HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s lax campaign finance laws allow powerful interests to pour unlimited dollars into politicians’ campaign accounts with few restrictions.
Campaign checks help donors or their lobbyists gain access to top elected officials who set the policy agenda in the Capitol, those versed in the way power works in Harrisburg say.
Legislative leaders deny that campaign donations buy either access or influence. Still, even the appearance of an arrangement in which monied interests get preferential treatment is enough to hurt belief in government, experts say.
Other states have taken action to blunt the power of wealthy special interests or provide additional transparency — reforms the Pennsylvania legislature has shown little interest in advancing.
There is no cap on the amount of money individuals or political action committees (PACs) can donate to policymakers’ campaigns in Pennsylvania. Corporations and labor unions can’t donate money to campaigns from their treasuries, but these entities can run PACs and use voluntary donations from members or employees to fund them.
For good-government advocates concerned about money in politics, the menu of potential fixes is vast.
“I can’t point you to a system that’s perfect in the United States,” Aaron McKean, senior legal counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, told Spotlight PA. “I can point you to best practices.”
These range from fundraising limits to public campaign financing to stricter transparency rules for nonprofits that spend on elections.
“Those are the kinds of things that exist all across the United States,” McKean added.
Limit how much individuals, PACS can give
Just 11 states including Pennsylvania do not limit individual or PAC giving, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The rest have laws that are stricter in some way.
Those limits differ by donor and type of race, and vary in austerity. Limits on individual giving range from $475 maximum for a Maine legislative candidate to a $20,000 cap for statewide candidates in Wisconsin.
Louis Hoffman, a patent attorney and author of Arizona’s nearly 30-year-old law restricting money in politics, compared big campaign checks to a form of “soft bribery.”
“Candidates who are funded privately by individuals who have strong interests are not necessarily going to be all that interested in bucking their donors’ wishes,” he said. “In some cases, it crosses the line to actual bribery. In other cases, it is just the ability to have access to powerful people that ordinary citizens don’t have.”
Federal law also restricts donations. Individuals can give candidates for president or Congress up to $3,500 per election, while PACs are capped at giving $5,000 per election.
One top Pennsylvania lawmaker, state Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, has repeatedly introduced a bill to cap campaign giving.
His version last session would have capped individual donations to legislative candidates at $1,500 per election and statewide candidates at $5,000. Political committees would max out at $10,000 per candidate, per election regardless of office.
Costa plans to reintroduce the bill this session. In a memo to colleagues, he argued, “Limits on contributions and on the amount of donations candidates can take in will level the political playing field and limit corporate influence on our political system.”
However, Republican senators who control a key committee have not brought Costa’s legislation up for a vote in previous sessions.
Ban fundraisers on session days
Pennsylvania state lawmakers regularly step out of the Capitol before, in between, and after key votes to host fundraisers in Harrisburg’s coffee shops, restaurants, and bars.
Fifteen states ban such a practice. Candidates there can’t solicit or accept any campaign checks during legislative sessions, when they actively consider bills. Another 13 states ban lobbyists from making donations during sessions.
Such a policy could be more complicated to execute in Pennsylvania, because the legislature is full-time.
However, some lobbyists want to ban fundraisers on session days, arguing that it could reduce the perception of impropriety within politics.
That’s a point four lobbyists from Greenlee Partners made in a 2016 op-ed. The firm has represented fossil fuel companies and the state’s police union, among other clients.
“The business of political fundraising and the proximity of lawmakers to viable fundraising sources provide an exceptional casting opportunity to snag lobbyists, interest groups and each other in a quest to fund their political action committees (PACs) and, in some cases, their own elections,” the lobbyists wrote. “In Pennsylvania, this has become a ‘cost of doing business’ in the lobbying community.”
In the intervening decade since the lobbyists’ call, the overlap between campaign funding and legislative votes hasn’t let up.
For the week of March 24, lawmakers are scheduled to be in town for three session days. Twenty-four private events are scheduled for those days.
The typical ask to attend such an event is $500, though it can be higher for legislative leaders or the caucuses’ campaign committees.
Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the Philadelphia-based Committee of Seventy, supports changing the state’s ethics and campaign finance laws. But she said she considers fundraisers on session days a “logistical necessity,” and that reality “doesn’t offend me.”
“They’re just never in the same place at the same time, so they’re taking advantage of it,” she said of lawmakers and donors. “There’s rules in place about not raising money on Capitol grounds or from their office phones.”
Neighboring Maryland bans the part-time legislature from fundraising during its 90-day session. But instead of reducing access, the ban leads to “a mind-numbing number of fundraising events” immediately before the start of the session, according to the nonprofit newsroom Maryland Matters.
Dark money transparency
The rise of independent expenditures by opaque nonprofits has made it harder to trace who is trying to influence elections, lobbyists and political operatives told Spotlight PA.
