West Virginia Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler (D-Marshall) worked for hours with Senate Republican leaders — including Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Trump (R-Morgan) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael (R-Jackson) — to shape a bipartisan campaign finance bill that both raised the campaign contributions limits and required that donors to dark money pools be publicly identified.
Richie Heath
That bi-partisan bill — SB 541 — passed the Senate last week by a vote of 28 to 6 — with the Senate leadership — including Trump, Carmichael and Senate President William Cole III — all voting for it.
But when the bill appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, the disclosure requirements were stripped from the bill.
Why?
House Judiciary Chair John Shott (R-Mercer) told West Virginia Public Broadcasting that the changes came at the request of the Senate leadership.
Greg Thomas
“The changes came at the request from some folks over in the Senate,” Shott said. “They had some second thoughts among the people who negotiated this bill. We had information that some of the stakeholders had second thoughts about that disclosure provision. When we came out with our amendment, we removed that from the bill.”
Kessler said today that it wasn’t Trump or Carmichael who called for the transparency provisions to be removed from the bill — so it must have been Cole.
Kessler, appearing on Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval, said that Cole has surrounded himself with the lawyers who have worked with dark money pools in politics — people like Cole’s general counsel, Richie Heath, the former executive director of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), and by Greg Thomas, a corporate political consultant, who worked closely with former Massey Energy CEO Donald Blankenship’s and his dark money campaigns and who is currently executive director of CALA.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were upset that the compromise hammered out in the Senate Judiciary Committee between Kessler, Trump and Carmichael was overturned by Senate President Cole.
“It stripped out all of the requirements for public disclosure of donors to dark money organizations,” said Delegate Stephen Skinner (D-Jefferson). “That’s one of the very good things that the Senate did. It was done on a bipartisan basis. This bill was presented to us without any notice and it was rammed through.”
Senator Mike Romano (D-Harrison) says he will vote against the bill if it remains without the disclosure requirements.
“The main compromise was to get disclosure of those behind the nasty commercials we see every election season,” Romano said. “We thought by getting disclosure, it would dampen down some of that negative rhetoric that seems to be polluting our elections. The bill was a compromise. Because we got those disclosure requirements, we agreed to increasing the spending limits.”