Desperately Seeking Honest, Competent Elected Officials
February Mountain MonthlyWe need a constructive solution to the problem that Blagojevich represents— the failure of our democratic process to provide us with qualified, honest, dedicated leaders.
Since "Love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10), I believe that this means either publicly funded elections or campaign finance reform. Blagojevich would not have been so inclined to try to sell a US Senate seat for $1.5 million if our laws mandated either voluntary public funding or limits on contributions. The Supreme Court has effectively destroyed limits on campaign contributions by declaring them to be a form of “free speech” so that limits are not allowed. The states and the Federal government are trying to find ways around this. The $2300 limit is now a benchmark, and if one campaign receives more than this much from single contributors, the other campaign is “free” to solicit equally large contributions from individuals or PACs. There is a similar provision to offset large loans by the candidate. That’s no help if you don’t have any deep-pocket donors to start with.
New Mexico now has public funding available for the Public Regulation Commission races, and District 1 incumbent Jason Marks won re-election in 2008 with initial public subsidies of $12,776 for the primary and $57,486 for the general election. When his opponent overspent these limits, Marks received additional amounts of $25,000 and $20,000 on October 30 and November 3, respectively.
How was he supposed to figure out how to SPEND that much money when the election was days away? In fact, he ended up returning $16,540 in unspent funds. That’s one good thing about the public funding, any unspent amount is returned, so the candidate cannot build up a huge war chest. The downside is that his opponent could have just not reported some of his expenditures. Instead he listed the $36,000 or so he loaned to his campaign, and also listed what he spent it for. Does the Secretary of State have any way of monitoring what is being spent on each campaign? I sure didn’t bother, this time around, to list all my expenses for gas going to and from Roswell as part of my campaign for the HD 59 seat.
In Albuquerque, the mayoral race is now publicly funded, and the candidates that have declared so far have all stated they will use the approximately $350,000 each that is available as public funding. That’s good in one way, but that money comes from Albuquerque taxes. Should our taxes be used to fund political races? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Personally I am not too keen on public financing, especially in these times of economic downturn. Our taxpayers’ money is needed for so many other things, though one can speculate that there might be more of it available if we had public servants who were less dependent on large donations from corporate interests. For example, Dennis Kintigh, the man who ousted Dan Foley in the HD 57 Republican primary, received around $230,000 from a handful of oilmen (and spent most of it in the primary, got some more from them in the general). Kintigh is a nice man but it is difficult to see how he will be able to feel entirely free of any obligation to these high-dollar donors.
The $230k for a contested primary is a high, and winning races cost from less than $5,000 for an unopposed candidate to $65,000 to the $250,000 or so that Kintigh spent. I suppose if the unspent money must be returned, public funding for state legislature races could be set at $50,000 per for the year, for a total of around $11.2 million for 112 races with two candidates each. That’s about 0.2% of a state budget of six billion. Maybe that’s a good investment in clean elections, which would produce cleaner candidates. We can hope. But this would not prevent PACs and other outside groups from spending huge sums of money to influence elections.
Another route to encouraging the election of more honest, competent public officials would be for the New Mexico legislature to lead the nation by passing a Joint Resolution advocating a (US) constitutional amendment to, for example, (1) limit campaign contributors to registered voters and (2) limit the AMOUNT they can contribute to the equivalent of one week's salary at the minimum wage. Then (3) apply these restrictions to all candidates, PACs, and non-profits who are political advocates for a cause, etc. This would mean that only people truly interested in the candidates could make contributions, and would provide the Supreme Court with the “strict constructionist” guidelines they currently seem to prefer.
The ONLY way I can see this passing the NM legislature, or the US Congress, is to add to the resolution an addendum that states that the amendment, if passed by the required number of state legislatures, will go into effect on a case-by-case basis as the incumbents at the time of ratification die, resign or are defeated in either their primary or general election. Otherwise most of the incumbents, scared silly that they might not win without huge sums of money from high-dollar donors, would never vote for such an amendment.
Ellen Wedum
19 Bigfoot Road/PO Box 1086
Cloudcroft, NM 88317
575-682-2464
wedum59@gmail.com