[ OUR OPINION ]
Legislators should ban
tax dollars for politics
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Circuit Judge Gary Chang ruled last week that city Prosecutor Peter Carlisle's expenditure of $3,000 in city funds and resources for a lobby called Victims Voice is permitted under state law. The difference between a public official urging political action and diverting public money for political purposes is an "artificial and arbitrary distinction," Chang said, rejecting a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union and freelance writer Robert Rees.
State ethics laws prohibit state resources from being used for private purposes, including help to "a private organization that lobbies or is engaged in political activities." Victims Voice is registered with the Campaign Spending Commission as a noncandidate political action committee, a lobby.
Registered similarly during the past legislation session was Citizens Achieving Reform in Education, or CARE, a group created by Lingle to lobby for her package on education reform. Lingle earmarked $65,000 in state funds for the group, which operated out of the governor's office. The state Ethics Commission decided in June that the expenditure of public funds on a private lobbying group violated state law, and CARE wrote a check of nearly $30,000 to the state to compensate taxpayers.
Carlisle suggested that the ACLU and Rees are in favor of free speech as long as it is speech with which they agree, and he has point. The ACLU and Rees were silent three years ago when the state Health Department spent $850,000 on advertisements, in concert with private groups, aimed at pressuring the City Council to ban smoking in restaurants.
At that time, such bans were not in force -- as they are now -- so the publicly financed ads, although politically correct, did not reflect public policy. The media campaign was successful; since then, county councils throughout the state have banned smoking in restaurants.
A proposed constitutional amendment allowing prosecutors to file criminal charges by submitting supportive documents to judges instead of holding a preliminary hearing or going to a grand jury is another matter. The ACLU is opposed to that amendment and won a court fight overturning voters' ratification of the amendment two years ago. It and three other proposed constitutional amendments will be on the November ballot.
Attorney General Mark Bennett supports the amendments and says he advocates them "whenever I have a chance to talk about them." He also has sent letters to all political candidates urging their support.
Presumably, Bennett's support of the amendments is on state time and stationery. If judges can find no distinction between that natural level of political advocacy by a public official and the siphoning of money and turning over of state office space to private lobbies, the Legislature should create one.
