Who’s funding that ad?

We’ve got to hand it to the clever and hard-working lawyers at the state Fair Political Practices Commission. They dived into the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this year in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission — which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to support or oppose candidates for office — and emerged with new regulations that will force more big political advertisers to reveal to the public, earlier, who they are and where they got their money.

There’s a great potential benefit in this for voters. The 1st Amendment protects the right of people (and, the high court has ruled, corporations) to spend money to get their messages out. But the Citizens United ruling identifies no right to make political donations or deliver political messages anonymously, or to prevent campaign regulators from ensuring that voters know who is paying to grab their eyes and ears during campaign season.

Until now, in California and elsewhere, a shadowy group could raise money and run a so-called issue ad during a campaign and would not have to disclose the source of its funding unless the ad used one of several “magic words” that signaled its express advocacy for or against a candidate or ballot measure. Say “Vote for Smith,” for example, and you’d have to disclose who you were and where your money came from. Say merely “Smith is our last chance to save California,” and donors — whether big corporations, labor unions or other special interests — could remain anonymous, at least in this state, on the argument that the ad was merely informing the public about an issue unrelated to an election. That’s because a 2003 state court ruling made regulators here skittish about enforcing a common-sense rule to compel disclosure in ads in which, even without the magic words, it was abundantly clear that the advertisers were urging viewers to vote in a particular way.

The problem, of course, is that independent groups caught on quickly, realizing that simply by avoiding the magic words they could get their messages out without revealing their donors.

But U.S. Supreme Court rulings, culminating in Citizens United, have erased the need for magic words. The fact that they did so in the course of striking down regulations to ban some issue ads during campaign season, rather than to uphold disclosure requirements, is beside the point.

Now Dan Schnur, the former Republican political strategist who is currently serving as chairman of the FPPC, has not only updated California’s rules to require more disclosure, but also has sent a letter to his counterparts at regulatory agencies across the nation urging them to do the same. We hope they take him up on it. But we’re under no illusions — nor should voters be — that would-be anonymous donors will back down in their quest to dominate political and campaign discourse while hiding their identities.