Article by Erik Smith. Published on Tuesday, November 15, 2011 EST.

The Inside Story of the ‘Session Freeze’ – Nobody Saw This One Coming

Republican Rob McKenna and Democrat Jay Inslee: One faces fund-raising restrictions and the other doesn’t.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, Nov. 15.—It’s one of the biggest ironies in state politics, and at least half of Washington’s political world is bound to find it funny. In just two weeks, one of the most competitive gubernatorial races in state history is going to be shut down because of a fund-raising law that gives all the advantage to the Democrat.

            At 12:01 on the morning of the 28^th, Republican Rob McKenna won’t be able to take another dime for his campaign. The ban starts the day the Legislature begins its special session and lasts until sometime next year, when lawmakers quit and go home. It might last three months. It might be longer.

            Yet nothing keeps Democrat Jay Inslee from taking checks. So a fund-raising race that until this point has been neck-and-neck will suddenly become a bit lopsided. Inslee could raise millions of dollars, tens of millions – billions even. And if the majority Democrats in the Legislature wanted to, they could stay in session right up until election day next year and keep McKenna from raising another dime. Not that anyone expects them to. But it could happen.

            And guess who wrote the law?

Okay, now guess again.

That’s what’s funny about it. The law was written by Republicans, for Republicans. Initiative 134 was supposed to break the power of the special interests that finance Democratic campaigns. Furious Dems railed against it in 1992 and called it a wicked scheme to elect Republicans. But either voters didn’t buy it or the argument was too obscure – they passed it in a big way, 73-27. The Republicans smiled sweetly and took a bow.

            But somehow 20 years ago, nobody saw this one coming.

            Reflected Republican Frustrations

            What’s going on is that a “session freeze” is about to kick in. When the Legislature is in session, lawmakers and state elected officials are forbidden from raising money for their campaigns. McKenna is Washington’s attorney general, and so the rule applies to him. Lawmakers return to Olympia on the 28^th for a special legislative session, and because of the way the law works, the freeze remains in effect until the final adjournment next year, whenever that might be.

            But Inslee is a congressman. That’s a federal office, and the law doesn’t apply.

            It’s a situation no one foresaw back when Republicans drafted I-134. The campaign finance reform measure imposed limits on contributions to candidates, forbade forced union dues for political activities, prohibited public financing of campaigns, and imposed the session freeze.

It was a GOP vision of campaign finance reform, to be sure. At the time, then-Senate Republican chief of staff Martin Flynn explained to the Seattle Times: “It’s what we’ve been pushing for in the Senate for years.” And Mark Brown, then the top lobbyist for the Federation of State Employees, fumed: “It’s a Republican trick,” he said, “a greedy power grab by the Republicans and the corporations who went into the back room and wrote this.”

The measure reflected GOP frustrations of the late ’80s and early ’90s, when Democrats were just beginning their long ascendancy at the statehouse and the rules seemed to favor the Ds. Back then, Republican candidates got their money from a much larger base of contributors, businesses and individuals, most of whom wrote relatively small checks. The Democrats got most of their money from large organizations, in big lump sums – labor unions, trial lawyers and others. In other words, the Rs had to work harder.

Things really haven’t changed much over the years, though the contribution limits have changed the way the money flows. These days the big Democratic interest groups are just as powerful as they ever were, though some have changed form and reorganized, and the whole process is somewhat less clear than it used to be. The big money still keeps coming – it just goes to independent campaigns, where no restrictions apply.

And while you might say this vision of campaign finance reform favored the Republicans, or at least it forced the other team to get more creative, it’s not that the Democrats were any more noble. They had their own campaign finance reform measure, an initiative sponsored by the League of Women Voters, which would have imposed spending limits and made sure that Republicans could never outraise the Ds. The problem was that the league tried to be high-minded about things and refused to hire paid signature gatherers, the way the I-134 campaign did, and so it didn’t get enough signatures to place the measure on the ballot.

            The session freeze? It was really a small part of the battle, sort of a footnote.

            Unseemly Fund-Raising

            Back then, one of the most unseemly things about the way money was raised was that the fund-raisers seemed to last all session long. Whenever an interest was threatened by legislation or had a bill to push, someone would hold a fund-raiser, put out a call for checks, and the money would flow. Sometimes it seemed bills were filed just to get contributors to open their checkbooks. And while both parties did it, the Democrats did a better job of it. So naturally it was one of the practices Republicans had to end with I-134.

            But here’s the thing. The initiative didn’t stop with the Legislature. It also banned fund-raising during sessions by all statewide officeholders – governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and all the rest. Flynn, now a prominent lobbyist at the Capitol, explains that it had to do with the natural impulse to advance. Suppose a member of the House or Senate wanted to take on a current statewide officeholder. “They wouldn’t be able to raise money and the incumbent could. So they said, well, we aren’t going to put up with that.”

            So every state-level incumbent was hit. It’s just that no one thought to make the freeze even broader, and include all officeholders, or all candidates for state office.

            First Time it’s Happened

            And now it all comes full circle. Democrat Inslee is the first congressman in the last 20 years who has run for a state-level office. It stands to reason. The natural flow is for candidates to move up, not down, and the jump from U.S. House to governor is really the only upward move possible for a federal officeholder. It’s a rare possibility no one seemed to imagine 20 years ago.

            Everyone understood the implications when the current gubernatorial campaign began, of course. Right now McKenna is raising money statewide as the deadline approaches. The latest fund-raising figures, released last Friday, show McKenna has a slight lead. At the end of October, McKenna had raised $2.6 million, and Inslee had raised $2.5 million. Republicans note that about a half-million of Inslee’s money comes from transfers from congressional campaign accounts and the state Democratic party, meaning that McKenna’s new fund-raising is actually considerably higher.

            No matter. Come the 28^th, it won’t be a level playing field anymore. Odds are Inslee won’t have any trouble catching up.

It’s not right, says Randy Pepple, campaign manager for McKenna. “Congressman Inslee needs to decide whether he will follow Washington, D.C. rules, or Washington-state rules,” he said. “He can continue to take special interest money while the state Legislature is in session – just as he currently raises money while Congress is literally taking votes. Or he can choose to follow the will of Washington state voters and take a break from fundraising while he is helping his colleagues in Olympia work on their legislative agenda.

“Congressman Inslee is the endorsed candidate of his party, and therefore he is the leader of the Democrats’ policy agenda. He should decide whether it’s the right thing to do to raise money while he is trying to pass that agenda.”

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