Campaign finances
City Council’s new incumbent-protection rules send a terrible message to voters.
Anytime politicians start changing the rules about campaign contributions, voters need to pay attention.
That’s why we got suspicious when we heard Houston’s mayor and City Council planned to amend the ordinance regulating campaign funds in local elections. If you thought the longer term limits adopted by Houston voters last year would reduce the influence of money in municipal politics, think again.
Under some common-sense rules adopted more than 20 years ago, candidates for city office could collect no more than $5,000 from any individual campaign contributor during each election cycle. Political action committees could contribute a maximum of $10,000.
Beyond that restriction came some rules on how much money candidates could personally loan their own campaigns. If you ran for mayor, you could write your campaign a check for up to $75,000, then later repay yourself with funds provided by political donors. For city controller and citywide council candidates, the limit was $15,000. For district council races, the limit was set at $5,000.
Contribution limits are supposed to serve as a check on corruption, but good government advocates aren’t the only people who support them. One of the odd little secrets of politics is that a lot of campaign donors actually like these rules. The disgraceful truth is that writing fundraising checks to elected officials is widely considered an unavoidable cost of doing business with government, so quite a few lobbyists will privately tell you they wish contribution limits were even lower.
Last year, in the same election that put Sylvester Turner in the mayor’s office, Houstonians voted to change the city’s term limits. Instead of holding municipal elections every two years and limiting elected officials to a maximum of three terms in office, voters opted for holding elections every four years and a maximum of two terms.
If you cast a ballot in that term-limits referendum, you might have reasonably assumed the new, longer terms also meant city politicians could drag the sack for campaign cash only once every four years. But if that’s what you thought, dear voter, you’ve been bamboozled.
In a cynical act of self-preservation, Houston’s mayor and City Council Wednesday adopted new campaign finance rules that essentially double the maximum contributions they can collect from each individual donor and political action committee before any election. Even though voters decided to let them stay in office four years between elections, our city’s elected leadership bestowed upon themselves the right to squeeze donors for campaign checks every two years.
They also boosted the amount of contributors’ money some candidates can funnel to themselves to repay loans to their own campaigns, raising the district council member limit to $50,000, a tenfold increase from the current $5,000. Candidates for city controller and atlarge council seats will be able to repay $75,000, five times the current $15,000.
So if you decide in the next election year that you don’t like your city councilmember, you can put your name on the ballot and run against him. But because he’ll already have a two-year head start raising campaign funds, he’ll be in a position to raise twice as much money from each of his donors.
If Congress had pulled a stunt like this, it could’ve been called “The Incumbent Protection Act of 2016.”
Two council members — Jack Christie and Amanda Edwards — did the right thing by voting against these changes. But it’s surprising and discouraging this matter sailed through a City Council vote without a peep of discussion.
What Houston’s mayor and City Council have done sends the wrong signal at a time when voters are already deeply scornful about the amount of money flushing through our political system. And it can only worsen the corrosive perception that our elected officials are up for sale.