This afternoon in Topeka, lawmakers will talk about cleaning up "corrupt political advertising." The House Elections Committee has a 3:30 p.m. hearing scheduled to talk about holding 527 organizations accountable for their sometimes smelly campaigns. An amendment to Senate Bill 117 would force anyone who buys political ads to identify themselves on TV and radio commercials and in mailings, robocalls, Web sites and mass e-mails.
At the moment, groups can advocate for or against a candidate but don't have to list their contributors, says Rep. Terrie Huntington, a Fairway Republican who is among several legislators of both parties who have been working on campaign reform for the last several years.
"If a group wanted to assassinate someone's character, that group circumvents the law by not having to report who the contributors are. They could write nasty postcards and it would be secretive," Huntington says. "We just want to even the playing field. It won't stop this kind of campaigning, but at least it will shed a little light on who has been contributing."
Huntington points out that it's a bipartisan problem. "Somebody, I don't know who it was, 'Citizens for Fair Government' or something, campaigned against Phill Kline when he was running for District Attorney. We have no record of who those folks are. On the other side, there is an organization, again I don't even know what they called themselves, but they're conservative Republicans who have campaigned against the more moderate Republicans."
Huntington isn't optimistic that the legislation will pass this year, and looks forward to trying again with a more comprehensive effort next year. "It's a painfully slow process to get these changes through," she notes, but the effort is slowly helping to bring cleaner campaigns to the state. "
hasn't scored very well on that," she says. "We used to have an F. Now we have a D." She cites the passage of laws dealing with campaign reporting and filing for bringing up that failing score to a score that ... is still pretty much failing.
I'm just glad someone's trying.
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