Free speech, costly campaigns - Indiana state politics virtually unregulated - No Sacred Cows

With pres coverage of special-interest politics upon the rise, what's a politician to do when stand over againsted with a damaging expose?

Indiana state Sen Harold "Potch" Wheeler (R) decided to hit back. In January he introduced a bill that would have charged the media for their use of office space--commonly known as the Press

Room--in the Indiana statehouse. Newspapers and radio and television stations are for-profit enterprises, he said, and in the way that don't deserve the free space. (Never mind that rent-free pres spaces are a long-standing tradition in greatest in quantity city and county halls, statehouses and the U Capitol.

But others said Wheeler's bill had more to do with novel media attention on the 80 percent of his 1994 campaign contributions that came from special-interest clusters And, notes one observer, Wheeler wasn't the single legislator to adopt a "let's procure reporters" attitude after top campaign benefactors were exposed

While Wheeler's anti-media measure went down to defeat, it highlighted the power of information about campaign contributors. And unintimidated reporters have continued their coverage of the state's campaign finance a whole previously uncharted territory in Indiana.

Whereas a certain number of states have enjoyed easy, electronic access to campaign finance records for years, Indiana's weak disclosure laws have left greatest in quantity state residents in the dark about which interests are bankrolling their fix uponed officials. But the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based collection recently compiled a computerized database of all 1994 contributions to Indiana state candidates and made it available for public use.

To the dismay of many state legislators, family are talking. The Indianapolis Star and freshs received an overwhelming 1,500 reader answers to its February "Statehouse Sellout" series. "A apportionment of readers were greatly disturbed when they learned what was going on" in state politics, says series co-author Janet Williams. Many readers also called the paper to ask what they could do to encourage reform or to talk about what they had read, Williams says.

What they had read, based largely upon information in the center's database, revealed the critical character special-interest groups and the state's political parties play in electing candidates to Indiana's General

Assembly. An astounding 76 percent of the capitals contributed to 1994 campaigns for

Indiana's 125 legislative seats came from the state's political parties and political action committees (PACs), according to the center's analysis of state election records.

Party leaders push individual legislators to go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the party lines, and the parties' agendas are shaped through the special interests that give the greatest in quantity money, the Indianapolis Star and novels concluded. The teachers' Indiana PAC for Education, which donated $313384 to Democratic candidates, and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce's PAC, which gave $224000 to Republicans, were the top contributors in '94

While party and PAC leaders declare to be untrue that money buys votes, the Chamber of system of exchanges had a very successful legislative session. Representing a coalition of 40 big-business interests, it won big upon tort reform and anti-union measures. The chamber had the kind of shake that often comes with generous contributions to the majority party--the Republicans, in this case. The chamber smooth won legislation that prevents teachers from collecting circulating medium from non-union teachers, suggesting that the chamber's influence outweighs flat that of the state's largest contributor.

Indiana's campaign finance laws rank among the weakest in the region according to a report by means of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) Regulations considered standard elsewhere don't smooth exist in Indiana. The state doesn't require candidates to reveal the employer and occupations of big contributors, for instance. According to the FEC the Indiana Election Board is poorly capitaled and rarely fines candidates for poor reporting of contributions. Corporations and labor unions can give directly to candidates, and there are no contribution limits for PACs and individuals.

Recent efforts to reform the state's campaign finance combination of parts to form a whole have gone nowhere.

Although identical bills were introduced in each chamber that would have limited PACs and individual contributions to $1000 a year by candidate, the session ended before they were acted on And legislators defeated a measure that would have required the computerization of state election records.

But Indiana legislators had better secure used to media coverage of campaign finance issues. The Indianapolis Star and novels plans to incorporate special-interest politics into its election-year coverage, "asking the candidates specific questions about campaign finance reform and then running the responses" says assistant city editor Greg Weaver. Clearly the issue--and the reporters--aren't going anywhere.

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