Following laundered money
Strict limits on campaign spending ended in 1974 when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed them as infringing on free speech. Caps on individual contributions to campaigns remain at $3,000 per person for statewide races and $1,000 for others, but have been rendered meaningless.
A corrupting loophole allows politicians to also control separate fundraising committees unbound by contribution limits, and to divert the money to their campaign accounts by passing it through the political parties, to which no limits apply. It’s legalized money laundering.
One of those slush funds, Friends of Ron DeSantis, has raised nearly $110.7 million since January 2018 with some $66 million still in the bank for the governor’s head start on a 2022 re-election. More than $10 million came from a single Chicago billionaire. During the last campaign, DeSantis’ committee gave $13 million to the Republican Party of Florida, where the paper trail ended.
The modern political landscape is crawling with “social welfare” organizations that can contribute to campaigns without disclosing where they get the money.
Exhibit A: In 2020, Republican operatives with ties to Florida Power & Light spent $550,000 in dark money to promote three “independent” candidates they had recruited to siphon votes from Democrats in key races.
The Miami Herald and Floodlight, an environmental news collaborative, recently disclosed that FP&L wrote a bill for Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, that opponents say would cripple its solar power competition in Florida by no longer requiring the company to buy surplus power from residential roofs. It was delivered by an FPL lobbyist just before NextEra Energy, FPL’s parent, gave $10,000 to her personal political committee. That’s not illegal — but it should be.
NextEra and its subsidiaries contributed nearly $5.4 million to Florida campaigns in the last election cycle alone. The influence it buys is evident at the Public Service Commission (PSC), the state utility regulation body that rarely says no to FPL.
The utilities control the PSC through the Legislature, which in turn controls the panel that nominates PSC members the governor must appoint.
That cozy relationship comes from a 1969 Florida Supreme Court advisory opinion that delighted the industry by holding that utility regulation is a function of the legislative branch, not the governor or Cabinet.