Legislators Won’t Stop Feeding Off Cash Cows

SACRAMENTO — Getting the Legislature to put limits on campaign contributions is like persuading a tiger to cut down on red meat.

Or getting the kids to eat all their broccoli. Or a hog to abandon the trough.

Such behavior doesn’t usually come easily, if at all.

The 120 legislators won their posts under a system that demands that most of them solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions. In just the first 5 1/2 months of 1992, legislative candidates reported raising more than $20 million.

The easiest place to get that kind of money in sizable chunks is from special interests--from big business, trade and professional groups, and labor unions.

In the final days before the June primary, a new political action committee financed by teachers and public employee unions--the Committee of Working Californians for an Effective Legislature--handed Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress) $70,000 for her reelection.

The money may have made a difference. Allen won, with less than 600 votes to spare, over two fellow GOP Assembly members in a newly drawn Orange County district.

Many legislators, including some who are very good at raising money, describe the system as “humiliating” or “demeaning.”

Several admit that dependence on large contributions makes it difficult to resolve major issues that pit one moneyed special interest group against another, like cutting the cost of car insurance or revamping workers’ compensation.

But the money still flows, despite voters’ attempts to hold it in check.

In June, 1988, they approved not one, but two, measures to impose limits on campaign contributions in California for the first time.

Proposition 68, backed by California Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, called for limits on spending as well as on the size of contributions. It also would have created a voluntary fund using tax dollars to pick up most of the cost of legislative races.

Proposition 73, an initiative placed on the ballot by three legislators, imposed limits on contributions for all state and local offices, but it prohibited the use of public money to fund campaigns.

Because it got more votes, Proposition 73 prevailed. But it was struck down almost in its entirety by a federal court, which ruled that it unfairly favored incumbents. The ruling came just in time to allow a binge of sizable special interest contributions in the closing days of the 1990 campaign.

With the restraints removed, politicians reverted to their old ways. Between January of 1991 and mid-May of this year, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) collected more than $100,000 from tobacco interests--all of it in amounts that would have been outlawed under either of the two voter-approved initiatives.

Common Cause wants to cap both spending and contributions, and the group has backed measures by Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) and Sen. Barry Keene (D-Ukiah) to do so. Because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that spending limits must be voluntary, the package offers partial public funding to candidates who voluntarily agree to limit their spending.

Assemblyman Ross Johnson (R-La Habra), one of the co-authors of Proposition 73, adamantly opposes public funding. He had a bill of his own to cap the size of contributions and ban transfers between candidates.

But in April, Johnson’s measure was killed in committee by Democrats.

Then in May, Vasconcellos’ bill fell short of the two-thirds vote it needed because not one of the Assembly’s 33 Republicans would vote for it.

Keene’s measure, which would place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot, was approved in the Senate this month with the help of five Republicans.

But Johnson opposes the constitutional amendment and predicts that the Assembly GOP will unite to stop it.

Because the two parties differ so strongly, getting them to agree on legislation to limit contributions is “essentially impossible,” Johnson said. “Of all the things said against the system, the one thing that can be said for it is that it’s worked for everyone here.”

Lisa Foster, executive director of California Common Cause, believes that reforms are critically important if the Legislature is going to break the hold of the special interests: “If we don’t change who pays for campaigns, the faces may change (in the Legislature), but that’s all that is going to change. . . . Campaigns are being financed by the same people as always.”