Be a hero, Sen. Gruters, and stop the scourge of dark money in politics | Editorial

“Everyone says that they’re for open and transparent elections and campaign finance. But in reality, what we legally allow makes a mockery of the current system.” — Joe Gruters

Joe Gruters is no wild-eyed liberal. He’s the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and a powerful conservative state senator.

But Gruters recognized the danger of dark money when he first ran for the state House of Representatives.

“I was targeted in my 2016 campaign for the Florida House by about $100,000 in attack mailers from obscure political committees,” Gruters wrote on his website. “But I did not know — and still do not know — who was behind those attack ads because special interests are allowed to launder their campaign dollars through multiple committees to hide their identities.”

Preach it, brother!

As a representative, Gruters introduced bills in 2017 and 2018 that would have made it illegal for political committees to contribute money to other political committees or political parties. The ability to do that in Florida is central to the money laundering scheme that Gruters denounced after his election.

Both bills went nowhere, dying quiet deaths in committee. The same fate awaited the same bills he introduced in 2019 and 2020 after being elected to the state Senate.

We’re glad to see Sen. Gruters fulfilling his pledge that this issue is “not something that I will give up on.”

But really, it’s time to treat this idea as a much, much higher priority, something Gruters needs to spend more political capital on.

Florida needs this reform now more than ever, especially now that we know the role dark money played in manipulating at least one state Senate seat last year, maybe others.

Former Florida GOP lawmaker Frank Artiles has been charged with bribing a no-party affiliation candidate to run in the District 37 Florida state Senate race in Miami to aid the Republican candidate, Ileana Garcia, who was not implicated in the scheme.

The NPA candidate, Alexis Pedro Rodriguez, had the same last name as the Democrat running in District 37, who lost by a measly 32 votes. Alexis Pedro Rodriguez, who got more than 6,300 votes, surely siphoned off more than that margin simply by confusing voters.

Since Artiles’ arrest in March, Orlando Sentinel reporters have produced a remarkably detailed picture of how political committees used dark money and NPA candidates to influence not only in that race but in others, including a state Senate race for a seat that covers Seminole County and part of Volusia.

The web of deceit is complicated but it’s bound together by campaign contributions that can’t be traced to the original source — thus the dark money designation.

Keeping the donors secret is essential to the deception. If the donors are revealed, so might their motives be exposed.

In the Seminole County Senate race, NPA candidate Jestine Iannotti didn’t bother campaigning but her candidacy was nevertheless helped by mailers paid for by a political committee called “The Truth,” which got its money from a dark-money nonprofit called “Grow United.”

Gruters recognized the problem back when he first ran in 2016, and he had an elegant solution, which was to “block the transfer of money from one political committee to another political committee, which would be a big step towards full transparency.

“This simple fix to a loophole in our campaign finance laws would help bring much needed sunshine by ensuring that all voters have the ability to see who is funding the support or opposition to a candidate running for office,” Gruters wrote.

Exactly! Well said!

It’s as if he was channeling conservative hero Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice who believed in more freedom to contribute politically, but who also wrote this in 2010: “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously … hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism.”

But that’s precisely what’s happening in American politics. Dark money — anonymous money — is what Scalia was warning us about. It’s what corrupted at least one Florida election last year.

Both parties, including the Florida GOP now headed by Gruters, are going down the road Scalia warned us against taking.

Don’t give up, Sen. Gruters. We don’t agree with you on much, but we couldn’t agree more that a functioning democracy needs the kind of transparency your bills have called for.

Now is the time to raise your voice, call in favors, twist arms, make deals, use whatever power you have to persuade colleagues to finally shine some light on dark money.

Show us you mean it.

Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of our members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.