Last month, the Board ruled
that candidates cannot use campaign funds on child care expenses. Almost two
decades ago, the board ruled differently; it has discretion over this issue
because the state’s Ethics Code doesn’t address the matter. A majority of the
board now in place saw differently from the past.
The request came from a putative candidate next fall
for House District 66, Morgan Lemandre. She also affiliates with the group
Emerge Louisiana, which supports hard left Democrat women running for office, and
as a result will lose big to incumbent Republican state Rep. Rick Edmonds.
Regardless, that orientation in part explains how
she phrased her request for a Board
review of its recent decision. She played the class warfare card by writing
the ruling “disparately impacts working parents of small children who are not
independently wealthy and will have the unintended result of preventing many
parents from running for elected office.”
In other words, she alleged the present
interpretation rigged the electoral system in favor of moneyed interests, in
that only they could afford to pay for their own child care while out on the
hustings. Yet it probably never occurred to her – or it did and she wrote cynically
and deceptively anyway – that even if the Board would authorize that kind of
expense, wealthy donors and special interests could give to a candidate to
recycle funds into paying for that, under her formulation making those
candidates just as much pawns of “wealth.”
However, the argument fails, and no better
explanation suffices than the one proffered during the initial review by Board
member Peppi Bruneau, an ex-legislator who often dealt with ethics matters: “Nobody
forces you to run for public office. But you have a child and that is your
primary responsibility to provide for that child. But I don’t think you need to
be raising money to run for office to do that, and I don’t think that is the
intent of the statute.”
Exactly so. People make choices in life; you can’t
have it all regardless of what you want. You have the right to run for an
office for which you qualify. You don’t have the right for the public to give
you an ethics pass to allow you to take money to offset the downside of a
decision, by which doing that could influence your actions negatively in office.
And, if you do want to have it all in this instance – run for office and afford
child care expenses – you and your spouse could pursue occupations lucrative
enough to permit that.
Remarkably, some complained that the decision was “sexist”
in nature, oblivious to the sexism in that very complaint. It assumes that a female
candidate must have primary child-rearing responsibilities, an attitude Lamandre
echoed in her request for review: “just a few [women in the Legislature] have
very young children whereas a higher percentage of men in our legislature do. This
is simply because many in society believe that it is the primary responsibility
of women to provide childcare for their children and if they do not then they
have misplaced priorities.”
But the Board didn’t differentiate between men and
women by this decision; it applies to all candidates regardless of sex. If
Lamandre and others see that directed against female candidates, it’s because they
assume women must act as children’s primary caregivers. (And that she makes the
imputation of imbalance by sex for legislators with young children as
reflecting an anti-female bias itself is absurdly reductionist; women typically,
for reasons
not inevitably shaped by societal attitudes and pressures, simply disproportionately
prefer childrearing and/or other choices over political careers.)
Yet in her morass of poor assumptions and faulty
reasoning, Lemandre did make one trenchant comment, when she wrote “A brief
search of campaign finance reports by current elected officials will show
expenditures for car care, lawn care, NRA membership, meal expenses, LSU
football tickets and throws for Mardi Gras. If those items are deemed to be
related to a campaign and allowable, then it is reasonable to allow childcare
expenses directly related to a campaign event.”
In other words, if the Board permits such large
loopholes, then this issue should receive the same treatment. However, this thinking
is backwards: just because dubious practices are allowed doesn’t justify that you
can add one more. Indeed, by denying the addition of more, hopefully this
creates momentum to reverse the bad trend and tighten up allowable expenses
wherever the Board has that discretion.
No good reason exists for the Board to reverse
itself on this item. If anything, it should begin ruling as out of bounds many
other expenses it currently allows.
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