Friday, October 05, 2007

Let them keep the money

The thought of making candidates return excess contributions is ridiculous.
News reports Thursday indicated the Missouri Ethics Commission has delayed making a decision on the issue until November. There shouldn't be any decision to make.
When candidates collected the money during the first part of this year, they were doing so lawfully. A case-by-case review of whether returning the money will cause a hardship for each candidate is total nonsense. When they accepted the money, they were following state guidelines.

Undeniably, this gives an advantage to some candidates, who picked up sizable contributions, including Governor Matt Blunt and his opponent, Attorney General Jay Nixon, but since when do we penalize people for abiding by the law, no matter how misguided that law may have been.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The "Ethics Commission" and they can't decide what is ethical? Reminds me of the DNR, they have to consult with some higher ups to see what they should do....don't want to hurt anyone.

Anonymous said...

The problem isn't with the ethics commission, it is with a court that made half a descision and punted. The court left the commission no guidance and no statute to work from, it was not formed to make law.

Anonymous said...

People ought to read the court's decision. Reasonable people might disagree with it, but the court was clear: The excess contributions have to be returned unless the candidate can show a hardship. They then ordered the Ethics Commission to enforce the ruling and to create a record of the hardship the the courts can review if the candidate appeals. The Ethics Commission doesn't have a choice.

Anonymous said...

I can assure you that there are Democrat candidates who will work with you in this effort to seek a reasonable settlement with the so-called Ethics Commission.

A conservative Democrat friend of mine from my Reserve Unit named Jason Kander is being coerced into "returning" campaign funds as well. I am sick of the left-leaning media spinning this in favor of Nixon instead of seeing it as a First Amendment issue.

Jason Kander is a good man, an Army Officer, who is only running as a "D" because you have to in Kansas City. So of course he is being called names like Stealth Candidate, but that is untrue.

The liberals are attacking him on this phony fundraising issue rather than debating his restrained view of government, his arms length relationship with union bosses and willingness to defend Missouri's Pro-Life legal framework. Kansas City politics stinks, I assure you.

Anonymous said...

I assure you, we do not care.

Anonymous said...

South Side,
Now you're taking your lies about Kander all the way across the state. You're not in his reserve unit, nor are you in the military at all. You probably don't know what his reserve unit does, whether he's in the Guard or Reserve, or even where he drills.

You just keep going to every blog in the state and trying to make the guy out as a conservative when he's not. It's a clever ploy, always speaking as if you're his friend, but you're obviously not, since you're so commonly racist, as well.

Jason Kander is a progressive. I've worked with the guy and you're just absolutely full of it.

I gotta hand it to you, it's clever to go on here and claim the guy is anti-union, anti-choice, etc, when he's actually a solid Democrat. But mostly, I think you're just kind of sad.

I'd call you out on your reserve unit lie, but I don't know enough about the military to do it properly.

But it doesn't take a military person to see that you're obviously pretty full of it here.

Anonymous said...

And don't come back and substantiate your lie by copying and pasting the details on his service from his website, fool.