponsored by Sen. Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, and Rep. Jim Smith, R-Tijeras, has passed the Senate four times. It has bipartisan support in that chamber and from almost 90 percent of the public in a series of polls conducted by Research and Polling over a four-year period. The bill is narrowly tailored. It is aimed at “dark money” coming from nonprofit organizations that pretend to be nonpolitical but which in reality spend millions of dollars in negative ads on TV. You know the ones. They have the scary voice, and the dark grainy background. Sometimes the groups funding these ads bear innocuous-sounding names like America’s Future or Freedom First. But the content of their ads is far from innocuous.
Unlimited spending from these groups has been unleashed by the Citizens’ United court decision in 2010. But while the Supreme Court — and other courts — have ruled the groups’ spending may be unlimited, it has balanced that by saying that states can require disclosure of donors to the groups so that the public can know who is spending these huge sums of money. At Common Cause, we believe that’s a piece of information that citizens should have in order to make informed voting choices.
True charitable organizations, like The March of Dimes or even the Pink Pack cited in Smith’s article, would not have to disclose their donors if they are not running ads mentioning candidates right before an election. And very few charities do this because most are nonprofit organizations whose donors get a tax deduction. To preserve their tax status, they are careful about being nonpartisan. So, for example, in Smith’s story about the hypothetical Pink Pack group that never spent a dime on political advertisements, that kind of group would never need to disclose its donors. Smith’s feigned concern on that score has no basis in any bill now being considered by our Legislature.
No, despite what Bradley Smith declares, the sky is not falling for the important charitable organizations in our state. We are only looking for an opening in the clouds that now shroud the activities of the inscrutable organizations that sponsor expensive ads in New Mexico elections. They already have the ability to spend vast sums. SB 96 simply asks that they not coordinate directly with the candidate they are backing and hence allow him or her to skirt state contribution limits, and that they reveal to the voters who is financing their electioneering activities. We urge House members to continue our state’s march toward transparency in elections and vote for this bill. And we hope readers won’t be deceived by the misleading material about New Mexico bills that is put out by out-of-state ideological groups like the Center for Competitive Politics.