House Takes up Campaign Finance Fix, Attacks Initiative Power This Afternoon

The South Dakota House of Representatives may hold its first real votes this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. CST, when it convenes to hear four bills. The first, House Bill 1001, will let the House speaker pro tempore come to Executive Board meetings but not vote. If you can think of a good general reason to oppose this bill (other than “Steven Haugaard and his misinformation should be kept out of as many meetings as possible”), let me know.

The bills that matter are HB 1003, HB 1004, and HB 1006.

HB 1003 is our first emergency bill. When the Legislature allowed “entities”—business and unions, mostly—to donate directly to candidates—it forgot to require candidates to list the entities who give them more than $100 the same way the law requires candidates to list the individuals who give over $100. If HB 1003 doesn’t pass now, Billie Sutton, Marty Jackley, and Kristi Noem will be able to submit their 2017 year-end campaign finance reports by January 26 and hide the names of all of their corporate donors from us. (I checked the state campaign finance database: none of those three have submitted 2017 reports yet.) In terms of transparency, yeah, that’s an emergency. Vote YES on HB 1003.

HB 1004 is the Legislature’s effort to limit the size of the laws citizens propose to place on the ballot. It’s sneaky—rather than imposing a word limit directly, HB 1004 gives the Board of Elections authority to dictate the size of the petition paper and font, which power the Board of Elections could use to effectively limit word counts on initiatives to 1,000 words or less. To make this one minor change, HB 1004 requires almost 1,000 words. This Session’s monster bill so far, HB 1070, runs over 18,000 words over 61 pages in its PDF form. The state has no compelling reason to restrict the length of bills citizens can propose as initiatives but not the length of bills legislators can propose. HB 1004 is simply another effort by legislators to limit the people’s power of initiative. Vote NO on HB 1004.

HB 1006 delays the review of initiated measures by the Legislative Research Council. Instead of the fifteen-day turnaround required by law, citizens submitting initiatives from December 1 through the end of March may have to wait until the second week of April for LRC to respond. Knocking this big hole in the initiative organizing calendar is another way for legislators to say, “We’re more important than you common citizens.” Vote NO on HB 1006.

Fixing the hole in campaign finance law to give citizens more information is cool; chipping away at initiative to take power away from citizens is not. Drop your House members a line by lunchtime and tell them to vote accordingly!