Independent expenditures are often made by groups that legally can’t give to candidates, such as corporations and unions. This spending supports or opposes a candidate, but it can’t be coordinated with a campaign.
Independent expenditures are common in elections where contributions are capped, such as federal races, as they allow billionaires, corporations, and unions to spend unlimited sums on politics.
But even in Pennsylvania, where there are no campaign finance limits, it can be appealing for donors to spend via independent expenditures. These dollars are often funneled through nonprofits, such as 501(c)4s and (c)6s, which are not required to disclose their donors.
Such “dark money” spending has risen since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, and is increasingly used by wealthy interests to avoid disclosure.
For example, the Philadelphia-based dark money group, Pennsylvania Alliance Action, has poured millions into independent expenditures to back Democratic legislative and judicial candidates in recent years. As a nonprofit, it does not file a campaign finance report, while its federal tax filings do not disclose its donors.
States, however, can set stronger disclosure rules than the federal government.
For instance, Arizona voters in 2022 approved the “Voters’ Right to Know Act,” which requires any nonprofit that spends more than $25,000 on a state legislative race or $50,000 on a statewide race to reveal all donors who gave it more than $5,000. The group must disclose this information within five days after it starts spending.
If a nonprofit that spends on these races accepts money from another nonprofit or PAC, the law requires those groups to also reveal their donors.
In the commonwealth, PACs that donate directly to candidates must disclose donors to the Pennsylvania Department of State. Still, they can make it difficult to identify their original funding source.
For instance, Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a PAC that primarily supports Republicans, receives most of its money from Commonwealth Children’s Choice Fund. The fund in turn gets its money from another PAC: Students First. Nearly all of Students First’s donations come from billionaire Jeff Yass.
Public money for political campaigns
Some states have tackled private fundraising by providing public dollars to political campaigns.
In such a system, the state provides taxpayer money to candidates who agree to reject private money beyond a limited number of small-dollar donations — say, $5 from 200 registered voters. Collecting more of these qualifying donations can lead to more public money.
Fourteen states have some form of public campaign financing. Five use it in elections for governor, lieutenant governor, and state legislature; 12 for governor and lieutenant governor; and two for state Supreme Court and other judicial elections.
In the 1990s, Maine voters capped campaign contributions and created a public funding system for all state candidates that remains popular. In 2022, 214 candidates used the system at a cost of $4.5 million, according to state data.
Last year in Pennsylvania, spending in three of the most competitive legislative races topped $4 million each.
Publicly financed candidates in Maine have not been hampered by their pledge to eschew big donations. More than half of the people who serve in the legislature ran publicly financed campaigns.
“It’s work,” said Rick Bennett, a Republican state senator from a rural district who used the program in multiple races. “You have to stay at it, but it is a way of engaging ordinary people in your campaign.”
However, these systems have frequently been the subject of lawsuits that sometimes lead to changes. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision of Arizona’s public campaign financing law that gave candidates in races against a well-financed opponent additional money, arguing that the provision violated the free speech of the opponent’s donors.
Independent spending is still present in public campaign finance systems. In Maine, legislative leaders may opt out of the system so they can establish PACs, accept donations from monied interests, and spend independently on key legislative races, regardless of whether the supported candidate is in the clean elections program or not.
But to Bennett, these gaps only reinforce the need to reach for a varied toolbox of reforms in the short term while working toward the ultimate solution — overturning Citizens United through a federal constitutional amendment that establishes money is not speech.
“This political industrial complex does exactly what it’s designed to — put consultants’ kids through college by keeping us at each other’s throats rather than solving problems,” Bennett said.
What’s next?
State legislators in Pennsylvania have repeatedly introduced bills to tighten the commonwealth’s campaign finance laws, but powerful committee chairs and legislative leaders have routinely not brought these proposals up for a vote.
Last session, the state House passed bills to require legislators to file two additional fundraising reports each election year and mandate electronic filing of campaign finance reports. The chamber also passed a bill to restrict political spending by multinational corporations, banning them from paying for independent expenditures.
Despite bipartisan backing, Republican leadership in the state Senate did not bring any of the proposals up for a vote. House Democrats said they are willing to review the bills again in the coming session.
Kate Flessner, a spokesperson for state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana), said the leader wants to look at “how greater efficiencies within the Department of State could lead to a more streamlined process for the public to find report filings.”
Erica Clayton Wright, a spokesperson for state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, R-Hempfield, said Ward would support campaign finance and lobbying reform, specifically the review of egregious national dark money organizations that influence state politics and government unions that use taxpayer dollars to hire lobbyists and advance their organizations political agenda.
But when contacted by Spotlight PA, no legislative leader — whether Democrat or Republican — backed limiting how much money billionaires or PACs for special interests can deposit in their campaign coffers.
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