The Alabama Senate Dems have rewritten a bill to ban PAC to PAC transfers by adding loopholes big enough to drive an eighteen wheeler through.

A Senate panel on Tuesday voted 10-0 to put several exceptions into a proposed ban on transfers of money between political action committees.

The sponsor of the plan, state Rep. Jeff McLaughlin, D-Guntersville, said the changes put loopholes in his bill to let PACs give to the PACs of political parties and related groups.

“It creates some exceptions I’d rather not have,” McLaughlin said in an interview.

McLaughlin even asked members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee not to vote Tuesday on the committee’s rewrite of his bill. “There are some aspects of it that I’m not real keen on,” he said during the meeting.

But the committee chairman, Sen. Wendell Mitchell, D-Luverne, rejected McLaughlin’s request to carry the bill over, telling him, “It’s in the purview of this committee now, Mr. McLaughlin.”

McLaughlin’s bill, as passed by the House of Representatives last month on a vote of 103-0, would ban any political action committee formed by a lobby group, company or other organization from contributing money to another PAC. Such PAC-to-PAC transfers can hide a candidate’s true source of political contributions.

Under the Senate committee’s rewrite, PAC-to-PAC transfers would be banned except that any PAC still could give to:

  • Political parties and the parties’ PACs.
  • Party caucuses and their PACs.
  • Legislative party caucuses and their PACs.

Organizations, which could have their own PACs, that use PAC money to get out the vote for candidates endorsed by those organizations. Mitchell mentioned the Alabama Democratic Conference as one group that would be covered by that exception.

The PAC of any organization “whose charter or bylaws mandate that the organization support candidates of only one political party so designated by the organization.”

Mitchell, who proposed the rewrite, said, “Whether it’s good or bad, parties have come to rely upon PAC contributions as a source of their funding. There was just a lot of sentiment in the Senate from people who wanted to make sure that this source of money was not dried up, as far as the parties were concerned,” Mitchell said.

The intent is clear.  The Senate Dems don’t want their gravy train of money from dubious sources to dry up, but they don’t want to face the voters next election without having passed some form of PAC to PAC ban.  This bill would allow these sycophants (I can’t think of a better word right now) to advertise on their campaign literature that they voted for a PAC to PAC ban.  The literature won’t mention, of course, that they “ban” they voted for has no teeth.

I like how Mitchell admits that many Senators are propped up by PACs because apparently their own constituents don’t like them well enough to contribute.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 5:27 am and is filed under Alabama, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.