DN Editorial: Show us the money...and who contributed it

SEVERAL WEALTHY candidates learned last week that while their money can buy name recognition, it does not necessarily buy love. Or enough votes to win.

Billionaire candidate Meg Whitman spent a jaw-dropping $142 million of her own money to lose her race for governor of California. Linda McMahon dropped a cool $50 million to lose a Senate race in Connecticut.

With a few exceptions, most self-financed candidates lost last week. But don't let these high-stakes losers distract from an alarming new reality: An unprecedented tsunami of corporate money - much of it from anonymous donors- significantly impacted the campaign just ended. Time is running out to keep money from permanently distorting the electoral process.

There are two parts to the growing campaign-finance crisis: One is the sheer amount of money coming into election campaigns - a record $4 billion this year, $1 billion over what was spent in 2006. That's enough to run the city of Pittsburgh for two years, or buy every resident in Topeka a nice car, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Just as important: The public doesn't know where a lot of the cash is coming from.

The new reality is a direct result of the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision earlier this year, which overturned 100 years of precedent to allow corporations and unions the same rights as individuals to contribute to political campaigns, including unlimited donations to outside groups that contribute to campaigns.

This year, spending by Democratic and Republican candidates and their parties has been relatively equal, with the Democrats actually holding a slight edge. But outside groups, which spent more than $300 million this election, benefited Republican candidates, including several in Pennsylvania, by a 3-to-1 ratio.

Here's a not-so-fun fact: The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, passed in 2002, included strict disclosure rules and, in the midterm campaigns of 2004 and 2006, disclosure of campaign donors was 100 percent. But in 2007, the Federal Elections Commission poked a big loophole in disclosure rules for outside groups. By 2008, disclosure had dropped to 50 percent. This year it was 32 percent, according to watchdog Public Citizen.

And, now, many conservative groups have found a new way to allow donors to hide their identities, although they appear to have violated the tax code to do it. Several groups with stirring names like "American Future Fund" and "60-plus Association" have formed as nonprofit "social welfare" groups. The groups don't have to disclose their donors. They appear to be routinely violating limits on how much electioneering they can do by spending more than half their funds supporting or attacking candidates.

Only a constitutional amendment undoing Citizens United could substantially reduce the amount of corporate and union money corrupting the election process. But the U.S. Senate has another opportunity in the next few weeks to at least allow the public to know who is sponsoring which candidates.

The DISCLOSE Act, passed by the House of Representatives last year, would require, among other things, that political donors be publicly identified. The bill has majority support in the U.S. Senate, but twice has been blocked when not one Republican senator would vote to break a filibuster - even senators who have supported campaign-finance reform in the past.

There's one last chance to impose a minimum check on the Wild West environment that campaigns have become: let the disclosure provision of the DISCLOSE Act come to a vote in the "lame duck" session of the Senate that begins next week. *