LANSING — Money, as the saying goes, is the mothers’ milk of politics. That’s always been the case. But in recent years, spending in Michigan campaigns has gone berserk. And sadly, there’s no easy way to track much of it, to see who may be influencing who.
But one lonely reporter is working full-time to bring the facts to any citizen who cares to know. His name is Craig Mauger, and he is the executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network (MCFN.org) a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to getting out the truth about money in politics.
“If you don’t understand how money is influencing politics right now, you don’t really understand how government works,” he said. That, sadly, is clearly the case. It is widely known that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that there could be essentially no limits on the amount of money spent by groups to influence political campaigns. (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission).
But the justices said every state had the right to require full disclosure of where the money came from. “Prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. But Michigan has done exactly the opposite.
“Today, in the state of Michigan, running for state office, there’s little to require you to disclose where the money is coming from, and even how much you are spending can be hard to track,” said Mauger, a former reporter who covered two legislatures.
Yes, if John Q. Doe gives $2,700 to Fred Jones’ legislative or congressional campaign, there is a public record of that. But not if a huge PAC (Political Action Group), or an Issue Advocacy group spends vast sums on ads designed to influence elections.
“You can keep the sources of your funding secret, as long as you aren’t running “express advocacy” ads, Mauger said, meaning ads that say directly, “Vote for Fred Jones.”
One could, however, form a group called Citizens for a Better America, get secret funding from white supremacist or other unsavory groups, and run ads saying “Fred Jones is great,” or, conversely, “Fred Jones hates America.”
There are no limits on this, and no requirement they disclose where the money is coming from. Efforts to require transparency have been consistently rejected by the Michigan Legislature.
Indeed, when bills were introduced this session to require candidates and any current state elected officials to disclose their personal financial information, current Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R-Jackson) said “I think the financial disclosure stuff is a bunch of crap. I don’t see how it adds any value to anybody.”
This is a big part of the reason why the Center for Public Integrity ranks Michigan dead last when it comes to transparency.
Craig Mauger does his best to overcome that, digging through documents, electronically and otherwise; and his website provides an amazing array of information. Recently, he discovered that lobbyists spent a whopping $5,682 on free meals and booze for State Rep. Brandt Iden (R-Kalamazoo) just from January to July.
That’s an all-time record. Why did they do that?
Simple. Iden is chair of the new and ultra-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which can hold up or advance any bill. His vice-chair, Rep. Jim Lilly, got almost as much — $5,325.
Another state representative, Larry Inman of Traverse City, is currently under federal indictment for allegedly sending text messages to a union official offering a price for his vote.
That is illegal. But if someone takes a big contribution, it is usually pretty clear what they want for it.
Ellen Cogen Lipton, a former member of the legislature, is on MCFN’s board. (Half the members are Democrats, half Republicans.) “When I got there, I thought they placed you on committees according to your expertise – but that wasn’t the case,” she said.
Instead, she said, people who were in swing districts and faced tough campaigns were often put on committees that would attract the most visibility and were the best vehicles for fund raising.
“In my last term I was put on the Committee on Committees, and tried to change that, but I was told that wasn’t the way it worked,” she said. The need for money distorts everything else.
Lipton got a painful, first-hand look at how the system works last year, when she attempted to win the Democratic nomination for an open seat in Congress.
She raised more than a million dollars, but still lost the primary to Andy Levin, the son of the previous congressman. Four years before, she raised about a quarter million in another unsuccessful bid, that time for a state senate seat.
“It’s really sobering,” she told me. “It’s sad, because that is keeping so many passionate and high-quality candidates from ever putting their toe into the political arena. So many good people call me and say, ‘do you really need that much?’ I want to paint a rosy picture, but you have to give them the truth,” she said.
“And so many of them say, that’s an arena I can’t be part of.”
How, by the way, did she raise a million dollars? “I had to sit for months in what was literally a windowless room in a basement, dialing, asking people to believe in me and give me money.”
In the end, she spent about $30 a vote, only to lose. The seat she was trying to win is a safe Democratic one; a swing district would cost much more. It took U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens more than $9 million in 2018 to flip a seat that had been Republican.
She began fund-raising for next year’s election almost before she was sworn in to office. This is all fully legal, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t wrong.
