If you happened to miss this story over the weekend, go back and read it (“Firm fights campaign laws“).
Bottom line: A leading conservative attorney representing a local electrical company is challenging Hawaii’s campaign laws in an attempt to eliminate both limits on spending by corporations and any reporting of their campaign expenditures and contributions.
If successful, it will have a devastating impact on Hawaii campaigns and set up similar challenges elsewhere.
The attorney, James Bopp Jr.
According to the New York Times in January 2010:
Mr. Bopp won his biggest victory last week when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions and nonprofit groups have the right to spend as much as they want supporting or opposing the election of a candidate.
Mr. Bopp was not present in the courtroom. His client — not for the first time — replaced him with a less ideological and more experienced Washington lawyer when the case reached the justices.
But it was Mr. Bopp who had first advised the winning plaintiff, the conservative group Citizens United, about using its campaign-season film “Hillary: The Movie” as a deliberate test of the limits on corporate political spending. And he shepherded the case through appeals to the Supreme Court as part of a long-term legal strategy that he says he has just begun.
“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he said in an interview. “And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”
According to Wikipedia: “He has served as the general counsel for National Right to Life since 1978 and as the special counsel for Focus on the Family since 2004.”
Again, from the NY Times:
Mr. Bopp said the next step in his 10-year plan is to roll back the disclosure rules.
“Groups have to be relieved of reporting their donors if lifting the prohibition on their political speech is going to have any meaning,” he said. Requiring groups that buy political commercials to report their donors is almost as punitive, he said, “as an outright criminal go-to-jail-time prohibition.”
The problem for the state is who will defend the law? If left in the hands of the Attorney General, it seems to me that we’re in big trouble.
In any case, the plaintiff: A-1 A-lectrician Inc.
Chairman and CEO, James Yamada Jr., took over the company his father started.
From an author’s note on his book, “God’s Hand in the life of an Electrician“:
Jimmy experienced a radical conversion to Jesus Christ after an intense “God directed” search. He is married to Diana. They are members of First Assembly of God, Red Hill. Jimmy is the Chairman of the Board of Hawaii Youth For Christ, Surf the Nations, Mission China and is on the Advisory Council of Jesus Christ Is Calling You, Inc. He is also the a pastor of at Hawaii Cedar Church in Honolulu, Hawaii.
According to the Star-Advertiser story:
A-1, the lawsuit claims, also wants to donate $2,500 to the Aloha Family Alliance political action committee but is unable because of the $1,000 donation limit.
Here are the political contributions A-1 has reported since 2008, according to the Campaign Spending Commission:
11/3/2009 Hawaii Republican Party $5,000
10/28/2009 Mufi Hannemann $3,000
10/28/2009 Marcus Oshiro $1,000
7/28/2009 Mike Gabbard $2,000
10/16/2008 Mufi Hannemann $2,000
10/16/2008 Gene Ward $500
In my view, the suit is very likely to strike down the ban on contributions by contractors who do business with the state because it appears broader than necessary to achieve the stated goal of controlling “pay to play”.
From the Star-Advertiser:
State lawmakers passed the ban on political donations by state and county contractors in 2005 to discourage what is known as “pay to play,” where contractors make campaign contributions in hopes of winning state and county bids. The ban came after several campaign-finance scandals involving engineering and construction firms.
This year, lawmakers considered relaxing the ban to only cover nonbid contractors, but the move was opposed by open-government advocates.
“The contractor provision was passed to stop the ‘pay to play’ system,” said state Rep. Sylvia Luke (D, Pacific Heights-Pauoa-Punchbowl), who was among the lawmakers who drafted the law. “As we try to instill integrity into politics, this was one of the things that we looked at.”
The lawsuit claims A-1, which has government contracts, wants to make $250 donations to several candidates this year but is unable because of the ban. The lawsuit argues that the candidates do not decide whether A-1 gets government contracts or oversee those contracts.
A copy of the lawsuit was not available from the federal court’s PACER system over the weekend. I’ll post a copy as soon as it is available.
