I have sitting on my desk right now five mail pieces. Two of them are franked mail from Congressman Connolly’s office, giving me updates on his work on I-66. This, apparently, is such important news that I needed to get two franked mail pieces from him on it, despite my having received next to nothing on any other efforts he’s made in Congress prior to July of 2010. I’ve already written one post about his willingness to campaign on the taxpayer’s dime, so don’t worry – this post isn’t about that.
This post is about the fact that despite sitting on $1.2 million cash-on-hand (as of his June 30 FEC report), Gerry is funneling all of his direct mail through the Democratic Party of Virginia so as to take advantage of their non-profit organization postal permit. I’ve got three separate glossy direct mail pieces here, one of which is a Gerry Connolly “I’m a businessman!” special and two attack pieces on Keith Fimian, including the one I just tore through earlier on Common Sense. All three of them claim to be “Paid for by the Democratic Party of Virginia.”
Yeah, right.
Connolly has no problems sending out campaign literature at full price on the taxpayer’s dime using his franking privileges, but he is so desperate to save a couple of cents per mail piece that he funnels all his direct mail through the DPV to take advantage of their non-profit permit. The Postal Service is on the verge of going broke – which will likely require another government bailout – and Gerry has no problems contributing to that problem by circumventing the rules to save a few bucks.
The biggest problem that I have with this is that it’s simply not true – the Democratic Party of Virginia didn’t pay for these ads. They were paid for by the Connolly campaign, giving DPV a donation for the cost of the mailer and the postage. Only in a crazy world is something like this okay. I am sure that some Republicans do the same thing, especially cash strapped campaigns that don’t have $1.2 million sitting in the bank, but I’m not going to say that’s okay either. The rules are the rules and if Congress wants to allow the IRS to treat campaigns like they’re non-profits, thus allowing them to get a non-profit postage permit, that’s great. But they haven’t done that. So using this method to circumvent the postage rules is hard to justify.
This is the kind of thing I’d love to see Attorney General Cuccinelli investigate.
