State Must Follow Teachers’ Money

Voters can learn a great deal about political campaigns by finding out who’s paying for them.

However, voters can’t “follow the money” unless candidates and special interest groups comply with campaign finance laws.

That’s why it should be a priority to enforce those laws.

That’s why it’s crucial for Washington state to investigate allegations of campaign finance violations by the Washington Education Association. The charges, not surprisingly, come from critics of public schools.

Teachers unions are among the most powerful special interest groups around. Their political action committees provide large sums of cash to candidates, mostly Democrats. And when the teachers unions back a candidate, they can mobilize a huge corps of campaign volunteers. Public schools, after all, are everywhere.

A debate over public schools is one of this year’s hottest political issues. Some Republicans consider them a failure and want to make parents eligible for state-funded tuition vouchers so children could attend private schools instead. Some who support public schools - including the teachers who work there - consider vouchers a threat to the schools’ stability.

Teachers have an absolute right to make voluntary cash contributions to political action committees run by their unions. The right to support campaigns is as basic as the right to speak about them freely.

However, state law requires that political contributions be reported and disclosed. In addition, money that teachers pay in compulsory union dues is not supposed to go to their union’s political action committees.

Some of the conservatives who support school vouchers have accused WEA of funneling union money into political activities and of doing so without reporting it as campaign laws require. The critics claim the state Public Disclosure Commission dragged its feet investigating these accusations, allegedly fearing that pro-WEA legislators later would cut its budget if it pursued the union aggressively.

These allegations ought to be viewed in context - as a tactic in the larger campaign to support vouchers and attack public schools. The WEA has no good reason to hide its well-known political inclinations.

Nevertheless, the charges against WEA are serious and specific. The complainants point to a paper trail of internal WEA and disclosure commission documents. They deserve a timely, aggressive investigation. If the commission fails to follow the money that pours from one of the state’s most powerful special interest groups, its credibility isn’t worth a plug nickel, and neither are the state’s campaign finance laws.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board