Right call on years-wrong loophole
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday made a historically right-minded decision on an Alabama law, a decision whose implications stretch well beyond Alabama. This decision wasn’t a landmark ruling; it involved a legal challenge to a lower court’s decision on a years-overdue reform — a challenge the high court decided not to hear.
It was the right decision about a right-minded ruling on a right-minded law that overturned a wrongheaded, decades-old tradition of political cronyism.
Alabama’s notorious PAC-to-PAC transfer loophole was one of the truly accountability-free disgraces of political slush funding. Under that system, in place for decades while Democrats were in control of the legislature and, usually, the Governor’s Office, money donated to one political action committee could be transferred to another, which could transfer money to another (or many others), and so on, until campaign funds were quite literally untraceable.
This mean that a campaign contributor’s money given ostensibly for one candidate or organization or cause was very likely to find its way somewhere completely different from, and possibly objectionable to, that contributor’s intentions. There was really no tracking where money donated to a PAC in Alabama would actually end up, or whose interests it was funding.
More to the point (almost certainly the point), it insulated politicians from strict accounting of where their money was coming from. It was political money laundering, pure and simple, and it was completely legal.
It was legal, that is, until right after the November 2010 elections, when Alabama voters opted for a reform-ticket Republican majority — the first since Reconstruction. The next month, both houses voted unanimously to ban the practice. (Some surviving Democrats retained their seats in the 2012 elections; others didn’t.)
But the Alabama Democratic Conference, which had received almost half its funds from various (and traditionally interactive) PACs run by the state Democratic Party, the Alabama Education Association and others, sued the state over the law that prevented its PAC from getting money from the others.
The basis for the suit was the now-familiar argument when political funding is the issue — that political money is a form of free speech, which the ADC claimed it was being denied by this law.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled otherwise. The PAC-to-PAC transfer ban, the court ruled, is not an unconstitutional infringement on free speech because it does not restrict donors’ ability to make contributions, or politicians’ and PACs’ ability to receive them. Its effect is only to make the sources and destinations of such donations transparent, and the donors and recipients accountable.
The “money is speech” argument, in a post-Citizens United American legal and political universe, is still a reasonably debatable issue. The legal and ethical imperative for transparency and accountability surely is not.
The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the ADC’s challenge is welcome news. It lets stand a good law against bad politics.
This story was originally published April 25, 2017 at 4:38 PM with the headline "Right call on years-wrong loophole."