All Cards On Table, And Face Up, Please

Washington state school teachers are heading back to work this week, decorating rooms and preparing lesson plans for fall. Their union, meanwhile, is preoccupied with a very different kind of lesson. The state Public Disclosure Commission has just rapped the knuckles of the Washington Education Association for reporting violations.

That’s a big deal. This year’s brouhaha about campaign financing is just so much hot air, unless the disclosure laws we do have are enforced against the biggest players in politics. Teacher unions are a huge force in politics, mostly backing Democrats. WEA’s budget dwarfs the budgets of the state Republican and Democratic parties.

A significant number of teachers do not support the political tastes of their union leaders. They don’t like the fact that union dues support a political machine with which they disagree.

So some Washington state teachers have tried to find out where their money goes. They uncovered evidence that teachers’ dues were illegally funneled to campaigns. The PDC investigated and forwarded the evidence to Attorney General Christine Gregoire, who can seek heavier penalties than PDC can. Gregoire filed suit. Her case is pending.

It was a step for government credibility when Gregoire, a Democrat, made her move and when PDC, a small agency vulnerable to legislative budget slashers, stuck to its guns as well.

Last week the first penalties were handed down, in a comparatively small piece of the allegations against WEA. The PDC slapped a $2,300 fine on Kristeen Hanselman, a lobbyist who was sent in by the National Education Association to fight school choice and charter schools initiatives that were on last fall’s ballot. Hanselman falsely reported that her employer was the state union, rather than the national union.

WEA says it hid nothing. But one important purpose of disclosure forms is to notify local voters when a national interest group sends in a ringer to influence them and their government.

What did the PDC think and why did it decide unanimously to impose the fine? Hard to say. The PDC discussed the evidence behind closed doors. That’s too bad. Hiding its deliberations made this key enforcement agency look timid.

The rest of the allegations against WEA, however, should be aired in open court, if the attorney general’s lawsuit proceeds.

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