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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL / CALIFORNIA
Capital Focus: McPherson Panel Has An Awfully Familiar Look
By Ryan Tate
Special to The Wall Street Journal

06/02/1999
The Wall Street Journal
CA1
(Copyright (c) 1999, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

SACRAMENTO -- In a rare moment of unanimity for the cause of good government, the Legislature last year adopted a sweeping effort to update the state's political-campaign law -- the landmark initiative voters enacted at the height of the Watergate scandal a quarter-century ago.

The Bipartisan Commission on the Political Reform Act of 1974 -- commonly known after its principal sponsor, Republican Sen. Bruce McPherson of Santa Cruz -- was to bring campaign finance into the digital era.

The 14 members would review ways to make regulations reflect the Internet's ability to provide near-instantaneous access to contribution records and other disclosure documents, consider the impact of so-called independent-expenditure committees and -- in the era of term limits -- make campaign regulations less onerous for newcomers to the political arena.

And to ensure that the McPherson Commission didn't favor special interests or Sacramento insiders, the statute creating it set strict criteria allowing no more than three lawyers active in politics to serve.

But, it seems, old habits die hard. For when the commission's membership was announced, it included four of the fearsome Sacramento sharks -- or, in the words of the law, attorneys "who devote more than 10% of their professional practice time to legislative, political campaign, or other politically related activities."

What's more, while the statute required that at least one member be a "representative of a nonprofit public-interest organization," no such individual apparently could be found. Instead, the commission includes such consummate insiders as former Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R., Garden Grove); Dale Bonner, a department head under former Gov. Pete Wilson; and Kathy Bowler, the executive director of the California Democratic Party.

The composition came about, it seems, because no one was responsible for making sure that all the appointments passed muster.

"No officials who made appointments violated the law, but collectively they did," explains commission member Dan Lowenstein, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who helped write the original Political Reform Act.

The result? "In 20 years in California politics, this is the most stacked deck I've ever seen," says Jim Knox, executive director of California Common Cause.

Of course, there are two ways to deal with a situation that's illegal. One is to start obeying the law. The other -- not available to those of us who aren't lawmakers -- is to change the law. Unsurprisingly, legislators chose Option B; in February, Sen. McPherson introduced a bill that would raise the quota of political lawyers to five. The measure passed the Senate last month and now heads to the Assembly.

"So many people involved in campaign-finance reform are attorney-types anyway," says Mr. McPherson. "People don't think it's that big a problem."

Well, some people apparently do. "This commission is unfair," says Bob Stern, another co-author of the original Political Reform Act and now co-director of the nonprofit Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. For while the McPherson Commission "is bipartisan -- there are Democrats and Republicans -- what's missing are people who believe in political reform," he says.

In a letter to Sen. McPherson, Common Cause's Mr. Knox and the president of the California League of Women Voters, Karyn Gill, complained that the new bill "violates the spirit of the enabling legislation and only ratifies the biased composition of the current commission."

For their part, commission members, who receive $100 for each day of service, note that they are charged not with rewriting campaign-finance laws, but with improving their operation -- specifically, as the statute says, with drafting "administrative, regulatory, procedural and clarifying changes to the Political Reform Act."

And who better to reform implementation of the act, members argue, than the political operatives who work most closely with it?

"There is a great deal of knowledge represented on that commission," says Mr. Lowenstein, himself a former chairman of the state Fair Political Practices Commission, which appointed him to the McPherson panel. (The statute directed the Fair Political Practices Commission to appoint two of its former chairmen to the reform panel.) "If that can be brought to bear in a good way, there's a real possibility to do things that are not sensational but useful," says Mr. Lowenstein.

Joe Remcho, another member and lead attorney in the case against Proposition 208 -- which voters adopted in 1996 to limit campaign contributions to a maximum of $500 for statewide elections -- put things more bluntly.

"I've always seen Mr. Knox and Common Cause as less interested in the nuts and bolts, and, frankly, I don't think they have a lot to offer on nuts and bolts," he says. Mr. Remcho, an appointee of Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D., Los Angeles), was the fourth political lawyer named to the commission.

But Mr. Knox, who has attended two out of the first three public meetings of the McPherson Commission, says it's precisely the nuts and bolts that concern him; the commission, he says, has been considering loosening the deadlines for candidates to disclose the source of campaign contributions and ending the requirement that candidates compile the list of every donor who has given more than $10,000.

The public, Mr. Knox worries, is "not going to find out who's funding these campaigns in a timely fashion; they'll find out after the election."

Mr. Knox insists that there are plenty of people who could serve on the commission who aren't political lawyers. "There's no shortage of people utterly familiar with the law who have a different perspective," he says.

But that's not always how it seems in the corridors of the state Capitol, where practically everyone you meet is a lawyer or a lobbyist.

"How would they not appoint insiders?" asks the McPherson Commission's chairman, Steve Lucas, a political lawyer appointed by former Gov. Wilson. "Those are the only people they know, by definition."

Indeed, as far as the composition of his commission goes, says Sen. McPherson, "I'm just glad that all 14 aren't lawyers."