Saturday, March 25, 2006

Contribution limits may be thrown out in Missouri

The Missouri Senate voted recently to eliminate campaign contribution limits, instead opting to put limits on how much money can be put into these legislative district committees which I have written about extensively in the past few months.
Today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch examines the effort, which now goes to the House. One of the selling points behind this proposal is full and immediate disclosure, but that in itself creates problems.
You can have every donation made to every candidate put on the worldwide web for everyone to see, but if the media is not willing to go to the work to make sure readers and viewers know who is receiving money from whom then it does not do much good.
Besides, if you allow a major donor to give $100,000, which is then used to mount a major television push during the last few days of a campaign, people are not going to be paying much attention to who financed the ads.
It appears this effort at campaign finance reform is simply another sop toward special interests.

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