It's not cash, it's currency

For absurdist theater, it's hard to top the Texas Ethics Commission, which is set to approve a draft ruling that says gifts of cash to politicians need not be quantified, but can simply say "currency" and be aceptable.

"If the Texas Ethics Commission adopts this opinion ... public officials can take millions of dollars in cash and legally write 'currency' on their disclosure form," Craig McDonald, director of the Austin-based Texans for Public Justice, which favors tougher campaign-finance laws, said in a statement. "This interpretation of the disclosure law is absurd and dangerous."

The vote will come six months after the same commission ruled that a gift of two checks for $100,000 could be listed simply as "checks."

Texas requires all public officials to report cash donations in excess of $250. But the law, according to the Ethics Commission, doesn't define how much description is needed.

"In our opinion ... the legislative intent as discerned from the plain reading of the words in the statute is that the description of a gift is not required to include the value of the gift," stated the draft ruling, put together by agency staff.

Under the draft, a candidate could describe a gift of cash as "currency" and still be within the law, but describing a cash gift as "a piece of paper" or "an envelope" would put one outside the law, it said.

Agency staff said it hoped the Legislature would consider amending the law.

Background on this saga can be found here and here. As the story notes, the full Commission will vote on adopting this rule Friday. Their point is that they need minute, micromanaging direction from the Lege in order to apply common sense to the rules. I fully expect that someone, like State Rep. Lon Burnam, who's been bird dogging them on this, to go ahead and submit a bill to do what they say they need. The question will be who will try to kill it. I don't think anyone will want a vote against this kind of thing on his or her record, so if no such bill makes it out of committee, it'll be because someone tried to take it down in the shadows. I'll be keeping an eye on this in the next legislative session.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on September 20, 2006 to Scandalized! | TrackBack