Brian Dickerson

Editorial Page Editor

Three weeks after Michigan state legislators adopted a heavily amended campaign finance bill in the final, frenzied hours of their 2015 session, even some of those who voted for the legislation are unpleasantly surprised to learn what’s in it.

High on the list of surprises is a provision that raises the amount a political action committee can donate to pay for expenses incurred in any statewide campaign, effectively doubling the maximum donation — for the second time in as many years — from $68,000 to $136,000.

Gov. Rick Snyder signed the bill into law late Wednesday afternoon over the objections of myriad critics, including legislators from his own party who insisted they’d been duped.

Rep. Dave Pagel, a second-term Republican the southwest corner of Michigan, was among 58 House Republicans who voted to adopt SB 571 just before the House adjourned in the late evening of Dec. 16.

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"It's troubling when you take a vote and later realize that you were ignorant of some facts you should have known," Pagel told me Wednesday, a few hours before Snyder signed the bill into law.

Pagel said he was misled about the scope of language that bars municipalities and school districts from disseminating information bond proposals and other ballot questions in the 60 days before an election.

I asked him if he realized the 41 pages appended to the original 12-page bill in a last-minute amendment also included a provision doubling the allowable PAC donation.

“I’d have to go back,” he replied.“That wasn’t the portion of the bill I was focusing on.”

Even Sen. Mike Kowall, the veteran White Lake Republican who sponsored the original 12-page bill, seemed taken aback Wednesday when I asked him whether he realized his Republican House colleagues had added an amendment raising the ceiling on PAC contributions.

“Well,” Kowall said after a pause, “I do now.”

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The small print

The bizarre circumstances surrounding the passage of SB 571 had led the Snyder administration to move cautiously in deciding whether to sign the bill into law. Indeed, it wasn’t until Dec. 28 — 12 days after its adoption, and about a week after other bills adopted the same day were presented for the governor’s signature — that the controversial campaign finance bill was formally delivered to Snyder’s office.

Republican lawmakers in both chambers have complained that the leaders of their respective caucuses — House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, and Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive — failed to brief them adequately about what was in a voluminous eleventh-hour amendment appended to Kowall’s bill, without notice or public hearing, late on Legislature's last voting day in 2015.

Most have raised objections to the single paragraph that muzzles local governments for two months before an election. Michigan law had previously barred the expenditure of taxpayer funds to advocate for or against passage of ballot proposals, and critics of the new, broader prohibition argue that it unreasonably restricts the flow of information voters need.

But the local government gag provision is only one of several controversial provisions slipped into Kowall’s bill at the last minute, including:

Language that permits contributions from PACS and other donors to be applied to expenses incurred in the previous campaign cycle, even if the total amount exceeds the limits applicable for that cycle.

Language that forbids employers to deduct money from their employees’ paychecks that is subsequently deposited in a union’s PAC, even if the employee consents to the deduction and the employer has contracted to make it.

Several legislators I spoke to this week insisted they were not aware of either provision, although spokespeople for Cotter and Meekhof insist the complete text of the amended bill was made available to members, however briefly, before the final votes in the House and Senate.

Kowall said he would be amenable to new legislation stripping some of the more controversial language from his amended bill. But he and other GOP lawmakers I spoke to said they weren't even sure which of their colleagues might be responsible for inserting the last-minute changes, some of which appear to benefit — or target — specific candidates or special interests.

“Part of this troubling process is you don’t know who’s behind this or what they their motives were," Pagel said.

Spending tomorrow's donation today

The biggest mystery in SB 571 lies in the provision doubling the amount donors may contribute to defray a statewide candidate’s expenses in a single election campaign. Most lawmakers insist they were unaware that the bill authorized such a change — perhaps because it appears to leave the existing ceiling on such contributions unchanged.

Until 2013, individual donors could contribute only $3,400 per cycle, with PACs permitted to give 10 times as much. Snyder and Republican lawmakers sustained intense but short-lived blowback two years ago when they muscled through legislation raising those ceilings to $6,800 and $68,000, respectively

SB 571 doesn’t explicitly raise those limits. But it authorizes candidates to accept up to $68,000 from a PAC in one campaign cycle and apply it retroactively to expenses incurred in a previous cycle — even if the same PAC wrote a previous $68,000 check in the heat of that campaign.

So a candidate who didn’t want voters to know how much money he was getting from, say, the Committee to Legalize Pot could cash a $68,000 check from that organization a few weeks before the 2016 election, accept a second donation for the same amount a week after that election, and use both checks to pay off the $136,000 credit card bill he ran up during Campaign ’16.

That's precisely what former House Speaker Andy Dillon did in 2010 after his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination (although, to be clear, the PAC doubling down on its donation with a post-election check for $34,000 was his own Dillon Leadership Fund, not any PAC advocating the legalization of marijuana).

The Secretary of State said applying the second, post-election check from Dillon's PAC exceeded the limit, triggering a violation of Michigan law. In a settlement reached late last year, Dillon agreed to refund the second $34,000 contribution and pay a $1,000 fine.

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Man of many hats

Dillon was represented in the protracted negotiation preceding the settlement by Lansing elections law specialist Eric Doster, who also serves as general counsel to the Michigan Republican Party. (Dillon had joined the administration of Republican Gov. Rick Snyder as state treasurer after Snyder beat Democrat Virg Bernero in November 2010.)

A little-noticed provision in SB 571 explicitly authorizes the conduct for which Dillon was fined. I called Doster on Wednesday and asked the GOP counsel if he was responsible for inserting the provision in the last-minute amendment to the bill.

“I had nothing to do with that, and Andy Dillon had nothing to do with that,” Doster said, adding that he continues to believe nothing in Michigan’s current law prohibits the post-election contribution the state ultimately forced Dillon to return.

Doster noted that even in agreeing to pay the fine, Dillon refused to concede that he’d violated the law. “We didn’t admit a damn bit of wrong-doing,” he said.

Doster was cagier when I asked if he’d participated, as one of the GOP's top campaign strategists, in drafting other controversial provisions of SB 571, such as the one that bars labor unions from collecting political contributions from their members via payroll deduction.

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” he said. “I’m asked about pending legislation all the time.”

“But did you draft the bill?” I asked.

“I think I answered your question,” Doster said.

Transparency mocked

Kowall lamented the perversion of his bill, which he noted had begun as an uncontroversial attempt to streamline the collection of political contributions by both corporate and labor union PACS.

The original 12-page version passed unanimously in the Senate and was recommended for passage by a unanimous, bipartisan vote of the House elections committee. Only after SB 571 quadrupled in size in the waning hours of Dec.16 did members of both parties (albeit primarily Democrats) begin to raise questions about its impact.

The opaque and deceptive prelude to the bill's passage ought to have prompted Snyder to veto it. This is a governor who loves to boast about his administration's transparency. Now, he's signed into law a bill whose contents remain a mystery even to many of those who voted for it.

In giving his blessing to SB 571, ironically, Snyder surrenders even more leverage to GOP bankrollers like the Michigan Chamber and the DeVos family, whose priorities have sometimes been in conflict with the governor's own.

It's the donors' state now; Snyder and his party's other elected officials are only living in it.

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com.