No rules bar Casada from spending PAC money on alimony
NASHVILLE – When House Speaker Glen Casada recently told a judge he could no longer afford to make his $4,000 a month alimony payments to his ex-wife, he cited his unemployment as the main reason.
Despite his pleas, Casada left out a key financial element at his disposal: his campaign money.
The embattled Williamson County Republican has nearly $562,000 in campaign money at his disposal.
That includes more than $381,000 in his personal campaign account and $180,600 in his political action committee.
That means Casada could afford his alimony for the next 140 months, or until January 2031 – if he were to transfer all his campaign cash into his political action committee. Those transfers are common.
Casada is set to resign from his leadership post Aug. 2 after he faced scrutiny for sending sexually explicit and misogynistic text messages. In May, he resigned from his job selling pharmaceuticals for Merck & Co.
As speaker, Casada earned a monthly salary of $6,079. The speaker has a yearly salary of nearly $73,000. Rankand-file legislators have a base salary of $24,300 a year, not including their daily allowances.
State law prohibits legislators from spending their campaign money on a variety of things, including rent, clothing, tickets to sporting events, personal food and drinks and school tuition.
But a loophole in the law places no limit on how PACS can spend their money. That means, if Casada wanted to, he could pay his ex-wife with his PAC money.
“In the campaign finance statutes, PAC expenditures are not subject to the prohibitions that candidate campaign fund expenditures are subject to,” Drew Rawlins, the now-former executive director of the Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance, told The Tennessean earlier this year.
That effectively means lawmakers with PACS can spend their money on whatever they want and face no repercussions.
For years, Casada has used his PAC money to cover everything from a membership to The Standard, a local restaurant with a PAC, to drinks and meals – including one with his former chief of staff, Cade Cothren, who once boasted about having sex in the bathroom of a local restaurant.
Cothren resigned on May 6 after facing scrutiny for his role in the text messages with Casada and for separately sending racist text messages. He also admitted to using cocaine in the legislature’s offices.
Despite serving in the legislature since 2002, Casada has never had his campaign finances audited by state officials.
Officials audit about 4% of all campaign accounts during a two year period. That means in the next two years, six lawmakers, selected in a random drawing, will be audited.
Reach Joel Ebert at jebert@tennessean.com or 615-772-1681 and on Twitter @joelebert29.