This is not the first time I’ve weighed in on the San Diego Ethics Commission and the City of San Diego’s campaign laws that often surpass those of the California Political Reform Act in their regulatory ambition. Some are good, some are…well…just waiting for a lawsuit.
I was recently invited to a meeting of a potential SD City Council candidate. The individual is definitely running, yet he is not yet a candidate and the meeting in question was not a campaign meeting…because, you see, the city says so. You can’t announce your candidacy, raise money, or even put up a website until a year prior to the primary election…uhhh, not in SD anyway.
Kinda seems like a regulatory chill on the right of free speech to me.
On March 12, the Union-Trib’s Logan Jenkins penned a hilarious, must read piece on the absurdity of it all, writing that "Franz Kafka would love this stuff." An excerpt:
For the next 2½ months, dozens of “closet candidates” for city offices, including city attorney and mayor, will be forced to conduct illegal stealth campaigns. They had better keep their wits about them or they could pay a steep price.
Over a decade ago, cities that mandated to candidates they couldn’t put up campaign signs on private property until a set number of days before an election were told to take a hike by the courts. Free speech. If you don’t believe me, ask any mass signage company such as COGS — they live and die by this stuff.
Many cities still have outdated political signage laws on their books, usually because they haven’t been made aware by the right candidate or a more diligent city attorney.
Similarly, courts at both the state and federal levels have tempered many campaign reform efforts that would restrict candidates from spending their own money. In effect, the courts have ruled that to tell anyone they can’t spend their personal wealth, in piles if they so choose, is a slap at the First Amendment. Thus, campaign reform has often instead gone in the direction of voluntary personal spending limits and incentives in exchange for capping one’s spending.
That all seems a tad free-speech questionable to me as well, but maybe not as extreme as telling someone when they can and can’t start campaigning. Under state law, you file a 501, a 410, and you’re off, no? I’ll let the legal minds on these pages like Jim Lacy and Mike Houston tell me what I’m missing here, but it seems the City of SD is overboard.
The question, perhaps, is whether charter cities, like San Diego — or any city for that matter — can go beyond the regulatory scope of State law (Political Reform Act) in this regard.
In the meantime, we’re not going to see any prospective candidates challenging the possible absurdities in SD’s Election Campaign Control Ordinance. In a climate still stinging from Duke Cunningham and scandal at City Hall, ethics rules remain foremost in the minds of the public. Who wants to run a race on the heels of the media generated from balking at ethics laws?
In a sense, the very climate that produced the current regs is the same one that ensures every candidate will simply choose to grin and bear it.
Jenkins also writes in the SDUT piece:
Popular opinion aside, politicians are Americans, too. They don’t forfeit their First Amendment rights when they decide to run for office. Except in San Diego.
It will take an ambitious lawyer out there to pursue this, simply on its merits…and possibly some notoriety, some of it negative. Anyone with guts out there?
Where’s the ACLU when you need it?