Goldsmith Politicizes The Campaign Finance Board

Gary W. Goldsmith is the Executive Director of the Minnesota Campaign Finance & Disclosure Board ("CFB"). He makes, as of 2012, $92, 417 per year and has been with the CFB for a Phyllis Kahn-like 19 years and counting. His salary is $51, 276 higher than the average for all Minnesota state employees. Let's start dealing with income inequality in the parasitical public sector before those who could never make it in the private start lecturing the rest of us.

CFB Boards of Directors come and go; Goldsmith remains, head of the permanent bureaucracy whose raison d'être is to manage, if not stifle, our 1st Amendment freedom of political speech. I can't fault him, exactly, for believing in doing what he does. I can, however, fault him for doing it in the manner he has, which is with an unassuming arrogance and a sure knowledge of unaccountability.

Goldsmith is a confirmed, featured speaker at a DFL, left-wing, government management festival hosted by the definition-of-unimpressive Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. The HHH School, as it is known, is run by Prof. Larry Jacobs, a laughing-stock on social media for his mindless parroting of all things DFL and his imperviousness to any pretense of fairness or integrity. Jacobs is to preside over this farce masquerading as concern for the public when, in fact, the agenda being pushed is to punish political speech--and the manner of its transmission--with which the organizers disagree.

You can find the program for the event by clicking here.

Political speech kommissars also include  Speaker of the House Paul Thissen, who is scheduled to speak for a mind-numbing 45 minutes. One can only guess at the number of platitudes and non-sequiturs that can be squeezed in during that amount of time. Doubtless he'll be up to the task.

There is also going to be a "debate" between Rep. Sanders (GOP), Rep. Simon (DFL) and Sen. Sieben (DFL) about what only God knows, the program guide giving no guidance. This effort in futility will be moderated by the never open-minded Lori Sturdevant of the increasingly irrelevant Star Tribune newspaper.

A 15 minute break follows, presumably to give oxygen to the suffocated audience so they can be propped up for what follows, which is dreadful indeed.

"Elections for Sale: Where's the Outrage?" This is rubbish but don't expect the liberals who have put this together, and who will constitute the overwhelming majority of the audience in attendance, to believe anything but that. To the outrage barricades! For Minnesota liberals, it's always the Paris Commune 1871. Or Selma 1968. Or Haight-Ashbury in the worst decade known to this country, the cancerous 1960's.

Brought in to lead the group in putting their dresses over their easily frightened heads is a Trevor Potter, the director of the not-widely known Campaign Legal Center. Gigs like this, and a relentless assault on political speech via regulation by bureaucrats, apparently constitutes the man's life work. I'd rather chose suicide but to each their own (he's a former FEC commissioner, the CFB writ hideously large). Something at this point is going to be moderated but the program offers no clue except the moderators will be yet another employee of the Star Tribune and the nutty professor, Larry Jacobs. The leftist tilt of the proceeding is irrefutable although it was pointed out that Rep. Sanders is a republican. That's like saying John McCain is a republican: it actually proves my point of viewpoint tilt and bias.

Mr. Potter is also an ersatz republican but in these sorts of proceedings the party label is not at all dispositive. What we have here, as in so many tedious & intellectually shallow academic proceedings, is a dearth of diversity of ideas. Who on that panel is going to challenge a single premise of this event? Not a one. That's how they like it. Potter actually worked for John McCain and--can't make it up--is a reporter for the Colbert Report. Yes, such a person is being brought in on your tax dime to exhort the ruling class into limiting your speech rights even further in Minnesota.

Finally, the confab ends with the ridiculous Erin Murphy, Majority Leader of the Minnesota House, giving a 15 minute harangue titled "A Call to Action." What do we do? Jump up and down? Blow whistles? Shake our fist at the man? Dress up as vaginas?

