he 2012 political season, the first presidential election since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, will be remembered for many reasons. Here’s an important one: It provided a wake-up call that campaign finance reform is urgently needed.
It is especially critical to ensure that such a reform effort makes the funding of the mammoth political action committees — more popularly called super PACs — as transparent as possible, rather than the somewhat murky entities they’ve become.
Although Hawaii drew relatively little media spending by national PACs, there was a local effort that capitalized on the more liberalized campaign spending rules enabled by Citizens United. It was run by Pacific Resource Partnership, an organization that tax laws classify as a 501(c)4 tax-exempt nonprofit. These entities don’t have to disclose their donors publicly, a provision that allows them to shield the identity of their donors supporting controversial political campaigns.
Few campaigns here have been as controversial as the advertising PRP has mounted, through its own PAC, largely in opposition to mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano, and in support of the city’s planned 20-mile rail project. The PAC spending has topped $2.8 million, according to the group’s filing last week with the state Campaign Spending Commission.
Its extensive series of negative ads painted an unfair picture of Cayetano based on donations his 1998 gubernatorial campaign accepted, donations that, after they had been spent, were found illegal. The whole scurrilous matter has prompted the former governor to file a civil lawsuit charging PRP with libel. Setting aside arguments over the legal merits of the defamation part of it, the suit, if it proceeds, could ferret out the identity of donors who have underwritten that campaign.
The prospects for this case are yet unknown, but this much is clear: It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to identify donors to a PAC. Citizens United allows organizations and corporate entities to have the same right to free speech as any individual person, and construes limits on spending to be an unconstitutional curb on that expression.
But it doesn’t ensure the right to anonymity, and disclosure of who’s underwriting such political speech would make donors more accountable for the messaging. That’s at least one potent means of making campaign ads more responsible.
However Citizens United has been pilloried by those opposed to limitless campaign spending, the decision does make the case for transparency. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy addresses political spending by corporations in particular. He wrote that "prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests."
We couldn’t agree more. At the congressional level, the federal DISCLOSE Act aimed to compel donors contributing $10,000 or more to a PAC to be identified; its failure to pass through the Senate’s filibuster hoops was lamentable. After this election, voters should press their elected representatives to try again.
But Hawaii doesn’t have to wait for Washington. State legislators should pass a bill that, at least for Hawaii races, reins in unaccountable, nameless accusations by dragging the whole sorry mess into the sunlight.
