A West Texas pastor who used his parish’s resources to campaign for office and several pastors from other churches who donated to him were fined after the state’s ethics commission determined that each violated election law.
The fines, some of which were issued last month, are the latest sanction from the commission following reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which revealed that three churches donated to the campaign of Scott Beard, founding pastor at Fountaingate Fellowship church, despite state and federal prohibitions on such activity.
Beard, who was fined $3,500, showed a “lack of good faith” in accepting the donations and in posting campaign signs on church property for his unsuccessful Abilene City Council race despite the commission’s warnings against doing so, it found.
“Because the respondent committed extensive corporate contribution violations in defiance of the applicable law, a substantial penalty is required,” the commission wrote about Beard. He did not respond to a request for comment.
They fined him more than 4x the total donations. How draconian does the punishment need to be?
More. How about we make it 5% of the perp’s gross income for the year? Then increase the fine by 5% for each further infraction.
If he broke the law for $800, I’m guessing $3,500 is probably more than 5% of his income. He’s the pastor of a West Texas church with less than 100 congregants. It took his church plus three others to shore up less than a grand. He probably makes less than $70,000 gross, so you’re likely actually suggesting that he be fined less than the $3,500 he was fined.
What I’d really like to see is his church and any other church that conspired to break the law for political ends be stripped of their tax exempt status.
That’s why you can’t do a flat fee; a minimum with exponential scaling. By the time you get to anyone in the top, say, 10% of income it should to become life crippling. For the top 1% it should be life destroying. For the top 1% of 1%, they should be fined so hard they can’t even afford a box to shelter in.
If we didn’t make them suffer in the only way they seem to understand - the wallet - then they’ll never, ever stop.
The ultra rich will show up with close to zero income, because they don’t actually deal in cash. This isn’t the master plan you think it is.
Issuing a fine that is some multiple of the damages ensures that it doesn’t become a “cost of doing business”.
Issuing a fine based on the income of the person receiving it makes sense for a handful of civil violations, if you can keep it from being exploited, but it is very exploitable especially if you have a lot of non-cash capital that you can leverage without ever generating any legally recognized income.
I’ll take both for $500, Alex.