Doug Kendall, writing in the Huffington Post, attempts a defense of Arizona’s flawed tax financing system—without ever addressing the system itself.
As Kendall sees it, state Sen. John McComish (R-Ariz.) has two problems. First, he’s the plaintiff in McComish v. Bennett, the constitutional challenge to an Arizona law that rescues tax-funded candidates from being outspent by their traditionally-funded opponents. Second, Sen. McComish “was forced to file an amended financial disclosure report, acknowledging that he had accepted from Fiesta Bowl officials a gift of more than $500 in value involving a trip to the Big 12 Championship in Dallas in 2009, and had not disclosed this fact as required by Arizona law.”
Of course, these two things have nothing to do with each other. There are laws regulating campaign finances, and there are separate laws regulating gifts to sitting legislators. Sen. McComish’s transgression has nothing to do with campaign finance law or the case currently before the Supreme Court. Moreover, other members of the Arizona Legislature committed the same offense despite having availed themsleves of public financing. (You can find a sortable list of legislators who accepted tax funding here.)
Mr. Kendall does take note of an inchoate scandal where Fiesta Bowl officials may have funneled “more than $46,000 in campaign contributions to 23 candidates funneled through Fiesta Bowl employees.”
Now, if proven, that’s certainly a campaign-finance violation. But it is entirely unrelated to the challenged portions of Arizona’s campaign finance laws, and Kendall admits that it is “impossible to know” if Sen. McComish was involved. Besides, the report into this developing scandal provides “no indication that politicans who received the donations knew” of the scheme.
Nevertheless, Kendall insists that “McComish is becoming Exhibit A in why the Supreme Court should reject his claim.”
By my count, that leaves us with a non-sequitur (illegal gifts to sitting legislators require that they and their challengers have access to public financing), a guilt-by-association argument (some legislators may have been involved in a campaign-finance scandal, but we don’t know who they are, so Senator McComish is suspect), and an ad hominem attack (consequently, Sen. McComish’s role in McComish v. Bennett should cause us to dismiss his constitutional arguments).
And nowhere does Kendall so much as mention the specific legal provisions actually being challenged in court. These broad-brush arguments simply shouldn’t be how we discuss our constitutional rights in this country.
