Senator Billie Sutton’s gubernatorial campaign scored its first big win in Pierre Monday, placing, taking the top prize in the 17th annual Pierre Parade of Lights. The Sutton parade entry won one hundred “Pierre Pride Dollars” for the well-illuminated Sutton Ranch stagecoach and a giant cowboy hat on top of a pickup truck towing a trailer with “SUTTON” in meter-high papier-mâché letters.
Parade fan and gubernatorial chief of staff Tony Venhuizen wonders how Team Sutton will report that prize on its 2017 campaign finance filing. We might have fun making a legal argument that a prize for a parade entry does not constitute a “contribution“: technically, the Pierre Chamber of Commerce did not make a contribution to support Sutton’s campaign. The other prizes issued to the Oahe Credit Union, the Pierre Indian Learning Center, and the Fort Pierre Volunteer Fire Department weren’t political contributions. The award to the Sutton campaign was compensation for the service of boosting the Pierre Parade of Lights with a crowd-pleasing float.
But why go to court over a few Pierre Pride bucks when state law actually lets this prize slide with almost no notice? As campaign finance law stands right now, Team Sutton simply throws that $100 value in with all the other newly-authorized contributions from businesses and similar “entities” which, thanks to a crucial oversight by the Board of Elections and the 2017 Legislature, do not have to be itemized, no matter how large. The Legislature’s interim task force on campaign finance has a bill (Draft #206) in the chute to rectify that oversight and require the itemization of every entity contribution (entitial contribution? entitillation?), but if the Legislature doesn’t pass that bill faster than they repealed IM22, Sutton won’t have to mention the Pierre Chamber on his 2017 report… and the majority of Pierre Chamber members, including board member Dennis Rounds, will probably be relieved not to be pegged as supporters of the Democratic candidate for governor.
The folks who vote for continuous deregulation need to be sat down and made to think about, put into their own words, the case having any rules or legal standards at all – as they’ve been so in love with the idea of small government, for so many decades, that they’ve begun to lose touch with why we have any regulations at all. Only then will things like campaign finance reform make true sense to them.
Everybody with money seems to want to donate secretly to the things and candidates they care about the most. If we ever want to get big money [sowing the seeds of division] out of politics, getting secret money out is the first step.
Out of state money should stay legal as long as the donors are transparent. Secret money is the real enemy. Campaign finance reform could help combat this enemy – if South Dakota can grab this issue by the horns and quit pussyfooting all around it.
Big money is fine, why would big money have any less right than small money? But Out-of-state money should be banned entirely. Big, Dark, Out-of-state money is behind most of what’s wrong in politics nationwide, and with the latest Slick Rick iterations it is seeping into South Dakota too. That is why Messrs. Bolin and Mickelson have some really good ideas. I look forward to seeing them get made into law bills.
If we banned ALL out of state money the SDGOP would be broke. They so very heavily depend on national monies that without it, they may cease to exist [without the allowance of accounting loopholes].
Unfortunately, SD Republicans seem unwilling to cut themselves off from their national tit, as they would never refuse advertising on behalf of the NRA.
Transparency? Who gives money to the Pierre Chamber? Who cast the votes for top float? Was the voting rigged?! Send in Jordan Youngberg and the campaign finance task force to investigate!