The office reached an agreement with attorneys for the nonprofit New Mexico Youth Organized allowing the group to hold off on filing while its attorneys fight the order in court, Attorney General's Office spokesman Phil Sisneros said Friday.It strikes us as interesting that these groups who claim that support open and ethical elections (meaning taxpayer funded candidates) work so hard to keep their supporters hidden behind the iron curtain of a 501(c)(3). The Secretary of State and AG are simply requiring that these groups - whose primary function is electioneering - to reveal who their supporters are.
(Sidebar)As odd as it sounds, we don't have any problem with groups lobbying their legislators. Our system was designed to specifically allow groups of people to band together to petition their government. We generally don't agree with the types of things that NMYO, SWOP, The Center for Civic Policy, and others lobby for but we defend their right to do so. However, their non-profit status should not be a shield that allows them to protect their supporters and thus their political associations any more than lobbyists for oil companies should be allowed to withhold their benefactors.
This type of shroud is one of the main objections we have to the Albuquerque Open and Ethical Elections ordinance (taxpayer financed elections). Candidates for office fund their ambitions with taxpayer money while shrouding their associations behind a curtain of money provided at taxpayer expense. This election scheme is neither open nor ethical.
(End Sidebar)
These non-profit political organizations have a lot of questions to answer - chief among them is why are they hiding and who?
3 comments:
Eli Lee is the head of the looney left's hit squad. Period. End of story. Ethics for him means whatever it takes to win. His causes and candidates are so noble and just the ends always justify the means.
Gary King is in bed with Lee's crew. Diane Denish is in bed with them and Mary Hererra is in bed with them. Rey "Sticky Fingers" Garduno put Lee on the City's Charter Rewrite Committee.
We will NEVER get to hold Lee and his cohorts accountable because people like King, Denish, Hererra and Sticky Fingers are in office and will protect Lee. They have worked with Lee before and want to work with him again.
Mark my words, we will never see a complete donor list from Lee and Lee won't pay any sort of price for covering up the truth.
Welcome to the far left's version of New Mexico.
In consistently demanding disclosure, it might be worth your time to consider this recent study my firm release regarding the costs (and perhaps unintended consequences) of disclosure: www.ij.org/images/pdf_folder/other_pubs/DisclosureCosts.pdf.
Thanks for your informative posts.
Actually, Gary King and Mary Herrera are conservative good ole boy network Democrats and as such are directly opposed to the progressive wing which Lee associates itself with.
In New Mexico, the GOP is so laughably incompetent that the conservative vs progressive struggle occurs within the Democratic party. The conservatives have been winning that struggle for the last sixty years.
King ended up settling with CCP & NMYO because he had no legal leg to stand on. CCP & NMYO engaged in issue advocacy (rather than candidate advocacy) and as such were not subject to campaign finance laws.
Keep believing that the good ole boy wing of the Dem party (Richardson, Ben Lujan Sr etc) are the "far left" and you're going to really freak out when progressives actually get in office.
By the way, in most respects Gary Johnson was further left than Bill Richardson or Marty Chavez are.
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