Politics & Government

Why Campaign Contributions Can't Be Limited In RSM—Or Elsewhere

A civics lesson breaks out at the City Council meeting of Rancho Santa Margarita.

Attorneys often get a bad rap, and attorneys as politicians get it even worse. With three attorneys on the the City Council of Rancho Santa Margarita, including Mayor Tony Beall, there's plenty of jurisprudence to go around.

But for anyone who might think that knowledge is a waste or solely relegated to the butt of jokes, consider what happened Wednesday night.

Larry McCook, who has run two shoestring campaigns for city council, addressed the four men and one woman of the City's governing board and asked that one of them do something that seems to make a lot of sense.

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"What I'd like to address is campaign practices ... and have someone on the Council step up ... and make a city ordinance ... to have a limit of $100 per donor per corporation toward any election in the future in our city," McCook said during the public comments portion of the short meeting. "Along with that, I would like to see any company that's doing business with the city or expects to do business with our city ... be ineligible to donate to the Council. I'd like to see the chance for all the people to have a chance to run without the political machine and corporate money and I think this is a very fair way to approach it."

And at least one councilman openly agreed with him—newly-elected Brad McGirr—during councilmember comments at the end of the meeting.

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McGirr gave a civics lesson—citing a couple of Supreme Court cases—on why a local government couldn't legislate the seeming common sense request made by McCook. McGirr, admitting he was going to go professorial for a moment, peeled off an explanation of Buckley vs. Vallejo from 1976 that determined campaign contributions were a first amendment right to political free speech, and that the overturning two years ago of part of the McCain-Feingold Act, aka the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, further supported the 1976 ruling.

“That’s why I wouldn’t support it,” McGirr said. “In order for a city to pass a law that said campaign contributions are limited to $100 and companies doing business in the city can’t contribute, that’s violative of the U.S. Supreme Court decision. It’s black letter law, and I wouldn’t endorse or support an attempt to create law that is going to be overturned immediately.

“There are some battles worth fighting even if you lose, and some  battles you should never fight even if you win, and that’s one of them.”

He got support from the attorney sitting next to him, councilman Steve Baric, who chimed in as well.

“Campaign finance limits were inspired with the best of intentions, but the concern is two things,” Baric said. “First, if you limit contributions, in effect you’re creating an incumbent protection system where no one can compete with existing council members because they can never raise enough resources. We don’t have that in this city so it encourages competition, not limits it.

"Secondarily, it creates a class of only people who can self-fund—who can write their own checks—can ever run for government office and I don’t think that’s what the framers had in mind. So the public policy reasons for how I think this city has always conducted elections seems fair.”


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