Last week's Strippergate charges were satisfying for those of us who want the Colacurcios prosecuted for violating contribution laws. But the potential damage to the public was never that great. All the Colacurcios wanted was for the city to reconsider their longstanding (and probably unfairly denied) request for a trivial zoning change. Their crime was making oversized campaign contributions to council members and evading contribution limits by funneling the payments through multiple donors. Those contributions were publicized and backfired immediately. Two of the council members involved lost their reelection bids. The Colacurcios failed to obtain the desired rezone.
When King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng announced the charges last week, he ironically reminded us of the scandal's relatively modest import by saying, "there is no 'small case' when it comes to ethics in our public institutions." Why then are cases with greater import than Strippergate, including violations by the Democratic Party and public-employee unions, getting a bye?
Public Disclosure Commission enforcement records show that similar attempts to subvert campaign laws occur routinely, involving larger sums of money and greater consequences than what was at stake in Strippergate. These violations have rarely led to prosecutions, only to "civil fines," which are mostly suspended.
For example, in a successful 1996 campaign to defeat a pair of school-choice initiatives, the Washington Education Association committed essentially the same crime when it concealed an illegal $410,000 contribution by the National Education Association. Then–Attorney General Gregoire let the WEA off with a fine and no indictment. A business group that wanted a piece of the proposed Sea-Tac third-runway project was recently fined, but not indicted, for pulling a similar stunt to stack the Des Moines City Council with pro-runway candidates.
And once again last year the Democratic Party was months late reporting millions of dollars in contributions and expenditures. As they do every time, they paid the fine and promised it wouldn't happen again.
Maleng now wants to strengthen the Public Disclosure Act (PDA) with new criminal penalties. He discussed this with the governor's legislative director, Marty Brown. Given the track record, I'm skeptical about Olympia's commitment to restrict contributions from its favorite donors. If Strippergate is to have an impact deterring corruption, the legislature and the prosecutors will have to be as tough with politically powerful career offenders as they are with easy targets like the Colacurcios. â–
Stefan Sharkansky founded the local conservative politics blog www.soundpolitics.com.
