If government can give you anything you want, contracts, employment, cell phone, health care, policies that help your company, harm your competitors, give you tax incentives just for doing your business, the human tendency to use money to buy what you want is too great. As Senator Goldwater said, “Any government big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it away.” The bigger and more powerful the government, the more it will be corrupted—and the easier to do it.
“Schnur’s idea was to ban fund-raising while the Legislature is in session. “It’s not just symbolism,” he told me. “It’s a question of voter confidence in the system.”
But he agrees that “the higher you raise the stakes the harder people will work to get around the rules.” In other words, the ultimate problem may not be a lack of moral rectitude by some legislators or sufficient campaign-finance rules — but a government that dispenses so many favors that favor-seekers such as Keating will pay handsomely to get a piece of the action.
Scandal sparked by Capitol’s high stakes
Big money naturally flows to big and powerful government
By Steven Greenhut, San Diego U-T, 11/19/13
While at the center of a scandal involving five U.S. senators accused of improperly muscling regulators on his behalf, disgraced savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating memorably explained his view of campaign contributions.
“One question among the many raised in recent weeks had to do with whether my financial support in any way influenced several political figures who took up my cause,” he told the media in 1989. “I want to say in the most forceful way that I can, I certainly hope so.”
California legislators and political observers are shocked (or at least pretend to be) by the allegations revealed in an FBI affidavit involving state Sen. Ron Calderon, the Montebello Democrat accused of accepting $88,000 in bribes from a federal agent posing as a movie executive and from a hospital official seeking to influence workers-compensation legislation.
Businesses obviously make large contributions to influence government, just as Keating admitted. The allegations at issue in Sacramento go beyond “honest” fund-raising, but everyone in the state Capitol knows the ugly side of politics given how much is at stake when a government with huge budgets and enormous powers flexes its muscle.
Calderon hasn’t been charged with any crime, but Al Jazeera America’s report on the federal undercover operation has sent some of the state’s savviest politicians scurrying. As the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Morain noted, legislators were long aware of Calderon’s fund-raising flamboyance — and basically enabled him, but you’d never know it from their reactions.
The Senate booted Calderon from his committees. The Latino Caucus booted him from its executive board. Calderon claimed that Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg was the real target of the investigation and that the feds leaked the information after Calderon refused to wear a wire. Steinberg adamantly denies that claim.
I’m still chuckling that Calderon, known for his lavish spending on cigars, would allegedly take a bribe from a phony movie exec named Rocky Patel, which is the name of a well-known cigar brand. Who says federal investigators lack a sense of humor? Author Joe Mathews seemed surprised that the alleged corruption seems so “embarrassingly small.”
But even a legislator accused of such grubby behavior deserves the presumption of innocence. The standards of the Senate are not the standards of court, so legislators can boot from committees their members that don’t conform to whatever standards they set. But this scandal is based solely on a leaked affidavit.
“Is that how investigations go now?” asks Grant Gillham, a political consultant and former Republican staffer. “Federal law enforcement authorities leak information to the news media in order to prejudice public opinion? If so, this is a frightening abuse of power that overshadows any of the so-called pay-to-play allegations … .”
Many of the Calderon-scandal post-mortems call for changes to political fund-raising rules that, for instance, allow donors to legally launder their money through nonprofit groups. Calderon “allegedly brags to the FBI agent about how the Latino Caucus transferred $25,000 to a nonprofit he and his brother control,” according to a recent KQED report.
Steinberg is now proposing caps on the money legislators can raise in non-election years, presumably to cut back on their never-ending fund-raising activities that consume legislators. But one possible result, critics say, would be that legislators will be more desperate than ever as they cram an entire election term worth of fund-raising efforts into one year.
That proposal is a watered-down variation of one floated by Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics and former head of the Fair Political Practices Commission, which polices campaign law. Schnur’s idea was to ban fund-raising while the Legislature is in session. “It’s not just symbolism,” he told me. “It’s a question of voter confidence in the system.”
But he agrees that “the higher you raise the stakes the harder people will work to get around the rules.” In other words, the ultimate problem may not be a lack of moral rectitude by some legislators or sufficient campaign-finance rules — but a government that dispenses so many favors that favor-seekers such as Keating will pay handsomely to get a piece of the action.
