Voters going to the polls Tuesday down in Riverside County had a clear choice: Elect the California Dental Association, or the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. <\/p>\n
In a special election in Glendale on Tuesday, they had their pick of the Service Employees International Union or Farmers Insurance agents. <\/p>\n
Voters in Sacramento shouldn’t feel left out. In June, they’ll have a chance to elect the California Faculty Association, the union that represents teachers at public universities. <\/p>\n
Of course, the ballot doesn’t actually list dentists, unions or insurance agents. But it might as well. <\/p>\n
With term limits and campaign finance restrictions, more and more lawmakers represent the interests of groups that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect them. <\/p>\n
Moneyed interests pay for attacks on candidates they suspect will vote against them, and back opponents whose votes would be more to their liking. Once in office, lawmakers know that by casting a vote that annoys an interest group, they risk having to pay at the next election. <\/p>\n
The Fair Political Practices Commission called independent expenditures the “giant gorilla in campaign finance” in a 2008 report. The math makes clear why they are so powerful.<\/p>\n
A candidate might find 100 donors who could give the maximum donation, currently $3,900. That would add up to $390,000, not nearly enough to in a state where contested legislative campaigns regularly cost far more than $1 million. <\/p>\n
Interest groups can spend unlimited sums on independent campaigns. In recent years, they have taken to using their money to elect legislators from their own ranks. Dentists, optometrists, insurance agents and union officials all have won seats with the help of groups that spawned them. <\/p>\n
In Sacramento, Assembly Democratic candidate Chris Garland is the choice of the union that represents college faculty. Garland is on leave from his employer, the California Faculty Association. <\/p>\n
The union of college teachers has loaded an independent campaign fund with $200,000, dedicated to Garland’s election in his primary race against Supervisor Roger Dickinson and City Council members Lauren Hammond and Kevin McCarty to succeed termed Assemblyman Dave Jones. <\/p>\n
Like college teachers, dentists might not come to mind when you think of Sacramento power players. <\/p>\n
But they can rip your teeth out, politically speaking, of course. The California Dental Association has spent $12.4 million on campaign donations and $5.8 million on lobbying in the past decade in California. <\/p>\n
In the Riverside special election to fill a vacant Senate seat, Assemblyman Bill Emmerson is the dental association’s darling in a field that includes former Republican Assemblyman Russ Bogh. <\/p>\n
Bogh and Emmerson would vote alike in almost all instances. But Emmerson is an orthodontist, who oversaw the dental association’s political action committee before winning an Assembly seat in 2004, with the help of $403,000 from the dental association. <\/p>\n
As a legislator, Emmerson carries bills that the dentists lobby for and regularly votes for legislation that dentists champion. In his quest to move to the Senate, Emmerson has benefited from $600,000 in dental association independent expenditures. <\/p>\n
In the campaign, Emmerson and the dentists faced opposition from a political action committee called Citizens for California Reform. <\/p>\n
Citizens for California Reform started the year by touting an initiative to make the Legislature part time. Once that stalled, the entity turned its attention to helping Bogh, raising $150,000 from three entrenched interest groups: the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a union that represent state firefighters and a group representing optometrists.<\/p>\n
Why optometrists? Optometrists, who are not physicians, are involved in a nasty scope-of-practice fight. They want to be able to treat glaucoma. Ophthalmologists, who are physicians, are battling that attempt. Assemblyman Emmerson sided with the physicians. For taking that stand, Emmerson evidently must pay.<\/p>\n
Public employee unions generally side with Democrats. But they have friends among Republicans. No doubt, the prison guards and firefighters figured Bogh would be more open to their arguments – though you’d never guess that from television ads they aired on Bogh’s behalf. <\/p>\n
“Russ Bogh pledged to oppose any tax increase, said no to the car tax hike, and no to wasteful spending,” the public employees’ union-funded ad said.<\/p>\n
The race also attracted Indian casino money. The Morongo Band of Mission Indians, which operates a large casino outside Palm Springs, dumped $93,031 into the Senate race, siding with Bogh. <\/p>\n
In the Legislature, Morongo seeks approval to begin Internet gambling within California. Other casino tribes, including members of the California Tribal Business Alliance, are skeptical. The tribal business alliance answered Morongo by spending $21,605 touting Emmerson.<\/p>\n
Independent expenditures are not new. But as the FPPC noted, their magnitude is growing, as is their influence. It’s not an advance.<\/p>\n
Robert Fellmeth, a law professor at the University of San Diego who has followed Capitol politics and policy for decades, said the influence of independent campaigns leads to “tribalism” within the Legislature.<\/p>\n
Moneyed interests and the lawmakers they influence seek to satisfy their own narrow and immediate needs, without much thought of the greater good. Lawmakers mollify “stakeholders” without paying heed to the public at large.<\/p>\n
“We want public decisions to represent the broad society,” said Fellmeth. But if all lawmakers are “tribal chieftains,” he asks, then who is not at the table? <\/p>\n
Too often, the one missing from the table is you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Voters going to the polls Tuesday down in Riverside County had a clear choice: Elect the California Dental Association, or the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. In a special election in Glendale on Tuesday, they had their pick of the Service Employees International Union or Farmers Insurance agents. Voters in Sacramento shouldn’t feel left out. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4379,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-526893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4379"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}