ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602160094
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-2 EDITION: METRO
WHEN A measure imposing limits on campaign contributions won a Virginia House committee's approval a week ago, House Minority Leader Vance Wilkins of Amherst remarked: ``This will just fool the public a little longer.''
How prophetic. Organizations such as the League of Women Voters, which have long lobbied for reasonable limits on political gifts that a single donor can make to any single candidate's campaign, had all of three days to imagine that this needed reform might finally be passed.
On Tuesday, the last day that the House could act on bills introduced by its own members, Roanoke sidekicks Dick Cranwell and Chip Woodrum delivered the old one-two punch. House Majority Leader Cranwell offered a substitute proposal; Woodrum moved that it be re-referred to a committee which would not meet to act on it.
House Speaker Tom Moss of Norfolk, no fan of campaign-finance reform, called for a voice vote, declared that Woodrum's motion had carried - and the coup de grace was complete.
Cranwell's and Woodrum's parliamentary maneuver is a tried and trite way to kill a measure without the bothersome business of having to go on record, for or against, by actually casting a vote on it.
Doubtless, the Democratic duo's legerdemain was appreciated by many House members of both parties who don't want the flow of unlimited money for their political campaigns to be dammed up, but also don't want to get caught voting for incumbency protection and political prostitution.
So the House preserved Virginia's standing as one of only four states that impose no limits on the amounts that statewide and legislative candidates can rake in from any deep-pocketed, special interest looking to buy political favors.
And for about the umpteenth year in a row, delegates found a clever way to keep the sky the limit on campaign gifts, and still be able to tell their constituents: ``Don't blame me.''
Clever, but cowardly. And the public, which has expressed in countless surveys a wish for campaign-finance reform, isn't fooled for a minute.
LENGTH: Short : 45 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996by CNB