[EL] McDonnell Case Shows Virginia is Not Above Corruption

Wed Aug 13 14:48:35 PDT 2014

Beyond the points Sean makes below about McGehee's straw man, it is interesting that McGehee doesn't cite any examples of corruption in Virginia related to campaign finance. McGehee's indictment is here:

"The trial is a daily display of a politician and his wife keenly interested in using the highest office in the state to “live large” – a world of Rolexes, Ferraris, vacation homes and private jets.  While McDonnell claims in his defense that accepting these gifts from Jonnie Williams did not include any reciprocal “official acts,” there is no dispute that he and his wife accepted the gifts, just whether or not they traded official acts for the gifts."

There are always people who enter office with corrupt intentions, and probably more who succumb to temptation. And note McGehee's bait and switch: opponents of restrictions on the role of money in politics have held out the state of Virginia to legitimize their opposition to campaign finance reform.  A state with few restrictions on money in campaigns, not much disclosure, and few ethics laws, ..."

"Campaign finance reform," "money in campaigns," "not much disclosure" [sic], and then, almost as an afterthought, "few ethics laws." But if the McDonnell scandal represent a failure of the law (it's not clear that they do - McDonnell is being prosecuted), it is those "ethics laws" that are relevant, not the much broader category of campaign finance that McGehee leads with and mentions three times. This collapse of "ethics" and "campaign finance reform" has been very detrimental to serious discussions of policy in either area of law.

The political activists and lobbyists promoting campaign finance regulation have long tended to sell the product a bit like a 19th century patent medicine - "it's good for what ails ya." At times it seems that campaign finance reform is offered up as the cure for any real or perceived scandal, any failure of policy, or any thing people don't like about government or politics. Reform legend "Granny D" even offered up campaign finance reform as a prevention for future 9/11 type events. Honestly. http://www.nancho.net/newchau/granD911.html

At the same time, government corruption in states that have aggressive regulatory regimes is never seen as an indictment of those heavy regulatory regimes, even when scandal stems directly from the regulatory regime, such as misuse and corruption in the use of public (i.e. government provided) campaign funds (see http://www.campaignfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013-08-05_Issue-Review_Swanson_Clean-Elections-Scandal-Case-Studies-From-Maine-Arizona-And-New-York-City.pdf).

This is a rigged game, but our credulous media falls for it again and again, and no doubt will this time around, too. And the public will grow more cynical as the reform community turns a corrupt pair like the McDonnells into a poster boy for all the good and honest public officials out there.

Bradley A. Smith

Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault

   Professor of Law

Capital University Law School

303 E. Broad St.

Columbus, OH 43215

614.236.6317

http://law.capital.edu/faculty/bios/bsmith.aspx

________________________________
From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] on behalf of Sean Parnell [sean at impactpolicymanagement.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 10:01 AM
To: 'Rick Hasen'; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: [EL] McDonnell Case Shows Virginia is Not Above Corruption

The commentary by Meredith McGehee begins with the following paragraph:

“For many years, opponents of restrictions on the role of money in politics have held out the state of Virginia to legitimize their opposition to campaign finance reform.  A state with few restrictions on money in campaigns, not much disclosure, and few ethics laws, Virginia has been heralded by reform opponents as showing what politics at the national level could look like if the federal campaign finance laws were repealed.  The picture they painted was of patrician politicians above it all, incorruptible by plebian concerns of money, legislating for the Commonwealth on purely ideological grounds.”

I would be very interested in finding out which “opponents of restrictions on the role of money in politics” have ever characterized Virginia politics this way. I recall myself and several others noticing that Virginia’s (and Utah’s as well) First Amendment-friendly campaign finance system didn’t seem to have made the state any worse off compared to other states, and that in some governance measures (Pew’s rankings of effective governance, for example) both Virginia and Utah seemed to be doing quite well. That is a far cry from how Ms. McGehee characterizes our views on Virginia’s campaign finance laws.

I can tell you that at CCP, we were well aware that corruption existed in Virginia. Here, for example, is a policy briefing we did in 2009 comparing public corruption prosecutions with contribution limits: http://www.campaignfreedom.org/doclib/20090122_issueanalysis5.pdf The more observant will see that Virginia is grouped in the “medium corruption” states category – and rather towards the high end of the medium group. An updated version of this released in 2013 shows Virginia moving up (or down, take your pick) to the ‘high corruption’ category, albeit at the low-end of that range: http://www.campaignfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013-08-01_Issue-Analysis-5_Do-Lower-Contribution-Limits-Decrease-Public-Corruption1.pdf. Hard to believe we viewed a state as filled with nothing but “patrician politicians above it all, incorruptible by plebian concerns of money, legislating for the Commonwealth on purely ideological grounds” while simultaneously slotting the state into first the ‘medium corruption’ and then the ‘high corruption’ categories in our research.

Somewhere out there I suppose there may be the First Amendment advocate/campaign finance regulation skeptic who touts Virginia as having a pure and clean form of politics, untainted by corruption. But I have not ran across such a person before, perhaps because I don’t spend much time at the unicorn stables.

Best,

Sean Parnell
President
Impact Policy Management, LLC
6411 Caleb Court
Alexandria, VA  22315
571-289-1374 (c)
sean at impactpolicymanagement.com

Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>
“McDonnell Case Shows Virginia is Not Above Corruption”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=64238>
Posted on August 12, 2014 11:58 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=64238> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Meredith McGehee blogs<http://www.clcblog.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=571:mcdonnell-case-shows-virginia-is-not-above-corruption>.
[Share]<http://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D64238&title=%E2%80%9CMcDonnell%20Case%20Shows%20Virginia%20is%20Not%20Above%20Corruption%E2%80%9D&description=>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20140813/72d2e9f0/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 1504 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20140813/72d2e9f0/attachment.png>