I haven't the slightest idea but why does Goldsmith disgrace the CFB by participating in a nakedly partisan event? He's been there 20 long years; clearly it's time for him to leave and another Executive Director be appointed. Terms for that position should be limited to two, two year terms. So much of Minnesota is stale (the arts, the media, the political milieu) that I feel like I live in a state suspended in amber.

The preface to the event gives the game away:

"Our democracy is awash in money."

          Nonsense. More money is spent on advertising gum each year than in the presidential elections. This is a dearly held but specious premise by the Left. It must be asserted as a harm because otherwise they can't appoint themselves to micro-manage your political speech. The approach is fundamentally fascist.

"Minnesota has a history as a national leader in fending off big money in election campaigns but is now threatened by large infusions of cash out of the sight of voters."

          If the former statement were ever true, and Minnesotans can't be beaten at believing good things about themselves, it no longer is. The latter part of the statement is asserted entirely without evidence. Even the reflexively liberal Star Tribune could not help but report recently that the money in this state flows from Alida Rockefeller and a few other bored dilettantes, both inside and outside Minnesota. Even so, I've defended, nay applauded, her and others' rights to use money politically without much government regulation. The idea that anything is threatened by "large infusions of cash" is more fear mongering and have you ever met more scared people--about anything and everything--than your typical liberal? Then again, if liberals looked at both evidence and outcomes they could no longer be liberals; they're thought-proof, the rare David Mamets to one side.

"As the Minnesota Legislature convenes in 2014, it is time to update state law to shine the bright light of public disclosure on campaign money."

          Why now? Because the DFL still controls both chambers and the CFB is seeking something like a million dollar increase in its budget, which is quite large for a group that consists mostly of make work. Apparently, Goldsmith is throwing in with those powers whom he believes can deliver the cash. It's rather unseemly but hypocrisy comes with liberal territory.

Don't be confused: the goal of this liberal assault on political speech is to ferret out donors to independent expenditure committees and other groups that do not and should not have to disclose their donors. The speech mandarins pretend this is to avoid confusion on the part of the voters but it is not; they're the only ones who think voters are this stupid.

The real goal is to apply public pressure to businesses and individuals from contributing in the first place. Yet people have a right to associate and to donate without their membership being revealed. This was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court when it refused to allow the state of Alabama from forcing the disclosure of members and donors of the NAACP (NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958)).

Congratulations, DFL & CFB: you're the latter day incarnation of Jim Crow Alabama!

Minnesota Statutes Chapter 10A gives the CFB the ability to make recommendations to the legislature but that's an ability it should use sparingly and wisely. Instead, Goldsmith's appearance at the clown show put on by the risible Larry Jacobs erodes public confidence that the board is impartial. This confidence is hanging by a thread, currently, given the refusal of the CFB to meet in open session when considering whether to fine the DLF senators who conspired together to, essentially, steal the election in 2012. The DFL Senate Caucus was fined $100,000 for their corruption. The public was deemed unworthy of knowing what deliberations the Board undertook in letting the unethical individual senators off the financial hook because it met in executive session, closed to the public and press. This is corruption by another name. The CFB should never meet in executive session except when getting legal advice or being updated by staff on an ongoing investigation.

Transparency is desired except when Goldsmith & the Board support clear, partisan objectives. They cheerfully and sanctimoniously exempted from disclosure a donor who worked for a Catholic organization who wanted to donate to a pro same sex marriage group in 2012. The CFB makes a case by case exemption in favor of policy outcomes they support but this isn't fair or just. No matter.

Now Goldsmith has thoroughly politicized the CFB, almost to the point of no return. He should not participate in the HHH event if he wants to have any credibility with the legislature or, far more importantly, the public that he ostensibly serves.

In Praise of Alida Messinger's Millions

The bored dilettante ex-wife of bored dilettante Gov. Mark Dayton recently wrote a $500,000 personal check to a political pac supporting democratic women in elected office, the usual litmus tests applying, of course. Much was made of this by those on the right, given the endless hypocrisy of the progressive left when it comes to money in politics. Mostly the local left was silent on Twitter and MC saw no blogging about what would otherwise appear to the sanctimonious set as an egregious example of why suffocating government regulation of speech is essential to what they conceive of as a fair and open political system. It remains an astonishing truth that the left never learns from experience or mistake; how else to explain their continued support for the failed Obama presidency?

