In 1989, Bo Pilgrim, an East Texas chicken plant magnate, strolled the floor of the Texas Senate and dispensed $10,000 checks to nine members in an effort to stop a worker’s compensation bill from passing.
But the chicken man’s brazenness — what he called campaign contributions, many Texans saw as bribes — ruffled enough feathers to usher in a rare era of good government reforms.
A review by The Texas Tribune found that the number of politicians, lobbyists and political action committees that owe fines for breaking state campaign finance laws has exploded in recent years. Since Paxton took office in 2015, the ethics commission has referred 2,500 unpaid fines to the attorney general for enforcement, the Tribune found. During that time, Paxton’s office has filed just 175 enforcement lawsuits, or 7% of the cases referred to it. Most occurred early in his tenure. After filing none in 2020 and 2021, the attorney general’s office brought 18 cases in 2022, 25 last year and just one so far in the first six months of 2024.
“Candidates are supposed to be telling Texans who they’re taking money from, what they’re spending money on,” Gutierrez said. “If any of that information is not being disclosed, it’s a big deal. It could be being kept secret for a reason.” He owes $11,300 for fines that piled up from filing three late reports. Paxton’s campaign account, which he could use to pay the fine, contained more than $1.8 million as of January.
“If I am a candidate for office and I want to conceal who I’m taking political donations from, the message the candidates get right now is there’s really no teeth in the agency,” Shelley said. “There’s really no risk to me in not filing my report before the election… there’s an incentive to game the system”
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