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Sponsor Peter Wirth says he doesn’t like the legislation in its current form; its House shepherd, Nate Gentry, says he’s ‘concerned with some of the attorney general’s inclusions.’
A bill aimed at ensuring campaign-finance transparency has been so changed by Senate committees that it has lost much of the support that propelled it out of an interim committee by a unanimous vote.
“It’s personally painful for me to stand up against a bill that I put so much work into, but it’s just become too burdensome,” said Steven Robert Allen, who took over last month as director of public policy at the ACLU of New Mexico. He was deeply involved in crafting the bill in his previous role as head of Common Cause in the state.
Changes to the bill, some requested by the Attorney General’s Office, have added language about donations that critics say is vague and confusing; nonprofits railed against requirements that they use separate bank accounts for donations or be forced to reveal donors’ names; and changing the tracking period from election cycles to calendar years raised eyebrows.
(Here is Senate Bill 11 as introduced, as amended by the Senate Rules Committee and as amended again by the Senate Judiciary Committee.)
Representatives from half a dozen groups, including the American Cancer Society, the Native American Voter Alliance and New Mexico Voices for Children expressed their displeasure with the amended bill in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting Thursday, saying they support the bill as it was introduced.
Allen was among those who had been working to strike a balance.
“If you take too small of a bite of this apple, then groups trying to do hit pieces don’t have to disclose their donors, but if you take too big a bite then you also swallow up general talking about government, which is a core constitutional right embedded in the First Amendment,” Allen said.
Changes upset balance of interim committee compromise
Sponsor Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, said he doesn’t like the bill in its current form. Its House shepherd, Nate Gentry, R-Albuquerque, said he’s “concerned with some of the attorney general’s inclusions.”
“We don’t want to be too onerous in the sense that we don’t to discourage people from political speech,” Gentry said.
The attorney general’s chief counsel, Stuart Bluestone, disagrees with criticism of the changes to the bill.
“I don’t think that when reasonable and fair-minded people look at this, that you’re going to be using this as a way of inhibiting free, open and robust speech on the issues of the day,” he said.
Wirth and Gentry worked together on the bill in the interim Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee (its final report is here) after disagreements between lawmakers, campaign-finance reform advocates, nonprofits and the Attorney General’s Office doomed similar legislation last year.
The interim committee came to a compromise that was hard-fought and perhaps tenuous. Now the changes to the bill have upset that delicate balance.
Concern about super PACs, other spending
As NMPolitics.net has reported, recent court decisions have rendered New Mexico’s Campaign Reporting Act “unenforceable,” in the words of Allen, which is why he, Wirth and others have been working so hard to find a solution. Without strong disclosure laws in place, some worry the swing state could be flooded with undisclosed spending on ads this year. In addition, the attorney general is still trying to deal with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2010 ruling upholding a lower court’s rejection of his attempt to force two nonprofits to register as political committees.
Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez, D-Belen, who voted for the bill in the Judiciary Committee, said he hopes “the advocates will understand this is just the first step, and if we need to amend it next year and take them out or… figure out a way to protect them, we can do that.”
“Nobody likes it, everybody swallowed hard on it, but we know we have to do something because of the super PACs,” Sanchez said.
Wirth said he hopes the bill can be improved on the Senate floor or if and when it makes it to the House of Representatives. But with the session ending Thursday, time is of the essence.
“We started in a position that the nonprofits liked and the attorney general hated, and now we’re somewhere in between… but I’ve got to get it out of this,” Wirth said, explaining that he’s OK with the bill leaving the Senate in rough shape — as long as it can be fixed in the House.
On the Senate calendar today
The legislation may face a difficult debate on the Senate floor, where there is lingering resentment over mailers sent by some nonprofits three months before the 2008 primary. The groups said the mailers weren’t electioneering, but a handful of lawmakers whose constituents received the mailers lost their seats. That controversy led to the failed attempt by the AG and secretary of state to force the nonprofits to register as political committees.
The bill is on the Senate calendar today. If it passes the Senate it still needs to be heard in House committees and on the floor there. If the House makes changes then both versions of the bill will need to be reconciled in a conference committee.
“It’s a short-session problem at this point,” said Vicki Harrison, the new executive director at Common Cause New Mexico.
Bluestone said work toward compromise continues.
“We’d like to have full agreement on this,” he said. “We’d love to see a bill that is a compromise measure that has everybody’s support, and that’s why I say we’re continuing to look at it and hopefully we’ll still be able to make some improvements to it.”
Gov. Susana Martinez has stayed out of the debate. She agreed to put the topic on the agenda for the legislative session but has so far declined to take sides.
The Governor’s Office hasn’t had a chance to review the changes to the bill and isn’t commenting now on what she would or wouldn’t sign, Martinez’s spokesman Scott Darnell wrote in an e-mail yesterday, but he said she will carefully consider any legislation sent to her.