DeSantis’s free flights highlight failure of campaign-finance laws

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican candidate for president, at a GOP event in California on Sept. 29. In theory, the United States has laws regulating fundraising by candidates for federal office. In theory, candidates — including candidates for president — can’t take checks from individual donors larger than $3,300 per election.

That opened the door to super PACs, with deep-pocketed donors joining forces to launch independent expenditure campaigns, and then to candidate-specific super PACs, on the flimsy pretense that their operations were not coordinated with the candidates they backed.Candidates can dispatch their top advisers to run their super PACs. They can speak at fundraisers for the PACs, so long as they don’t explicitly solicit contributions above the candidate contribution limit.

Evidence that super-PAC abuse is a bipartisan sport — and that these entities are anything but independent — came in the 2016 campaign, with Correct the Record, a super PAC that spent $9 million supporting Hillary Clinton. Designed to take advantage of the internet-exception loophole, Correct the Record went far beyond training campaign surrogates, staffing a “war room” during Clinton’s Benghazi testimony and sending “trackers” to opponents’ events.

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