NC lawmakers are skirting campaign donation rules. Investigate them. | Editorial

A few years back, a group representing North Carolina’s trial lawyers wanted the legislature to increase the required minimum levels of auto insurance.

The change would benefit trial lawyers by creating bigger cash settlements in accident cases, but it also represented a reasonable and overdue adjustment. The state’s minimums hadn’t been increased since 1999, despite the soaring cost of vehicles and medical care.

It was a proposal that the General Assembly should have been able to consider and decide on its merits. But these days, it doesn’t work that way.

Members of the trial lawyers group, N.C. Advocates for Justice, donated $45,000 to the campaign of state Sen. Dave Craven, who co-sponsored an omnibus bill in 2023 that increased the required minimums.

That was a curious show of support for Craven’s election. He is a Republican in a rural district whose politics tend not to match the left-leaning agenda of the lawyers’ group. Indeed, campaign watchdog Bob Hall notes that among the trial lawyers who contributed to Craven’s campaign, there were more Democrats than Republicans.

The trial lawyers’ donation is part of a pattern of giving to Craven that includes others seeking legislative changes and state government funding. The News & Observer’s Dan Kane explored the pattern in a report this week that drew on Hall’s examination of campaign contributions.

Craven, 36, represents the solidly red Senate District 29, which stretches south from Asheboro to North Carolina’s border with South Carolina. He could put his name on the ballot with an R next to it and win without campaigning. He won his last race by a 37-point margin.

Yet in the last campaign cycle, Craven received more than $1.3 million in campaign donations, more than any other state lawmaker except Senate President pro tem Phil Berger. Much of the money came from clients of Craven’s friend, lobbyist Kevin Wilkinson. Craven then gave two-thirds of his windfall to a Republican state Senate campaign committee.

Craven is operating as a bank for Senate leaders, who disburse his campaign funds to Republican lawmakers in more closely contested races. Contributions from campaign committees to candidates are not bound by the $6,800 limit on campaign contributions by individuals. Kane reports that the N.C. Senate Majority Fund gave state Sen. Lisa Barnes, a Nash County Republican, contributions as high as $600,000 in the last election.

The channeling of funds gives Craven influence. Despite being the Senate’s youngest member, he was appointed as co-chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee.

To be clear, when Democrats controlled the legislature, there was a pay-to-play culture. But since Republicans took control 15 years ago, the amounts involved have grown and the rewards have become more blatant. Kane’s report details several instances of contributions followed by the award of contracts and state grants.

The ties between contributions and legislation are getting harder to see as Republican leaders wrap their activities and the budget process in secrecy. They have exempted lawmakers from the state’s open records law. The budget is assembled behind closed doors. There’s no way of tracing which lawmaker inserted a budget provision that benefits a large contributor.

All that needs to change. Democratic lawmakers should be more vigorously challenging the practice of end-running contribution limits and rewarding generous contributors.

Republican leaders will not open the process or impose greater accountability on themselves. It will take investigators who have the power and the willingness to pry open legislative transactions to examine their legality. Wake District Attorney Lorrin Freeman has asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into possible violations of the State Ethics Act and State Lobbying Act by lobbyists and lawmakers involved in distillery tours in Kentucky in 2022 and 2024.

Meanwhile, Wiley Nickel, a Democrat and former state senator, has pledged to make investigating potential public corruption a priority when he becomes Wake County’s next district attorney. He can begin by reading Kane’s reporting and exploring Hall’s findings.