This town needs an enema.
- The Joker
A brain enema.
- The One True b!X
Ron Ledbury has a new pet complaint. This time, he thinks he’s setting an inescapable trap for Portland’s publicly-financed campaigns. What Ledbury is so hot on is an excerpt from Oregon law.
ORS 260.655 Payments for putting name on nomination papers or for performance of political committee duties. No payment or contribution for any purpose shall be made a condition precedent to putting a name on any caucus or convention ballot, nomination paper or petition, or to the performance of any duty imposed by law on a political committee.
Ledbury offers a tortuous and circuitous “explanation” for how this is the key to invalidating publicly-financed campaigns. He ends this wind-around with one word: “Simple.”
Simple-minded, perhaps. Here’s the problem: The process through which candidates seeking to participate in the publicly-financed campaigns system, wherein they must gather $5 contributions from 1,000 people, has nothing whatsoever to do with getting onto the ballot and into the race.
Putting oneself on Portland’s ballot is an entirely separate matter, and can be done either with a filing fee or a petition showing that a given number of people support you running for local office. It is illegal to offer people money for this.
But that’s entirely separate from qualifying for public funds. All of the candidates who sought public funds for their campaigns were already filed to run for office.
This isn’t just apples and oranges. Ledbury is trying to merge two entirely disparate elements of campaign law (one regarding the process of getting into the ballot, and one for qualifying for a publicly-funded campaign) into a single deceptive distraction.
Opponents of publicly-financed campaigns in Portland love the deceptive distractions. They shed them like skin cells.
Perhaps there’s a good job opening for Ledbury over at Gard & Gerber.
Oh, by the way. That excerpt from Oregon law that Ledbury quotes? It’s not actually an excerpt from Oregon law. In the current version of ORS 260, the relevant portion quoted by Ledbury is listed as having been “repealed.”
So, it either doesn’t exist anymore anyway, or was repealed and then reformulated elsewhere. Either way, Ledbury actually is working from an entirely outdated book of law in order to make his point, which wasn’t relevant to begin with anyway.
Oops.
