When he took over the Fair Political Practices chairmanship from Ross Johnson, Dan Schnur promised he would focus the efforts of the Commission to root out corruption in the Capitol and enforce legislative ethics. These are noble goals for any government agency, goals which would take the time and effort of the enforcement personnel in the agency, and would also make them work very hard at rooting out corruption, and discovering unethical behavior. Government employees, however, tend to be lazy, and are not always interested in working hard, so they pick easy targets.
I expect this week to be hit with an accusation from the FPPC. My crime – I forgot to terminate one of my five election committees, and didn’t file campaign reports for that committee. Of course, the committee didn’t collect for the periods when I thought it was terminated (and hasn’t collected any money from anyone other than me for four years), but the FPPC thought I was such a criminal that I should pay a $4000 fine for these "serious" violations of the law. Oh yeah, and I gave a $2000 contribution to Guy Houston (which I disclosed) from the wrong bank account. I had the money in other committees, but FPPC rules about when committees can spend money have gotten so complicated that if you give money that you have collected legally, and could give legally if it were in the right bank account, you have still broken the law, because you gave it from the wrong bank account.
I refused to pay their extortionate demand of $6000 for these so-called "serious" violations, so now they are asking for $15,000.00 in fines from me by way of an accusation against me.
Let me explain how we got here. I have been in politics almost 30 years. I have ran for office a lot, and collected and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in those efforts. I have been investigated by the FPPC 3 or 4 times, the last time starting about 2 years after I left office. No investigation has led to any charges filed against me, but the last one lasted over a year, and was an investigation that would make a lot of proctologists (and several space aliens) proud. It was comprehensive to say the least, requiring that I give them every piece of paper I had for the last four years I was in office. After all of that, I received a letter saying I violated all of these laws, and demanding I pay the FPPC money. I said no, because I knew I didn’t violate the law. They then filed a notice that they were going to pursue me, and gave me the actual accusation, which had these three paperwork violations, violations which would generate maybe $1000 in fines if the FPPC were being reasonable.
But they couldn’t be reasonable. They had spent a lot of money trying to find me guilty of something, and they couldn’t. So, now they had to find a way to recover their investigation costs, and justify their phoney baloney jobs. So this is the way. I showed up at the probable cause hearing to see if they were willing to be a little more reasonable. When I got there, there were four FPPC employees there, whose salaries totaled over $300,000.00, and me. The Chief Legal Counsel, who was the boss of the Chief of the Enforcement Unit, claimed to be an unbiased participant in the proceeding, then demanded to know just "why are you here?" of me. I got up and walked out, feeling a little like Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant, as they sat there with "their 27 8 by 10 colored glossy pictures with the pictures and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what it was about."
So much for rooting out corruption. They deemed these three violations to be serious violations of the Fair Political Practices Act. A committee that hasn’t collected money from anyone in several years and a small contribution that would be legal if the law wasn’t so complicated. Meanwhile, the Mayor of Los Angeles gets hundreds of thousands of dollars in free stuff, and newspaper stories are filled with facts about legislators who receive money from lobbyist while they carry that lobbyists legislation.
Yes, forms should be filed, they disclose whether the law has been broken, and inform the public. If, however, once the form has been filed, there really is no law violated, except the failure to file the right form, pursuing that violation is an exercise in futility. No one benefits substantively from that action.
The problem of bureaucracy is that bureaucrats take the easy route, taking on technical violations of the law, instead of enforcing the law, because technical violations are easy to pursue. Proving corruption is a noble goal, but one that is difficult to pursue. It is easier to build the statistics of the bureaucracy on the backs of those missed a deadline or failed to file the right form, even if they didn’t violate any law of substance. I violated no law of substance, I did nothing that in the real world would be considered corrupt. I have been out of office 4 years. Only a bureaucrat interested in building their statistics instead of enforcing the law would think the public would be benefited by pursuing some minor paperwork violations.
Someday, these same bureaucrats will claim they just don’t have enough people on staff to enforce the law, and will ask to grow their bureaucracy. Will anyone ask them just why they spent time, money and effort to go after some small technical violation of the law? Probably not, and their bureaucracy will be expanded. That is why it should be called the Kommittee to Grow Bureaucracy. That more befits their mission, rather than rooting out corruption and enforcing ethics.
Today, I am the victim of big government. I will fight them, but if anyone wants to know why I am a conservative, this is it. This happens to thousands of others every day, through the thousands of other bureaucrats in hundreds of other bureaucracies. Mine just happened to be the FPPC.