opinion

Roberts: Arizona legislators protecting dark money donors (again, that is)

Arizona's leaders are one pull closer to sealing off any remaining gaps in that blackout curtain they’ve hung around elections, to prevent us from getting a peek at who is trying to influence our vote.

This time it’s House Bill 2153, a bill aimed at stopping cities from requiring dark money campaigns to disclose the source of their funding in city elections. The bill already has cleared the House and should face smooth sailing in the Senate as well.

It’s a clear slap at Tempe, where voters in March will consider a proposed charter amendment to turn on the lights. The Sunshine Ordinance would require non-profit groups making independent expenditures over $1,000 to disclose their organization’s name and source of their campaign funding in Tempe elections.

Sunshine gives our leaders the hives

Cue the alarm bells at the GOP-led Legislature where the word “sunshine”, when uttered in connection with the word “election”, tends to send our leaders into a blind panic.

Already they've refused to do anything about the proliferation of dark money in state campaigns and in fact even passed a law making it easier for special interests to give anonymously. (Which is why it falls to a citizen group to mount the Outlaw Dirty Money drive, a 2018 ballot initiative to require disclosure.)

Now, they're taking aim at cities that might dare try to let the sun shine in campaign contributions.

Hide the children!

To hear some of our leaders – and the Goldwater Institute which wrote the bill -- tell it, Tempe’s ordinance would put all Arizonans at risk of having a lynch mob at their door should they dare give $10 to their local Rotary Club.

That contribution, they reason, would have to be disclosed and the contributor exposed to all manner of retribution and retaliation should that Rotary Club then donate to a non-profit campaign group supporting a controversial ballot measure.

“I’m very fearful when government starts peeking through the window when you’re writing a check to save the whales.” Rep. Bob Thorpe, R-Flagstaff, said, during a recent hearing by the House Federalism, Property Rights and Public Policy Committee. The committee approved the bill on a 6-3 party line vote.

An 'anti-privacy mandate'? Please.

Goldwater’s Tim Sandefur told the panel that what cities like Tempe are doing amounts to an “anti-privacy mandate”, one that discourages people from exercising their constitutional right to free speech.

“People are less likely to give to charity or to express their opinions if they think their name will be put on a government list and spread all over the internet,” he said.

Goodness.

Meanwhile, here on Planet Reality

Back here on Planet Reality, Tempe's proposal is aimed at the big money special interests, often developers in Tempe's case, which try to sway our elections from the cozy cover of anonymity.

Think Arizona Public Service, which is widely believed to have secretly spent $3.2 million to elect its favored candidates to the state Corporation Commission in 2014 by funding a pair of nondescript non-profits. Do you think it might have been useful to know it was really the state’s largest utility spending millions to get certain people elected to the regulatory board that sets utility rates?

Under HB 2153, if APS were to get involved with a local election after Tempe’s Sunshine Ordinance passes, not only would it be exempt from having to disclose its involvement – elections officials and possibly even the state attorney general would be barred from investigating if they thought a campaign-finance violation had occurred.

“Under this bill,” Rep. Ken Clark, D-Phoenix, told the committee, “if the AG wants to investigate something.”

“TIME,” interrupted Rep. Mark Finchem, R-Tucson, the committee’s vice chairman who was limiting speakers to three minutes.

This, on a bill he claimed was all about protecting free speech. Go figure.

Home of the brave?

Two things seem worth noting:

1 The Arizona Supreme Court has said that local elections are a matter of local control and that the state has no business butting in.

And 2. Consider the words of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in which he explained the community’s need and its right to know who is trying to influence our vote. (This in Doe v. Reed, a 2010 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that disclosing the identities of those who sign a referendum petition does not violate a signer’s First Amendment rights.):

“There are laws against threats and intimidation," he wrote, "and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously (McIntyre) and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8635.

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