Campaign Finance Board clears Entenza
A while ago Republicans levied a charge against House Minority Leader Matt Entenza of improperly funding a group called 21st Century Democrats. The charges were baseless, and the board has found the same. Not being able to give up the issue, Republicans are saying that the board is "soft on Democrats."
Here's some advice to the Republicans: before you file a complaint, make sure it has merit. Just because Republicans don't like a donation, doesn't mean it is illegal. I'm not thrilled about the state of campaign finance either, but a legal donation is a legal donation, whether or not I or anybody else likes it.
posted by MN Politics Guru @ 18:23
1 Comments:
Re: "Here's some advice to the Republicans: before you file a complaint, make sure it has merit. Just because Republicans don't like a donation, doesn't mean it is illegal."
I'm not so sure that they ever really believed that it was illegal. As I'm sure you know, charging opponents with illegal/unethical practices generally tends to make the news. When it is discovered that the allegations are bogus, it doesn't tend to generate much news (this one was pretty well covered, though). So there is very little downside to making charges like this.
I think it also helps the Republicans to just throw charges like this around every once in a while. They have a majority nationally and in this state, they have shown themselves to be very willing to break the rules in order to keep power (consider the violations Pawlenty made in his last campaign or just about everything Tom Delay has ever done). They need to at least charge Dems with this kind of things once in a while to give the public a general sense that "everybody does it". In a sense they are right, Dems have broken rules in the past and certainly will again in the future. In a larger sense this is very misleading to say that anything the Dems do could be equivalent to the nearly unprecedented corruption in todays Republican party.
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