House Speaker Black should disclose gifts to his legal fund

Editorials

October 23, 2006

Anonymous The Daily Southerner Mon Oct 23, 2006, 12:31 PM EDT

House Speaker Jim Black has a lot of legal bills and needs a way to pay them. That’s understandable. What’s not understandable is his refusal to tell the public who’s giving money to his legal defense fund. In an age when full disclosure is the only way citizens can know who’s funding politicians, that’s outrageous.

Unfortunately, it’s not against the law. North Carolina law requires public disclosure of the sources of contributions to almost every kind of political commitee, but not legal defense funds. State Elections Director Gary Bartlett urged the General Assembly to require the donors to be made public, but – you guessed it – the General Assembly didn’t go along with it.

Perhaps Black and his supporters have a practical reason for not making the contributions public. Perhaps they worry that opening the contributors’ list to public scrutiny would discourage further contributions.

Or perhaps the speaker and his allies simply don’t want the public to know that, for instance, the political action committee of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – the largest union in the state – wrote the fund a $5,000 check in August. That’s in addition to the $4,000 it contributed to Black’s re-election committee in September and the $20,000 it gave to the N.C. House Democratic caucus in August.

The public wouldn’t have known about the Teamster PAC’s $5,000 donation had it not been disclosed in a 222-page filing with the Federal Elections Commission, reports the Observer’s David Ingram.

That donation caught many by surprise. Several newspapers had reported in March that the legal defense fund’s organizers said they wouldn’t accept contributions from lobbyists and PACs. Addison Bell of Matthews, an organizer of the fund, said he was incorrectly quoted by three newspapers last spring. He said he remembers saying no lobbyists’ contributions, but says he didn’t mention PACs.

Here’s why disclosure is important to the public: Candidates can’t accept more than $4,000 from any donor, and can’t accept a dime directly from corporations or labor unions. The whole scheme of political finance regulation rests on the reasonable premise that disclosure lets voters know who’s financing whom, so they can watch those candidates’ actions and judge for themselves whether the candidates are serving the public interest or the donors’ interests.

But legal defense funds are unregulated. If donors to them aren’t publicly identified, a politician could accept any sum from a corporation, union, individual or any other source and the public would never know about it. Voters wouldn’t have access to vital information about politics and government.

In this case, lack of disclosure gives special interests a way to funnel money directly to one of the state’s most powerful politicians. It’s a blatant conflict of interest that further tarnishes North Carolina government. When the General Assembly convenes in 2007, legislators should put this issue at the top of the list for immediate action.

— Charlotte Observer

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