Many election campaign finance related bills were submitted to the Government Administration and Elections Committee of the Connecticut legislature this year but only one is moving forward with no Republican input.
Connecticut's Citizen Election Program is funded with taxpayer money and provides campaign grants to candidates. My state senate reelection campaign received nearly $100,000 from the program. The program was designed to eliminate outside influences in state political campaigns by forbidding businesses and lobbyists from a key role in the campaigns.
In 2013 Connecticut Democrats who control the legislature blasted bus-size loopholes into the Citizen Election Program with changes that received no Republican legislators vote.
Last year I talked about Democrats changing the campaign finance rules and then suing the campaign finance regulators.
Not only did the Democrats increase donor limits, lower safeguards and allow lobbyists to take a prominent role in campaigns again but they did all of this saying they must fight against the terrible impact of "Citizens United" - a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed freedom of speech for businesses.
The reality is we don't have a problem with Citizens United money in political campaigns in Connecticut. What the Democrats did was raise the issue as a major problem so they could create loopholes in our clean elections program and claim "we had no choice."
Poppycock!
Senate and House Republicans proposed a package of reforms to election laws this year, including the following changes:
- Cap organizational expenditures by state political parties (SB612)
- Rollback the Democrats' increase of donor limits to state parties from $10,000 to $5,000 (HB6084)
- Stop state contractor's political donations from being used in state races (SB385)
- Eliminate public campaign financing grants to unopposed candidates (SB224)
- Reduce all public financing campaign grants by 25% ((SB225)
Instead of bi-partisan support for clean elections in Connecticut like we had when the program was created in 2005 under Governor Rell's leadership we have the majority party running roughshod over the program.
An amazing proposal in SB1126 this year is limiting audits of the taxpayer-funded grants to a political campaign. The Democrats don't think they should be audited this year if they had an audit last year. It seems the way state government currently audits businesses, state grant recipients, state contractors and even taxpayers should not apply to the politicians.
How brazen is that?
