What to do with PAC money

PAC contributions create a dilemma for politicians.

Of course, you can always donate them to a good cause.

Campaign donations from Political Action Committees come in handy for cash-strapped campaigns. PACs are special interests. They have a political and policy agenda. PAC contributions are not illegal. They are not a bribe. They go to a candidate's campaign, not to the candidate personally, and there is no explicit quid pro quo. Still, the whole campaign finance system looks

Jeff Golden

 transactional and corrupt. It is shady enough that people with a political agenda are giving money to candidates. People are meant to be represented. But PACs are openly and overtly the "factions" that James Madison warned might destroy a republic, and PAC contributions amplify their power. Jeff Golden makes a point of not accepting campaign contributions from PACs.

Like several other Guest Post authors here over the years, he is a college classmate. Like many of Harvard's most successful alumni, Jeff left Harvard early without graduating. He has been a home builder, a river raft guide, a Jackson County commissioner, a public TV journalist, a public radio talk show host, and now an Oregon state senator.

Guest Post by Jeff Golden 

Bringing money back to the District is an unwritten part of a state senator’s job description. That doesn’t always make for the wisest spending of tax dollars (except, of course, when it comes to the money we bring back for our district), but that’s how it works.

I recently realized that there’s another way, wholly aside from public tax dollars, to bring outside money to worthy causes. Not as many dollars as the state budget process produces, but I’m going to give it a shot to see if it catches on.

Here's how the idea came up. I was meeting with the woman who founded Golden Rule Re-entry, an amazing tiny non-profit striving to help people who’ve done jail or prison time succeed on the outside. At one point she talked about how much a $1000 check she’d just received was going to boost her work. The mention of a thousand dollars nudged my attention to a chore I needed to do later that day: return a $1000 campaign check, sitting at that moment on my desk, to its sender, an upstate Political Action Committee. I had never met or talked to anyone from that PAC, but it’s obvious what kind of votes they’d want on bills that might come before the senate.

This isn’t unusual. During my term in the legislature, I’ve received twenty or more unsolicited checks from lobbyists, corporations or unions with clear specific interests in how I vote. Usually there’s nothing else in the envelope, just a check made out to my campaign committee.

Now, I generally take every opportunity I can to comment on money in politics (here’s one example), and won’t stop until we do something serious about it. But this example is self-explanatory. The stark fact is that checks from lobbyists with clear legislative agendas regularly arrive in legislators’ mailboxes. No explanatory notes, no information, no explicit requests, just a more-or-less substantial check to help you win your election so you’ll be in a position to cast votes on their issues. If you let that sink in, you don’t need additional commentary from me.

In every case I return the check to the donor with a few words noting my practice of running without PAC money. But the other day, as I listened to this fiercely committed woman describe her life-changing work, it came to me how much better she’d spend the $1,000 check on my desk than would the lobbyist who sent it to me.

That’s the moment my donations policy changed. I called my campaign treasurer to tell him to start depositing every PAC check we received and to immediately donate an identical amount to a lean non-profit group doing vital work to help people, families and the environment we all live in. With the abundance of groups like that in the Rogue Valley, I’ll have plenty of places to pass along all the unasked-for checks that come my way.

And whatever else happens, I’ll get to feel confident that those extra dollars went to purposes more valuable than lawn signs, Facebook posts and political junk mail.