New complaint against Sodrel campaign merits investigation

“You won. Get over it.”

That is how the Bloomington Herald-Times summed up Rep. Mike Sodrel’s response to a recent complaint filed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The complaint, stemming from the 2006 election in which Sodrel lost to the current congressional representative for the Indiana 9th, Democrat Baron Hill, alleges that the Sodrel campaign was illegally coordinating activities with two 527 organizations.

Does he have a point? It’s from the 2006 race, not even the most recent face-off between the two recurrent opponents.

Moreover, Sodrel lost.

“Perhaps someone should remind Congressman Hill that he won the 2006 election,” Sodrel said in a statement to the Herald-Times last week. “If a dictionary definition of sore winner is ever written, Baron Hill should be a synonym.”

But hold on. Despite all the tired, we’ve-heard-all-of-this exasperation surrounding the case, this allegation is actually quite significant. While the outcome of this specific election will obviously not be affected, the committee filing skirts the larger issue of campaign finance transgressions – a slippery slope that, quite to the contrary, will decidedly have an effect on future elections.

Political contributions are divided into hard and soft money. Hard money goes directly to a political candidate’s campaign, such as making a donation on JohnMccain.com. Soft money goes to groups – generally referred to as 527s for the branch of the tax code under which they operate – that do not explicitly endorse a candidate but function as lobbying arms for partisan issues, such as making a donation to MoveOn.org, a left-wing organization that endorses progressive political agendas.

The point is that after a long, tired history, the structure of campaign finance law is such that soft-money-funded groups may not explicitly call for the election or defeat of a particular candidate. (Remember the awkward-sounding “I’m John Smith and I approve this message” tacked on to political ads?)

Furthermore, Sodrel’s allegations that Hill is a “sore winner” are in error from the source as, again, the complaint was filed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, not Hill himself.

The committee’s sole function is to get Democrats elected to the House, and its Republican counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee, does the same for Republican candidates.

Playing legal watchdog is one of the most important roles any congressional committee, Democrat or Republican, can and should play.

The Indiana 9th District is a highly visible House race on the national scene, and simply dismissing any possible line-blurring between 527s and official campaigns sets a dangerous precedent for legal proceedings in future races.

This is independent of political affiliation – both sides should be held to the same compliance expectations when it comes to fishy funding.

It’s not being a sore winner or loser or anything with a normative slant – it’s the law. Was the Sodrel campaign actually engaging in illegal coordination with one or more 527s in the 2006 election? Who knows? But we should certainly give the investigation due diligence and transparency – calling it water under the bridge is irresponsible and sets us up for a mess in races to come.