At any rate, Alida Rockefeller Dayton Messinger's contribution is to be praised, not clucked about or worried over. The professional left,  to quote Robert Gibbs, will faint when MC claims that money in politics is not a problem. Post-Watergate the group think was that money indeed was very much a corrosive element in politics and the First Amendment could be compromised because of good intentions. It's ever thus on the left. And yet there is no empirical evidence that the cloying web of regulations (Minnesota, typically, is ridiculous in its micro-managing of political speech) has had any positive effect on our political discourse or system. Of course, Obama declined to accept public funding in 2008 and the usual do-gooders were of a piece in their silence. The right consistently critiques itself far more than the left, another indication of the strength of its ideas.

Liberalism is profoundly simple: a few axioms and off you go. Trim and adjust as needed but never actually modify your thinking. This brings to mind what Talleyrand is said to have remarked of the Bourbon restoration: "they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

Money in politics is, after abortion, the best example of this. Without intentionally trying to do much violence to their positions, liberals mindlessly believe that more money in politics is very bad (please ignore the lack of evidence on this point) and hence they are on the side of the good, the true and the beautiful in trying to limit it. Except they are not.

Money does not buy political office. Ask Governor Whitman or Senator Fiorina. Or does it? Someone check with Gov. Dayton. MC jests.

Those on the right, generally speaking, do not share the low opinion of the voter that, generally speaking, those on the left hold. They are not robots or idiots, swayed like so many consumers of products advertized on television. Again, speaking generally, people value their vote and make the best decision possible. Sometimes this works for republicans, other times for democrats. But kindly spare us the insufferable meddlers who insist they know best how to fashion the type of system in which the rest of us should exercise our political freedoms.  Alarmingly, and all too often unrealized by them, their approaches resemble an incumbent protection racket. Ranked choice voting, which allowed the loathsome Dave Thune to remain on the St. Paul City Council, is but one example of their misguided foolishness.

Naturally, a distinction has to be made: contributions to candidates are still limited in ways that donations to causes are not. Messinger could not have given half a million dollars to Mark Dayton's campaign outright. That's fine; unlimited campaign donations raise questions in ways that funding issue based causes simply do not.

MC, however, wants to hear nothing more from its friends on the left about ALEC, the Koch brothers or Citizens United.

The disclosure canard is another failed response to the mistaken idea that money in politics is a problem. People have a right to donate to the causes of their choice without forced disclosure designed to do nothing more than inhibit that right in the first instance. Who funds the deeply unrespected Common Cause Minnesota? No one knows because it does not have to disclose. Nor should it. Nor should any other group if it does not wish to if allowed by law. Those laws should not be changed by those who wish to silence others under the rubric of transparency.

The left has long since lost its moral bearing from years past. Not so long ago it would be repulsed at judging people by race. Now it insists on such as a matter of getting past race. It would support the defenseless; now it insists the humanity of such is but a personal choice. Not so long ago it would see government dependence as bondage, a form of prison. Now it sees such as the very role of government and is annoyed with the backlash from such indentured servitude. They know better, you see.

In 1958 the state of Alabama attempted to force the NAACP to disclose its members and donors. Is there any question where the left would have been then? Now, however, it would appear that they would take a different approach. Not out of principle but out of expediency. Expeditious but unprincipled is a handy summary of the current day left.

Senator Mitch McConnell recently wrote in the Washington Post about such matters. Click here to read it.

Alida Messinger's right to write a check of any amount to any cause she pleases should be supported by those in both parties who understand both the constitutional rights in play and the stakes involved. The reaction of silence and embarrassment on the left shows just how much work remains to be done.




Hat tip to Tony Sutton for having created, circa 2010, the eternal phrase "bored dilettante."