Editor cites need for campaign reforms

On the date that the Republican Party candidates forum article ran in the Herald-Journal, editor Cindi Ross Scoppe wrote about campaign finance reform in the capital city's newspaper, The State. Her theme was missed opportunities in previous reform proposals.

THE LAST time the Legislature "reformed" our campaign finance law, a lot of good changes were supposed to have been passed, to make it easier for voters to figure out to whom their elected officials might be indebting themselves. As the years went by, though, it became clear that the changes that got talked about the most didn't quite get made. And some of the not-so-good changes didn't get talked about very much. And of course, a whole slew of changes that needed to be made weren't -- but we've known that all along.

In this year's session, she wrote, another few proposals had been offered, and she liked one of them, a ban on "leadership PACs."

But another proposal was a bad idea, she wrote.

The Senate also addressed another "oops" event from the 2003 law -- a provision that was supposed to require candidates to tell us the occupations of their donors, just as candidates already have to do in federal elections. This was one of legislators' big bragging points after the 2003 reform. But this turned out to be an even bigger farce than the special-interest reporting law: While the law requires candidates to collect the information, they aren't required to report it to the public.

That would seem a simple enough problem, whose solution was painfully obvious: Change the law, to require candidates to report the information they collected. Somehow, though, that solution hasn't occurred to anyone at the State House.

Legislators' idea of a solution -- first proposed a few years back by a special House panel tasked with closing loopholes in the law -- is to remove the requirement that the information even be collected. Really.

Requiring candidates to tell us the occupations of their donors makes it easier for voters to see whether their senator is receiving an inordinate amount of support from, say, individuals who are employed by the payday lending industry. Every candidate for federal office manages to do it with no difficulty. And, assuming they've been obeying the law, S.C. candidates have been collecting the information for five years.

The other reform that hasn't seen the light of day is the bill to make it impossible for the likes of Howie Rich to use paper corporations to get around our donation limits. But we take what we can get in South Carolina, and if the House would join the Senate and ban leadership PACs, that would be a significant step forward.

"A chance to break out of one step forward, one step back mode"
State, The (Columbia, SC) - May 13, 2008