Wiseacres will tell you that the Texas Ethics Commission is an oxymoron – such is the state of public confidence in honest politics. But the Ethics Commission proposed new rules to force politicos to take the lid off what are called “campaigns in a box.”
Ross Ramsey, executive editor of the Texas Tribune, says a “campaign in a box” is when campaign managers write a single check to a consultant, rather than to each vendor the campaign uses.
“You don’t have to report every detail of what you’ve spent,” he says. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game. You write a law, they work their way around it…. This is the current work-around.”
What you’ll hear in this segment:
– How it looked like a campaign consultant milked former governor Rick Perry’s presidential campaign for cash
– What a “campaign in a box” can hide on the spending side
– Why transparency in campaign finance matters in an election and what comes next for the proposed law
