The California Fair Political Practices commission will be holding a public hearing tomorrow on twelve new areas of political campaigning that it is considering regulatory changes. Most of the proposals are actually good ones. But a couple are real stinkers (see below). The meeting will start at 1:00 pm Wednesday, November 17 at the FPPC headquarters in Sacramento, and will be held simultaneously by teleconference in Los Angeles at the Center for Government Studies, 10951 Pico Blvd., Ste. 120.
The new areas of regulation and the proposed additional regulations include: streamlining and improving access to electronic filings (a good idea); simplifying forms and reports (a good idea); streamlining deadlines for filing and making more sense of them (a good idea); increasing campaign finance thresholds (a good idea); create on electronic filing system that includes state and local election jurisdictions in one system (a good idea if it does not drive up the cost of compliance at the local level); improve ability to terminate old committees (a good idea); harmonize filing deadlines for different types of committees (probably a good idea); regulate robo calls to improve disclosure, require scripts to be sent to the FPPC within two days, and move jurisdiction governing political robo calls from the Public Utilities Commission to the FPPC (in general this is a GREAT idea, as long as political calls are not banned, however, the idea of sending scripts to the FPPC within two days is an irrational infringement of the First Amendment. Requiring that the committee keep a copy of the recorded message with no actual filing requirement is a better idea); a host of illegal infringements of First Amendment rights against slate mailers (that means a bad idea); improvement of expenditure reporting such that small expenditures would need not be itemized on campaign disclosures (a good idea); change of conflict of interest disclosure thresholds (a good idea); harmonization of "revolving door" prohibitions for retiring officeholders who lobby between state and local level, look to Federal rules for guidance (I think liberals and conservatives can agree this is a good idea to help regulate abuse of the system by insiders); and putting disclaimers on lawn signs, emails, small handouts and door hangers, such small items that the Federal Election Commission specifically excludes them from disclaimer requirements but the FPPC wants to regulate them and print disclaimers all over them (the worst idea of them all, even worse than the slate mail regulation ideas).