A chance to break out of one step forward, one step back mode

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.

I bring all this up because in recent weeks the Senate has passed not one, not two, but three bills that would make changes to that last reform. And one of them is actually a good change.

There’s still no movement on the biggest one that got away in 2003: the anti-video poker law, which legislators assured us would require any special interests that spend money to try to influence our votes to tell us where their money came from and where they spent it. As it turned out, an extra “not” mysteriously appeared in the final version of the bill, and so legislators only required special interests to tell us where they spent the money — not where it came from. And some special interests refuse to do even that, but that’s a different story. That loophole remains gaping five years later because legislators are terrified of the special interests that most like to exploit it (that’s voucher proponents this time around, instead of video poker barons).

But last month, the Senate passed a measure by Sen. Vincent Sheheen to outlaw so-called “leadership PACs.” These creatures, borrowed from the corrupt culture of Washington, allow elected officials not only to collect more money from each donor (twice as much for statewide officials, 4.5 times as much for legislators) but also to give that money to other candidates — a practice that is otherwise illegal, because it’s essentially money laundering.

Abolishing these PACs doesn’t take away anybody’s rights. In fact, they were illegal for the first decade the Ethics Reform Act was in place.

The irony is that allowing them to exist was part of the price the House insisted on in return for those reporting requirements that didn’t really require anything. So on pure political grounds, it makes sense to ban them again.

There’s a more important reason than that, though. What they do is allow elected officials to use their political clout to collect extra campaign donations from special interests and give it to other politicians in order to further increase their own political clout.

Someone who wants to be speaker of the House, to take an example out of recent S.C. history, can use his position as chairman of a powerful committee to collect donations from lobbying groups that want something from that committee, then give that money to fellow House members, in the hope that they’ll vote for him for speaker. In other words, the special interest groups are essentially buying support for his campaign for speaker.

Leadership PACs are still in their infancy in South Carolina, which makes outlawing them now even more important, because the more officials who have their own, the tougher it will be to kill them, or even regulate them.

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.

What’s astounding is that Sen. Wes Hayes, one of the ethics good guys, actually put his name on a bill to do that. This was the third ethics bill the Senate passed last month.

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 bill isn’t as significant, but it seemed worth mentioning since it passed in the same spate of activity: It lets the House and Senate Ethics committees, rather than the State Ethics Commission, act as judge of House and Senate employees’ ethics. As long as legislators judge their own ethics, this probably makes some sense. (I don’t think legislators should judge their own ethics, but the Legislature isn’t about to change it.)

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.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.