Follow the money. That was the advice Bob Woodward received from “Deep Throat” during the Watergate scandal and it’s the advice reporters should be following on Beacon Hill during the upcoming debate on ethics reform.
CommonWealth analyzed lobbyist contributions to lawmakers in its winter issue, and David S. Bernstein of the Phoenix takes a broader look at campaign cash in his newspaper’s latest issue. Both reports found Rep. Robert DeLeo of Winthrop, the House’s new Speaker and ethics reform champion, raking in enormous amounts of campaign cash from lobbyists and other special interests.
Bernstein, in his report, laments how the reporting system for campaign contributors is flawed. It requires campaigns to provide the occupation and employer for each person donating more than $200. But, unfortunately, all too many donors never report the information or identify themselves as lawyers when they are also lobbyists. “Unless one is armed with a list of registered lobbyists, connecting the dots is nearly impossible,” Bernstein writes.
I couldn’t agree more. Don’t get me wrong, the law is better than it used to be. Back in the 1980s, campaign contributors didn’t have to provide any identification beyond name and address. The Globe Spotlight Team spent nine months tracking down who gave money to whom on Beacon Hill over a four-year period. The result was a jaw-dropping look at the way influence was peddled on Beacon Hill. The Globe series resulted in several federal indictments, the departure of then-Speaker Charles Flaherty, and several law changes, including one requiring donors to be identified.
It may be time to revisit the law covering campaign contributions again. For while the law requires that donors be identified, all too often it doesn’t happen. For example, I went to DeLeo’s campaign finance report for the first part of 2008 and scrolled down the list of contributors to a person I recognized but who wasn’t identified. On April 9, 2008, DeLeo received a $500 contribution from a guy named Chester Atkins. DeLeo’s campaign apparently didn’t know who Atkins was, so it reported that it had sent a letter to him asking him to identify himself. What a farce. Atkins is a former US congressman from Massachusetts who heads a lobbying and political consulting firm called ADS Ventures.
Jason Tait, a spokesman for the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, says candidates are required to send a letter asking for identifying information for contributors who fail to provide it. But he says the law doesn’t require them to do anything more if the person never responds.
“When they’ve sent the letter, they’ve complied with the law,” he said.
Maybe campaigns should be required to return the money if they can’t identify who gave it to them. That might improve compliance.