Sacramento For Sale

This is deadline week in the California State Assembly. Hundreds of bills will be voted upon so that they can be moved on to the Senate. Obviously, major special interests want to have something to say about which bills pass and which leave. The best way for them to impact that is through campaign contributions. And this year, they've got a new campaign to which to contribute.

The law bars them from donating more than $7,200 directly to Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles). But nothing has prevented teachers, doctors, gambling enterprises, insurers and others from giving much, much more to a cause close to Nuñez's heart.

Those interest groups wrote checks for as much as $250,000 to help bankroll a ballot measure that would tweak California's term limits to give Nuñez another six years in the Legislature. Seventeen unions, corporations, utilities and professional associations have donated a combined $1.68 million for a signature-gathering effort to put the measure before voters next February.

The contributions, all made within the last two months, come as lawmakers led by Nuñez are deciding on hundreds of bills of concern to the donors. The groups had already spent a combined $3.5 million in the first three months of this year trying to influence the Legislature, governor's office and state agencies, state records show.

This is not a problem in and of itself, unless the bills that come out of the Assembly match up favorably with the campaign contributors. We'll be watching. But the appearance is certainly not pristine.

Jay Stewart, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Better Government Assn. in Chicago, said he doubted that union members and corporate shareholders were clamoring for a term-limits overhaul. But the large donations are certain to be noticed by Nuñez, he said.

"Common sense tells you that if you support an issue near and dear to any legislator … to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, you're probably going to get your phone call returned," Stewart said.

There's a list of donors here. A lot of them are trade unions. We've always known that special interest dollars on all sides corrode the trust that people have in their government. The best way we can change this is to lobby on behalf of AB 583, the pilot program for public financing of elections which will be voted on tomorrow. However, this won't impact special interests giving to initiative committees that, in this case, extend the term of service for legislators. So initiative reform is something that we need as well.