This year’s plan to ensure no significant reform is approved: Put all the proposals into one bill to rally opponents of various pieces of legislation behind a common purpose — voting down one bill
In 2007, Rep. Mimi Stewart introduced an ethics reform bill that would have made 13 different changes to the state’s Campaign Reporting Act, including enacting contribution limits, giving the secretary of state subpoena power to investigate potential violations of the act and implementing tougher reporting requirements.
At the time, one legislator said to me something to the effect of, “She’s putting all the eggs in one basket. If she would split these up, some would pass. Together, they’re all going to die.”
Predictably, 2007’s House Bill 821 did die. Two years later, New Mexico still has no campaign contribution limits.
That’s why the current proposal by a number of lawmakers to lump several ethics-reform proposals into one omnibus bill would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sad. As Stewart’s bill proved two years ago, putting so many different proposals together in one bill only gives more individual lawmakers reasons to vote against the entire basket of eggs because they don’t like the color or shape of one of them.
This isn’t Washington, where dollars for bridges to nowhere get added to controversial legislation to legally bribe lawmakers into voting for it. In Santa Fe, binding together a number of contentious proposals only increases the number of opponents of the bill.
If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to think the omnibus bill was an attempt to kill ethics reform once again. Oh, wait — this is Santa Fe. Of course that’s what the omnibus bill is about.
It’s not entirely clear which proposals will be folded into the omnibus bill. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the House Voters and Elections Committee tabled several bills last week, including one that would place limits on campaign contributions and another that would ban state contractors from contributing to state political candidates. There’s also been talk of including the proposal to create a state ethics commission in the bill.
But no omnibus bill has been presented publicly.
The nonprofit factor
There’s another indicator that this is an attempt to kill ethics reform. Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez, D-Belen and no friend of reform, told The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Steve Terrell that the omnibus bill might include a proposal to require nonprofits to disclose their contributors, according to Terrell’s blog.
There’s also been discussion about somehow limiting donations to nonprofit groups. House Majority Leader Ken Martinez, D-Grants, pushed that idea during a meeting of the Voters and Elections Committee last week. And there’s already a bill sponsored by Bernadette Sanchez, D-Albuquerque, that would broaden the definitions of “political committee” and “political purpose” in the state’s Campaign Reporting Act in an apparent attempt to make the act apply to nonprofits.
There’s history behind that. The secretary of state and attorney general are attempting to force two nonprofit groups to register as political action committees or pay steep fines because of mailers the state officials say were political in nature but the nonprofits say were related to a coming special session of the Legislature. The nonprofits have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to stop the action by the state agencies. It’s a lawsuit both sides agreed to so the courts can resolve the dispute.
This is a seriously controversial issue in the Legislature — even hotter than the already contentious ethics-reform proposals being discussed. Whether the state can force nonprofits to release their donor lists is questionable. And the state can’t limit the size of donations nonprofits can take in. The attorney general and secretary of state have the right approach — letting the courts decide. The Legislature should do the same.
If these groups crossed a line, then they’ll have to register as PACs, and their political activity would be subject to the contribution limits that would be placed on PACs in several bills under consideration by the Legislature. If the groups haven’t crossed a line, they can go about their business.
Trying to regulate nonprofits in a way that may or may not even be legal — and putting such proposals into an omnibus bill that includes other reform proposals — will put pressure on progressive lawmakers to vote against the bill, even though progressives tend to be the biggest champions of most of the ethics reform proposals that are going to be lumped into the bill.
That alone would ensure the bill’s death.
‘We will get nothing’
Rep. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces and the primary sponsor of the campaign contribution limits bill that’s most likely to pass the House, said it best at the same Voters and Elections Committee meeting at which Martinez made his comments last week.
“My fear is that if we… say it has to be all or nothing, we will get nothing,” Steinborn said.
Doing nothing would leave New Mexico as one of only a handful of states around the nation that don’t have contribution limits, an independent ethics commission and legislative conference committees that are open to the public. There are many elected officials in Santa Fe who want to continue the status quo, but the citizens of the state have made clear, in polls and by tossing out several reform-opposing lawmakers in last year’s election, that they’re ready to join the rest of the nation in enacting some basic reforms to help create a more ethical government in Santa Fe.
Perhaps lawmakers should listen to the citizens they purport to represent.
By way of disclosure, I also write for the New Mexico Independent, which is owned by the Center for Independent Media in Washington. When the group was starting up its New Mexico news site earlier this year, the Center for Civic Policy, one of the nonprofits at the center of the dispute described in this column, helped it locate funding sources. The Center for Civic Policy has never tried to use that fact to influence anything I have written.