Senate’s filibuster rule protects corruption

Nothing about American politics has failed so badly as efforts to contain the corrupting influence of campaign money. Nowadays, billionaires shove millions into political committees, parties pass gobs of loot through innocuous-sounding outside groups, everyone involved practices nothing more than a legalized form of money laundering, and none of them bat an eye. It was not always so.

In a less jaded age, the Florida Legislature as well as the public took offense over the $450,000 that three wealthy men, one of whom ran six dog tracks, had secretly contributed to elect Gov. Fuller Warren in 1948. Feeling cheated of the patronage he had expected, another conspirator ratted out the deal.

Warren’s haul was big money then, equivalent to $5.1 million today. It prompted Florida’s national model “Who Gave It, Who Got It” law of 1951, to limit and fully disclose campaign contributions. It restricted them to $1,000 per donor per candidate and barred any from liquor, racing and public utility interests.

That law is, of course, ancient history. So are the campaign spending limits that Florida enacted in 1970 and the ones on federal campaigns that Congress passed the year after.

In the 1976 case of the U.S. Supreme Court misconstrued freedom of speech to bar any restrictions on total spending by candidates out of their own money or that given by others. It also allowed unlimited outlays by entities claiming to be independent.

Nothing can be done about that until there is a better court or a constitutional amendment.

Disclosure requirements remain. So do limits on what a donor can give a candidate, but both are riddled with loopholes in the campaign and tax laws. “Dark money,” untraceable to its sources, is pervasive.

Those are problems that new laws could fix.

Florida could repeal the law that allows politicians to establish separate committees exempt from the limits on individual contributions — committees such as Friends of Ron DeSantis.

Since creating this committee to elect him in 2018, DeSantis has bagged some $96 million, including $5.5 million from one Chicago billionaire, and has about $53 million still in the bank. Last month’s $5.5 million haul was more purchasing power than Warren had for his entire campaign. There were 203 contributions in August of more than $5,000 each.

Florida purports to limit declared campaigns to $3,000 per donor. But again, that’s just for direct contributions to a campaign. If these well-heeled donors want to give more, they can give unlimited amounts to a committee such as Friends of Ron DeSantis. Such committees are the norm for statewide candidates and members of the Legislature; the contribution limits are pure window dressing.

And yet, DeSantis is merely an extreme example of opportunities that both parties exploit.

You’ve heard of equal opportunity lenders. Now, it seems, there are equal opportunity money launderers.

A dark money nonprofit, Grow United Inc., operating out of a UPS mailbox in Denver, supplied some $550,000 that Republican operatives spent to advertise three independent Florida Senate candidates last fall. The object was to draw votes from Democrats, and they did tip one of the races, a state Senate contest in Miami.

Our colleagues at the Orlando Sentinel recently reported that two Democratic committees in Florida had also laundered money, some $700,000, through Grow United. Those two operate under a section of tax law that does not require donor disclosure; neither does the election code.

One of the Democrats who lost said she was confident none of the Democratic money was used as “friendly fire” against her. Without disclosure, how could she be sure?

What national rules still exist are often negated by a partisan paralysis at the Federal Election Commission, where 3-3 ties prevent its general counsel from pursuing complaints in which he’s found probable cause. Sen. Rick Scott’s fundraising got the benefit of one of those. More recently, GEO Group Inc., a private prison contractor headquartered in Boca Raton, escaped further investigation of a $100,000 gift from a subsidiary to a pro-Trump Super Pac in 2016. In its complaint, the Washington Legal Center said the money was given a day after the Obama administration said it would stop contracting with private prisons. Federal law prohibits even indirect contributions from corporations holding federal contracts, which GEO does. Although there’s suspicious smoke, that 3-3 tie bars the FEC’s career staff from looking for the fire.

That’s one problem, among many, that the Senate’s massive Freedom to Vote Act would correct. One splendid provision would authorize the FEC general counsel to pursue a complaint to conclusion unless a of the six commissioners disagree. A majority could also order further investigation of a complaint that the counsel wants to dismiss.

This is Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar’s bill. She and seven cosponsors, significantly including West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, took some heat for opting to preserve the paralyzing partisan balance on the FEC. But the criticism fails to note the ingenious safety valve.

There’s too much that is good and urgent in the bill to detail all of it in this space today. One major thrust, as reported, is to override what Trump partisans in state legislatures have enacted to discourage voters and overthrow honest election officials. The provisions to clean up campaign finance and empower enforcement are equally important.

Among other things, they would more effectively block coordination between federal candidates and SuperPACs, stop candidates and officeholders from raising money for those committees, extend the ban on foreign money to ballot initiatives and referendums, require reporting of all campaign-related disbursements, and compel disclosure of all money spent to influence federal judicial nominations and confirmations.

Shamefully, Republicans would filibuster the bill. So the choice for cosponsor Manchin is unavoidable. If ever there were a reason for modifying that undemocratic Senate rule, it is this. There are already exceptions to the filibuster because enacting a budget and filling federal judicial vacancies are considered more important than any Senate tradition. Voting rights and honest elections are even more so.