Last updated on 2018-12-07
The Senate Republican Campaign Committee in South Dakota is no piddly PAC. They started this election year with $54,753.98 in the bank. SRCC took in another $6,250 pre-primary, $41,700 pre-general, and spent at least $52,000 by October 22. Handling that checkbook is a big deal… and it was Senator Deb Peters’s big deal, according to the most recent SRCC campaign finance report, filed at 13:02 CDT on October 22, 2018, listing Peters as SRCC treasurer and Peters’s Hartford home address as SRCC’s mailing address.
But that’s funny: an e-mail from Majority Leader and SRCC chair R. Blake Curd to every Republican candidate for the South Dakota Senate on August 19 said that Senator Jeff Partridge had assumed Peters’s treasury duties:
The attached bylaws from 2009 specify that one Senator shall be treasurer and that the treasurer shall be responsible for the checking account.
By August 28, Senator Partridge was responsibly writing big checks on the SRCC account:
But two months later, we still find Deb Peters’s name on the SRCC pre-general campaign finance report, listed as treasurer, the brave and trusty soul assuming all sorts of legal liability for the committee’s reports and any boo-boos the guy actually signing the checks might make:
Oh, those Republicans, putting stuff on paper (or, in this case, official electronic records) that they don’t really mean. When will they ever learn?
It’s the SDGOP’s state. They own it. They decide which laws apply to them and when. They have no reason to worry.