Campaign finance laws are supposed to help provide transparency in government. In an ideal world, politicians aren't supposed to be beholden to campaign donors and citizens known who the donors are.
But Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson writes that Michigan's campaign finance law is toothless:
Candidates come and go, but the wealthy donors who finance their campaigns have become a permanent feature of Michigan’s dysfunctional politics, unrestrained by term limits or effective constraints on what they spend to keep sympathetic elected leaders in office.
Most of the time, they exert their influence in secret, abetted by a small army of lawyers and political consultants whose only purpose is to make sure Michigan voters never learn who the donors are or what they seek in exchange for their campaign dollars. Every TV viewer has seen this army’s work in the so-called independent ad campaigns that bloom across their screens like black mold every election year.
“Thank Judge Melissa Trueheart for standing up to polluters and drug dealers,” the ads suggest, or “Call Sen. John Doe and tell him what you think about his bill to protect child predators.”
If the lawyers and consultants have done their job, there’s no way for viewers to learn that the anonymous party extolling Judge Trueheart’s virtues happens to be the defendant in a high-stakes lawsuit pending before her, or that the real beef with Doe is the senator’s opposition to generous tax breaks for pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Michigan’s toothless campaign-finance law makes it easy to conceal the donors' identity. As long as an ad refrains from explicitly encouraging voters to support or oppose a specific candidate, its sponsors have no obligation to identify themselves or their real interest in the candidates their ads are so transparently engineered to help.
