Shawn Vestal: With a real race for Congress, get ready for the dark money

It looms over Monroe Street like a harbinger of things to come.

It’s big. It’s bold. It’s dark – or at least the source of it is.

The billboard, facing southbound traffic at Monroe and Mallon, shows a huge picture of an unsmiling Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and the assertion that she wants a “slower, censored and more expensive Internet.”

Her phone number in big type. Viewers urged to call.

You can almost hear ominous music playing in the background.

Hello, dark money. Welcome to Spokane. We’re sure to be seeing much more of you, now that McMorris Rodgers seems to be facing her toughest challenger yet in Lisa Brown, the former Eastern Washington University economics professor, state lawmaker and chancellor of Washington State University in Spokane.

Unlike most of those who’ve taken a run at the job, Brown actually punches at McMorris Rodgers’ weight, which means national groups may pay attention and get involved. If they do, this will be one big way they do it: darkly.

Dark money is political spending by organizations that don’t have to report their donors in most cases, so long as politics is not their primary purpose and they avoid direct endorsements. Like all speech without accountability, dark-money politics is often the garden where the ugliest weeds grow. And it’s a growing part of the political ecosystem – political nonprofits, often formed as “social welfare” groups, play an ever-growing part in the political ecosystem.

There’s nothing especially outrageous about this particular billboard, really. Politics has produced far nastier shots. McMorris Rodgers has supported the rollback of FCC regulations that many think will erode “net neutrality,” and though it’s surely not true to say she wants a slower or more expensive internet, it’s not egregiously unfair so far as these things go.

We’ll almost certainly see worse, in terms of negative ads playing loose with truth.

The problem is, we don’t know who paid for the ad or why. If you believe in accountability in political spending – perhaps a quaint notion in these years after Citizens United and all the fruit of that tree – that’s a problem. A hallmark of the worst, dumbest, ugliest, meanest forms of public speech, whether it’s online forums or dark-money political ads, is that the speaker is detached from the responsibility for their speech. And when it comes to elections, that problem is compounded by the fact that voters can’t understand who is flooding them with messages, and for what reason.

Dark money is a bane of our politics. It is the corner in which a lot of people hide their motives from the public while exerting as much influence as their money can buy. It comes in a lot of different forms, and it’s everywhere. Both Washington and Idaho have conservative “social welfare groups” – the Washington Policy Center and the Idaho Freedom Foundation – that don’t have to report their donors but exert themselves constantly and directly in efforts to influence public policy.

Plenty of others use the tax-status dodge, as well. Sen. Andy Billig has taken repeated runs at passing legislation requiring more disclosure of donors to non-profits that spend a lot in politics, without success.

A lot of people like to give – and get – their support in the dark, it seems. It’s becoming ever more popular, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks dark money spending at its Open Secrets web site.

Open Secrets reported on Aug. 25 that the amount of outside spending in the 2018 election cycle already far exceeds that of the same time during the 2016 presidential cycle – $48 million, compared to $20.7 million.

Of that, $7.4 million came from social welfare groups. That’s more than twice the amount in the 2016 presidential race, and more than three times the amount in the 2014 cycle.

All with more than a year to go.

By those standards, our little billboard is nothing. It cost $3,500. A Massachusetts group called Fight for the Future, which has advocated for a variety of internet freedom issues, paid for the ad.

A spokeswoman for the group said they had raised the money from small donors – just the little people, you know, putting five bucks into the online kitty. Maybe that’s so. It’s just that there’s no way for voters to know for sure, and there should be.