Democrat Holli Woodings is heading up an effort called “Keep Idaho Elections Accountable”. This very large political action committee has been collecting signatures to “reform” Idaho’s Sunshine Law — the statute governing campaign finance.
Woodings claims that she is all about “ordinary” Idahoans and the grassroots. She asserts that her reform effort is designed to “reduce the influence of big money in politics”. But the truth is, that is all a bunch of hokum-smokum.
Her latest campaign finance report shows that she has raised nearly $230,000 to collect signatures and build a Democrat database. $132,000 of that came in the month of May alone. While her initiative would limit legislative candidates to receiving donations of no more than $500, her report shows that 91% of the money she hauled in last month for her ballot measure came from just 5 donors:
- William Von Mueffling (New York) — $25,000
- Weston Milliken (Los Angeles) — $20,000
- Blaire Hull (Chicago) — $25,000
- Henry Pincus (New York) — $25,000
- Matt Cutts (Nebraska) — $25,000
Oh, and please note: Not only is this huge money from a very small universe, but none of these people live in Idaho. One must ask why folks in LA or New York are so terribly concerned about Idaho’s local elections? And what is “average” about multi-millionaires funding the Woodings initiative? We don’t know about all the players on her list, but Henry Pincus, as an example, is heir to his father’s Wall Street fortune. (You know … one of those evil “one percenters”….)
Obviously more is going on here than Ms. Woodings would care for us to know.
It is also rich that Ms. Woodings, on her way to “reforming” Idaho’s campaign finance law, may have violated current state law by failing to report several large donations in a timely manner.
We strongly suspect that Democrats’ work on campaign finance “reform” is an extension of national efforts to put a choke chain on the First Amendment.
Furthermore, it is already very difficult for candidates to challenge incumbents because of the inability to generate a critical pile of campaign money. If Woodings succeeds at getting her scam “reform” measure on the ballot, that challenge becomes even greater for conservatives of limited personal means to win office.
And then we must state the obvious fact that Woodings is hoping to ride this initiative into another run for Secretary of State in 2018. Let’s hope that the activists she hired to concoct another “astro-turf” movement were too lazy to get signatures from actual Idaho voters.
